‘If you give good sales people the right data, they’ll make millions for you’

Tami is a Dublin-based business that provides market intelligence and sales leads. It works like Google, crawling websites regularly for contact information of key contacts in businesses across the world.

The entire offering is GDPR compliant and provides almost 1 billion contacts across 161 million websites.

“We’re crawling the internet, analysing all the web pages, and seeing all the information about each company,” Liz Fulham, chief executive and founder of Tami, told the Business Post.

Established in 2016, the business has 45 staff and has raised over €10 million in funding to date.

Through the service, clients can find contact information that is constantly updated within companies, assorted company information, the service providers for those businesses, such as who they use for shipping, and more. The full range of information is provided through a user-friendly dashboard and Tami generates revenue through annual subscriptions.

“I was the European head of telesales in PayPal and I found that the quality of data that salespeople had was terrible. If salespeople don’t have the right data, they can’t sell,” Fulham said.

“If you give the right data to good salespeople, they’ll make millions for you. I decided this problem needed to be solved.”

That led Fulham to creating Tami, where the early days were spent developing a product she felt could meet the needs of salespeople.

“Early on, I definitely underestimated the complexity of the product. Now we’re at the stage where people love the product. We’ve opened an office in London and we’re hiring like crazy there at the moment,” Fulham said.

“We’re having an open day at our London office on January 27 and we want as many people as possible to come and check us out.”

The business has been supported since its early days by Enterprise Ireland and was part of the high potential start-up unit (HPSU).

“We started with the competitive start fund. Then we did HPSU. I was surprised by how much support we got from them. They’ve been an incredible supporter on our journey,” Fulham said.

“We’re going to raise another round of funding this year and then we’re going to open up more offices in Europe. We have a couple of products in the pipeline for this year and we just want to become the market leader for what we’re doing.”

In addition to the company’s own growth plans, Fulham is determined to ensure Tami does a great deal of social good, helping other Irish businesses starting out as well as those in less fortunate circumstances.

“We’re going to try and do pilots to help Irish companies go abroad. We can have all of these clients but it means nothing if you don’t help the community,” she said.

“We’ve funded accommodation and gotten apartments for three Ukrainian families, and one of them is working for us. A lot of companies that want to help don’t know what help looks like. They can reach out to me and I’ll help them work out how to help.”

This Making it Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland