Data Quality Versus Data Quantity – Why the Biggest May Not Be the Best Fit for Your Business

When it comes to lottery winnings or slices of cake, bigger may be better– but that’s not always the case. Sometimes bigger means you have to make sacrifices, such as quality, attention to detail, and dedicated double-checking. While having a thousand slices of cake sounds enticing, if they don’t taste very good, you’d rather have a few slices of delicious cake, right? 

When selecting a B2B data provider, you need to determine what the best fit is for your business; understanding data quality and data quantity are not one and the same. You are simply unable to give up some aspects, and you shouldn’t be forced to compromise your wants for the seemingly best value solution. 

Growing Pains

While other providers like ZoomInfo claim to have the largest B2B database with over 150 million business contacts, that may not be as impressive as you think. 

While others may boast a large database, these statistics are often highly dependent upon machine-processed information, which can be riddled with inaccuracies. Sometimes, each entry has the same generic office number (i.e., the number for their headquarters) or only a guess at the email address. 

When it comes to your pipeline, inaccuracies can be a big deal. Think about your team for a moment. If they had a list of 500 contacts and half of them were outdated, missing information, or irrelevant, they would be pretty unhappy and frustrated.They may have wasted hours on calls or emails that went nowhere. 

In fact, according to a LeadJen study, approximately 27% of a sales rep’s time is wasted on chasing bad data. That can amount to a waste of 546 hours a year per full-time rep! 

But what if you had a list of 300 contacts but they were exactly what your team needed– the right industry, accurate emails, and even direct dials? It really puts the argument of data quantity vs. data quality into perspective. 

We saw these results with Bryan Nemec, Director of Business Development, at JP Enterprises. “You could hire me three people, and they couldn’t do what you guys do: what your system does. Now I can get 25 to 30 calls done in a day, where before, with everything else going on, I probably would’ve been lucky to get five,” said Bryan.

Customers often learn the hard way that what you see is not always what you get. Larger B2B data offerings often remove many benefits and quality controls to keep their costs competitive, making customers make the difficult choice of prioritizing features and accuracy or database size. 

Relying on Machines

The data at other B2B data providers is mostly machine-processed and has significant gaps in data quality. Other data providers exclusively rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning, matching emails based on their formatting. For instance, if they have their contact as first.last@somecompany.com, then their algorithm is going to generate all emails for that company in the same way. 

But companies are getting smarter. To reduce spam and scraping, companies are beginning to adopt an email address format with randomly-generated characters at the end of each account name – something that machine learning is struggling to decipher, potentially causing a database of “bad” bounceable emails. 

If you factor in redundancies and the lack of a re-verification process, data quality will degrade further and bring down your B2B sales efficiency. It’s common for our competitors’ customers to dial a prospect only to find they left the company over a year ago. 

“We did random trials with each of the companies and validated them against our datasets. Frankly, it was worse. Most of them were way outdated. Not really worth the premium they were asking for,” said  Nick Perdikis, CEO at Devensoft, about his evaluation process and experience with other providers. SalesIntel’s success in Devensoft’s evaluations is what led them to switch to our offering. 

While a number of providers offer a data enrichment feature, at SalesIntel, we differentiate ourselves by enriching our customers’ CRM with human-verified data. Human verified contacts are manually verified by humans to ensure the contact and company information is accurate. Did you know that SalesIntel calls every phone number and emails every address before it’s allowed into our system? Considering the main objective of enrichment is enhancing the data quality of your existing contacts, you want to use the most reliable data possible, not potentially introduce more errors. 

SalesIntel already has a database of 6.4M+ human-verified contacts that are guaranteed to be 95% accurate. We follow a 90-day re-verification cycle to maintain our standard of data quality. With 500K new verified contacts added every week, our database continues to grow in terms of data quantity as well.

Relevancy and Redundancies

Many of the big databases result from a combination of acquired and combined data providers. Due to the inherent size and available information, many of these providers have significant overlaps between their data, meaning that merging their databases will create a lot of redundancies. 

If you hear that your provider is acquiring another company’s 5 million contacts, understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean the total number of unique entries will grow by 5 million. After an acquisition, these data sets often remain siloed, meaning you cannot even access all of the data in one place, and often not without upgrading your contract.

What if they don’t have the data you’re looking for? Even with database behemoths, some find that if they cannot find the information they want from their data provider, they can essentially do nothing about it.

However, SalesIntel provides a one-of-a-kind, Research on Demand service. If we don’t have the data that you need, make a request, and our dedicated team of researchers will locate and provide that information to you. Research on Demand can be used to find contacts by specifying account, department, level, persona, or a mix of them all. 

Bryan Cole, Senior Business Solutions Executive at PhoenixNAP is a big fan of our Research on Demand service. “One thing that I love about what you provide is that if it’s not something that you have now, you have the Verify button that I can click that will get me that information, same day, typically. I know that if it’s being verified, I’m getting the best information. Very, very helpful,” said Bryan.

Let us take the research out of your sales representative’s hands so they have more time to focus on generating new business. That’s something that the “bigger guys” can’t promise. 

Limited Access to Platform Data

Often our large competitors segregate their database into numerous segments and sell licenses for specific access points rather than a comprehensive solution. Say a client has a license from ZoomInfo for emails. With that license type, they can’t access mobile numbers or direct dials. Only emails!  

Sometimes features may disappear without warning, too. This happened to SalesIntel user Natalie Marcotullio, Chief of Staff at Map My Customers. “At one point, [ZoomInfo] took away mobile numbers with no notice. They kind of changed how you access data and who gets it without letting us know,” said Natalie.

While others may preach that they may have a substantial database, clients can’t access most of it unless they are willing to pay additional fees for each function, which can quickly reach exorbitant amounts.

SalesIntel’s B2B contact database is comprehensive, including email, direct dials, and mobile phone numbers. ach of SalesIntel’s clients gets access to the entire database, making us the best ZoomInfo alternative. 

Lacking Individualized Care

Just because a provider is large doesn’t mean that they should stop taking care of their customers. Many of their clients feel as though they are “just a number” and don’t receive personalized service or care. 

Our competitors leverage fine print and lock customers into renewals through intricacies in their contracts. Many customers only realize their contract obligations after they have signed on. 

SalesIntel strives for 100% transparency – our customers are made aware of even the most minute details before the contract is signed. No hidden charges, no fine print, no surprises. 

Our customers trust us, a reviewer on G2 recommended SalesIntel, claiming “Unlike ZoomInfo, they don’t have draconian contract terms or use high-pressure sales tactics. They were partners with us throughout the entire procurement process.”

As we grow, our commitment and vision remain the same: to be the partner all driven professionals love. We have a dedicated team to support customer success, solve problems, and celebrate wins together with you. We are continually praised for our customer service in terms of quality, availability, and response time. 

Making the Right Choice

More often than not, you are expected to sacrifice features to keep up with expansive data quantity. But that’s not always the truth. 

With more accessible data, better data quality, excellent features, and individualized attention, SalesIntel is shown to be among the best B2B data providers. 

It’s time for you to make the right choice. Schedule a demo now to experience all we can offer.