6 Steps to Select the Right B2B Contact Data Partner

So you have decided to collaborate with a reliable B2B data partner and you’re here because of one of the following reasons:

#1. Inaccurate or insufficient data is hurting your bottom line.

#2. You want your sales team to spend more time selling to the right audience.

#3. You want to make the most of your outreach campaigns.

#4. You had a bad experience with an earlier data partner and want to switch to a reliable B2B data partner.

#5. All of the above.

While reliable B2B contact data is considered the foundation of any outreach campaign, building a list of prospects with accurate contact details is the real challenge.

The problems with B2B data are manifold. On the one hand, sales reps spend too much time finding the contact details of decision-makers. On the other hand, inaccurate data wastes 27.3% of sales reps’ time.

Since building an accurate contact list is a time-consuming process, B2B businesses often hire a data partner who can make it easier for them to reach decision-makers. You may feel that all contact data providers offer the same data quality. However, some of them have their USPs as the key differentiators.

How can you identify the right data partner for your company? Here are the 6 steps you can follow to choose the right fit:

Step 1: Define Your Lead Generation Process

Start with defining your lead generation strategies by brainstorming with the internal stakeholders – your field sales team, inside sales team, and marketing team.

Don’t forget to include these key points in your discussion:

Define your ideal customer profile. You can define multiple buyer personas to find the one on which everyone is aligned.
Decide the marketing channels you will be used for lead generation activities. Buyer persona profiling will help you identify the right channel.
Identify what additional data besides contact information you will need to filter the qualified leads from the unqualified ones?

Step 2: Define KPIs to Measure ROI

If you are investing in a B2B data provider, you need to define the KPIs that measure ROI. This will help you understand whether it is cost-effective in the long run to continue the subscription with the data partner or not.

You can reverse engineer the lead numbers starting from how much your lead-to-customer ratio is. From there, you can figure out how many leads you will need to hit your numbers. To be fair with the evaluation, your message should be strong and convincing. This will also help you to decide how many contacts you need to procure.

For example: suppose you want to run a cold email campaign and you want at least 100 positive responses such as open rate, response rates, click rate, etc to build the pipeline of your sales team. You can then compare your expected numbers and actual number.

Step 3: Cost Comparison

You can compare the cost of outsourcing B2B contact data with the cost of data research using your in-house team (based on time and effort). You can consider the factors that are mentioned in this Spreadsheet, then modify the scenarios to fit the needs and process your team follows to build their contacts list.

Step 4: Quantity of Data

The quantity of data that a B2B data provider gives you will decide the execution speed, scalability, and flexibility of your lead generation campaigns – whether they are email campaigns or calling.

Apart from the overall size of the database (including companies and contacts), consider the following factors:

How often the data provider adds fresh data to the database.
How many filters do they provide?
How quickly they can provide data as per your requirements.

Step 5: Quality of Data

This is the crucial step to procuring a B2B data provider. Quantity of data aside, quality of data matters the most.

An average company loses 12% of its revenue due to bad data.

An important note here is that the quality of data is more than merely an accurate email address and contact number. A data vendor should be able to match your complete criteria in terms of –

Firmographic data

Type of companies you want to target
Size
Revenue
Industry

Decision-makers

Titles
Seniority

There are very few data providers who include these two data quality criteria and offer technographic information. In addition, the data keeps changing every 12-13 months for different reasons such as a job change, promotion, etc. Don’t forget to ask the data provider about their process to maintain data hygiene.

For example, at SalesIntel, our human-verified B2B data goes through a re-verification every 90 days to ensure that you only use data that are accurate and reliable. If you are getting the correct emails and phone numbers of marketing managers, but your targets are Chief Marketing Officers, you are still hitting off the mark.

Step 6: Pricing

When all is said and done, pricing is going to play an important role in your buying process. Differentiating data providers based on pricing might look like a simple job. However, you also need to consider the value it brings to your sales productivity.

Make sure you clear all your doubts at this stage before making a decision. You can include the following in your questions:

What are the pricing models?
How flexible are vendors in their pricing models?
Do vendors offer any additional benefits (discounts) if you sign a long-term contract?

It makes more sense to pay a reasonable premium cost for higher accuracy instead of getting more contacts for less or the same price compromising with the data accuracy.

When all is said and done, you should onboard a reliable data partner who gives you the freedom to access the data as per your need without any dependencies, rather than simply providing you with a database of contacts.

Why is SalesIntel the Go-To Data Provider?

Following are the reasons to name a few:

SalesIntel gives you access to a huge set of decision-makers from different industries.
SalesIntel offers 95% human-verified data to ensure the highest data accuracy.
SalesIntel offers the highest number of direct-dials to ensure your sales team can directly speak to the decision-makers bypassing the gatekeeper.
SalesIntel goes beyond basic contact info by offering you technographic and firmographic data. Technographic data allows you to identify what type of technology and tools your prospects are using.
You can integrate SalesIntel with your CRM, which enables you to export data directly to the CRM.
Every contact is verified every 90 days by our team to avoid data decay and maintain accuracy.
You can install our RevDriver chrome extension to pull prospect data from their LinkedIn profile and websites.
SalesIntel has a proven record in helping B2B businesses spend more time selling with accurate prospecting.
SalesIntel offers a free research-on-demand option for our clients. So, if you need data on a specific industry or contact that’s not already in our database, just submit your request and we’ll find the data for you.