A New Decade, New Challenges – CCPA, SalesIntel, and Turning Challenges into Opportunities

Happy new year, my friends, and warm wishes to all of you as we close a tumultuous decade and look forward to bright days ahead.  2020 is here (barring a 20 year delay of the Y2K crashes we kinda sorta feared a little bit, maybe), and with it a new set of challenges and with those, a new set of opportunities. 

Clearly we are at a crossroads of sorts when it comes to data – twenty years ago (and likely, even earlier than that) a highly intelligent person said that privacy would be the biggest issue of the first half of the 21st century and so far, slowly but surely, that prediction is proving true.  

GDPR, which we have talked about before, paved the way for new regulations and provided the model for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the incoming APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules System, which we’ll address in the future. 

For now, I’d like to take five minutes of your time to address the state that is home to developers, surfers, skiers, farmers, economists, decision makers, engineers and jump shooters, the fifth largest economy in the world, and so much more: California, CCPA and new challenges in data.

At SalesIntel and despite our collective decades of experience with data, we’re still a relatively young company facing many challenges and, like all of you, we look at those challenges as opportunities.  CCPA has presented us with the opportunity to protect users’ privacy more thoroughly, to help our clients protect their data more thoroughly, and to help usher in a new day for data management, usage, and storage, ultimately aiding the B2B marketplace in using data as a business-driving tool and not viewing it as the commodity we started to see it as during the latter half of those long-ago 2010s.  

We are now fully compliant with CCPA, and if you are as well, cheers to a job well done.  If you are not, you can get there and we’re confident you will.

Essentially, there are three new rights offered through CCPA to California residents: 

• the right to know how their data is being used
• the right to access their data
• the right to request that their data is removed from your systems.  

If you are compliant with GDPR, you need only to apply those principles to your California data, audit your data for those protected by CCPA, and update your Privacy Policies.  Sounds easy enough, but the biggest challenge we uncovered on our journey to compliance is understanding what data points we cover address individuals who are protected by CCPA.

Getting compliant, at its very core, requires you to know who and what is protected by these regulations and with the proliferation of mobile phone numbers in the workplace, a contact that you are calling with a New York area code could live in Seal Beach, or an individual who works for a big Los Angeles movie studio could live in Astoria, Queens.  Think for five seconds about the contact data you manage and how many different moving parts there are to it, and this gets awfully scary awfully fast.

What is required to address these distinctions is research coupled with technology, which our clients are roundly informing us they do not have the time or inclination to apply to their data themselves.  Going through your CRM, and thinking forward to the many new opportunities you’ll identify in the 2020s, mining for California area codes is headache-inducing enough, and adding the need to find all of those 212s, 469s, and 206s that sit in California can turn the smartest and most capable contact data manager into Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a hill in perpetuity. 

What we have done to get compliant is combine incredibly complex technological analysis into the location of our data subjects and straight brute force human research to do our very best to afford California residents their rights as given under CCPA and get ourselves compliant. That’s what we call a win-win, as our friends in California are protected according to the regulation, and we at SalesIntel are compliant.  A big challenge, turned into an opportunity.

Here’s to a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2020, and thanks as always for your ongoing use of SalesIntel!