The TENS Number stands for Tree Electronic Numbering System.

The TENS Number is a 10 digit number designed to identify a company. What made it different than a DUNS number is the TENS number could be looked up by any of a company’s domains.

The benefit to looking up a company by their domains is that B2B lead forms collect more email addresses than any other data point (physical address / phone / website). For example, Hootsuite.com is one of many marketers who gather only name & email on their signup forms.

To segment their databases, B2B marketers need to enrich their partial records containing only name and email with company information. Appending a TENS number makes this possible. For instance, if I know that Joe@dasani.com signed up for my product, then the Coca Cola Company (who owns Dasani.com) becomes my lead. And Joe receives more attention than the other 300,000 people who signed up this month.

* T-E-N-S is a registered trademark of company data trees, inc in San Diego, CA.

Invented: Circa July 2011.