In the U.S., the technology sector is outpacing any other industry in terms of growth. Employment in this industry has grown three times faster than the private sector as a whole – and many companies are reaping the benefits.
DiscoverOrg, an IT intelligence and lead generation services company, has benefitted immensely from this boom, and its growth is spiking in a major way. The company provides technology marketers with access to up-to-date data. It operates a call center designed to gather information on IT and Finance departments of Fortune-ranked mid-market and SMB companies.
Founded in 2007 and based in Vancouver, WA, the company has made the Inc. 500 list—a compilation of the fastest-growing private companies in America—two years in a row due to its explosive growth. Last year, DiscoverOrg earned $14 million, and in 2011 it pulled in $5.5 million. The company earned just $279,000 in 2008, meaning it has grown 50 times its original size.
DiscoverOrg’s five-year growth rate is an impressive 1,854 percent, and since its founding in 2007, the company has shot from being a two-person company (based in the upstairs loft of the founder’s apartment) to employing 55 workers. This quick growth is on par with the rest of the tech industry, which for every one job creates 4.3 jobs in the wider community, mostly due to wages that are 17 to 27 percent higher than other industries. To compare, the average manufacturing job creates just 1.4 jobs in the wider community.
More than 600 customers already use DiscoverOrg’s service, from information security companies to IT security vendors to nonprofits. The company compiles data in the form of an IT organization chart, contact name, direct phone number, email address, IT budget, number of IT employees, key tech initiatives, and more.
And in an age when many companies have pegged outbound marketing strategies as dead, DiscoverOrg is a champion of the opposite. The company uses cold calls to gather data directly from the companies it profiles, says founder Henry Schuck. While many have pegged outbound strategies as outdated, Schuck says this is exactly what has made DiscoverOrg successful.
“That is what made our company different back then as well as today,” he says. “We called into those companies to gather the data and collect the phone numbers, and we updated the information on those people. That is what made all the difference. We did not source data through a crawler.”
Schuck has more than 10 years of experience managing sales and marketing initiatives of IT Data companies.
“Companies spend a lot of money on salespeople, yet those people spend four to five hours a day doing research on potential companies versus doing what they were hired to do, which is to sell the product or service,” Schuck says. “We let salespeople do sales [while] we do research.”
Through 2020, demand for tech-related jobs is expected to greatly outpace demand for jobs in other fields. DiscoverOrg’s massive growth shows just how quickly a tech services company can grow in a short number of years – and how much profit it stands to reap.
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