62% of organizations rely on marketing and prospect data that’s up to 40% inaccurate.
Data is the lifeblood of all businesses, B2B included. As the sheer volume of data continues to grow, B2B marketers and salespeople are challenged with managing, utilizing, and enlisting third-party data providers' help to help.
That’s when B2B data providers come into the picture.
This week, let’s do a deep-dive into the world of B2B databases.
❓What are B2B Data Providers?
They provide businesses with accurate datasets that help them connect with their target audience and generate engagement for targeted personas through personalized campaigns.
B2B data may include a list of companies or businesses and their respective details. These details are usually things like company names, company address, location, phone number, email address, key people such as directors, owners, and other company decision-makers.
🔍What Problems Do They Solve?
New contacts: Companies hire a third-party data provider so that they can add information regarding future customers and prospects to their CRM, rather than filling it with information about only current customers and prospects.
Automated maintenance: Companies work with data providers to keep their information fresh and usable. Otherwise, data in the CRM will quickly become outdated as phone numbers change, companies merge, and people take new jobs and titles.
Industry standards and compliance: Because of new regulations surrounding contact data and security, working with a professional can help keep the company compliant and within the law.
Saves time: With a third-party data provider, the responsibility of data quality and maintenance no longer falls on the sales team, leaving them time to focus on making sales.
Data like these can allow a company to boost the effectiveness of a marketing program for the best results.
The B2B data append services also allow companies to handle large scale key account information and email ids. This makes it easier for companies to develop better business relations with customers for long term dealings.
Apart from helping a company to promote the business to a maximum number of target customers in a direct manner, the B2B lists also make it possible to recognize the close sales. This makes it possible to obtain large numbers of customers in a short time.
By effectively using B2B data, it is possible to increase the number of leads as well as boost the effectiveness of sales and marketing plans.
It offers a cost-effective way to promote a business that guarantees better ROI within a short while for a definite business period.
🐛 Data Decay
Data decay happens naturally because of how often people change jobs or titles, companies go out of business, and mergers occur.
Thus, many organizations are working with a B2B database that is cluttered with outdated, invalid, or incomplete contacts. Dirty data impacts all areas of an organization, including marketing, lead generation, customer relationships, and finance.
Types of B2B Data
Intent Data - highlights behavior-based activity such as lead sources, social media engagement, form fills, and time spent on a website and is used to discover buying signals found by tracking multiple sources.
Fit Data - helps find leads that are fit to be a customer for the company and helps marketers score and segment prospects into personas suitable to be in their customer base. It encompasses demographic data, including Job titles, Industry, Tech stacks, Location, etc.
Opportunity Data - helps identify favorable conditions for a company to act on when sales prospecting. With data like promotions, mergers and acquisitions, product launches, and funding, opportunity data gives users opportunities to create new business.
📝 Types of B2B Data Providers
Owned B2B Data List Providers - They gather data through proprietary sources like crawlers, email opt-ins, and other types of in-house data-gathering technologies. This data is sourced from a vendor’s daily business processes or through proprietary data-gathering technology.
They will be more familiar with every aspect of their information-gathering and verification processes and should be able (and willing) to provide specifics to the company. They also provide superior service as they have the incentive to quickly fix data issues and have unrestricted access to the collection and verification process.
Data decay is unavoidable. One downside of working with a vendor who sells their own data lists is that many don’t have ways to verify or update their database.
Brokers & Resellers of B2B Data - They typically procure their data from multiple sources and then turn around and resell it to other companies. The majority of B2B contact providers fall under this category.
They offer value-added services for clients by including special tools for uploading and managing data and dedicated account managers. They also focus on niche markets, and are better equipped to provide organizations with contacts relevant to your business goals.
Their data accuracy may be questionable and they lack familiarity with the data and may not know how often their data list sources update or verify information, if at all. They may also often markup list costs to drive their profits.
B2B Data Aggregators - They gather information from multiple sources – paid and organic. These sources include directories, websites, publicly available resources, and other private sources.
They offer more volume than other types of vendors by constantly adding new information and will have a lot of information regarding one individual or company, due to them sourcing from so many different places.
They have more duplicate or conflicting records as a result of using multiple sources, their information is not standardized because it is obtained from multiple data owners, and they have minimum purchase requirements, and are generally less flexible in their ability to negotiate pricing.
📈 Evolution Of B2B Data Providers
With its official launch in 1878, the phonebook enabled salesmen to sit at desks and call up potential customers rather than slugging their supplies around town. While phone sales allowed more volume with access to millions of records, it didn’t allow for prioritising the data based on a certain set of characteristics.
From data scarcity to data abundance - Because sales organizations couldn’t possibly call every phone number, they started outsourcing the task of calling into businesses and gathering custom data to B2B call centers. Individual reps could then call into these businesses themselves and have more informed, personalized conversations. This was too labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately inefficient.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, all companies started to maintain an online presence and the rise of the personal computer and internet also brought about the rise of the CRM – which allowed organizations to easily store, update, and manage data of their customers and prospects. Now all companies, big and small, needed data to fill up their CRMs.
The initial wave of these high-tech B2B data companies scraped the web for standard data to re-create the phone directory, but using a much more scalable method. They churned through billions of web pages looking for people and company-related information.
The next wave of B2B data companies scraping the web looked beyond the basics by exploring job posting and user behavior to re-create some of the custom data around past purchases and intent to buy. Such data was already available using call centers, but the use of web scraping caused a dramatic increase in volume. This caused a wide abundance of data and data related companies resulting in a lower unit price per record and increased efficiency for sales & marketing organization.
Today, access to standard B2B company and contact data that once provided a competitive advantage is now simply the new baseline.
📉 Challenges
System costs - It costs plenty to build, maintain and update a database of the prospect names.
Update recency - You typically will be making a trade-off between list recency and system costs. If you accept updates from list owners as soon as they’re available, you’ll be paying a hefty fee for them. On the other hand, if you hold off on updates, your data will be less accurate and less recent than what is available on the general market.
Changing marketing practices - Many organizations find that while a prospect database offers increased selectivity, marketers are still mailing as broadly and as heavily as they did when renting lists. Changing the acquisition mailers' marketing practices can be the biggest challenge to achieving a positive return on a prospect database investment.
💰Payment Models
The cost for a list of leads will vary based on several factors:
The number of leads.
Targeted nature of the data (B2Bs in a specific industry may be more expensive than just a general “business” list)
The type of data (e.g. just email or other stuff like annual revenue)
Accuracy of data (double-verified email, contact is in the same position, etc.)
Providers have many different payment models:
Annual – paying for the entire contract up front for a year. This is the most common since most businesses would like to lock in sales for the entire year.
Bi-annual – paying in 2 equal installments. In such cases, it’s not uncommon for the contract to also be renewed after 6 months.
Quarterly – Paying in quarterly installments which means being billed after each quarter cycle.
Monthly – paying up front on a monthly basis. This type of commitment is also fairly common and means your card will be billed automatically at a certain date on a monthly basis.
Pay as you go – For many service-based products, pay as you go model is not unheard of. What this essentially means is that you can pay as and when you utilize a particular product or service.
2️⃣ Alternatives
Clearbit Reveal: instantly match IP addresses with company names, and see full profiles for all site visitors. Clearbit Reveal immediately identifies web traffic by dynamically converting the IP address of visitors into a rich profile (85 data points including name,company revenue, employee count and contact information for sales).
Datanyze: predictive technographics provider, helping B2B companies apply unique technology insights to identify and close their best accounts. Datanyze crawls the web and mobile technology for technographic data of 35M companies to help you build a more robust view of prospects and customers.
HG Data: technographic data provider with best coverage of back-end technology such as help desk software. HG Data has the most robust database of technographic data on the market today. While HG Data provides a similar solution to Datanyze, they have a unique ability to provide intelligence on back-end technologies such as help desk software.
Brainsfeed helps clients generate significant value and save precious time by making ready to use, customized lists, on-demand. Contact us at ask@brainsfeed.com with your specific research needs.
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