SalesIntel June Newsletter: History of B2B Contact Data

Message from Our Founder

AI or CrowdSourcing Alone Doesn’t Work: History of B2B Contact Data

Over the last 20 years, a variety of B2B contact solutions have come to market with various degrees of success. This month I wanted to share how the previous changes in the industry taught us that AI processed or crowdsourced data alone is not enough and informed how we set up SalesIntel.

Initially, the B2B contact market was highly fragmented and focused on list compilation. Then JIgsaw disrupted the model 15 years ago with a crowdsourcing model. Everyone was excited and wanted to contribute quality data so that they could receive quality data as well.

But over time, the system broke down as bad actors started to game the system and input bad data for their own short-term gains. Salesforce acquired Jigsaw, changed the name to Data.com, and then ended up sunsetting the product last year.

In the past 5 years, there have been several solutions that have found various degrees of success. One of the biggest though was unintentional: LinkedIn. LinkedIn wasn’t designed for B2B lead gen, but once they had a grown a massive userbase of business professionals with contact data actively updated by the network’s members.

The challenge of LinkedIn B2B contact data that everyone encountered was their “closed ecosystem” philosophy. Because of LinkedIn privacy policies, contact information had to stay within the LinkedIn ecosystem and couldn’t make it into sales and marketing software systems teams rely on.

The recent trend in B2B contact information is to use AI and machine learning to gather contact data, but so far none of these solutions have been able to hit the high expectations of sales and marketing professionals. By over-relying on machine processed data, the accuracy and the amount of necessary first-party data have held companies back from successfully going to market.

With the rise of ABM, we believe that the expectations for B2B contact are only going to keep rising. That’s why we’ve been on a mission get the most accurate data at scale to B2B professionals. We’ve learned from our predecessors that there’s no single silver bullet. Instead, we combine first-party crowdsourced data, our patented AI Engine (we were just awarded our 4th patent on the process!) and our world-class research team.

We bring the 3 worlds together in a comprehensive solution where B2B professionals have access to

Highest quality B2B data at scale
A large pool of our first party data processed through AI
A Research on Demand service where our own researchers curate data from our massive AI processed database

Overall, I know we play a small role in the overall B2B revenue process, but I think it’s an important one. It’s been great to watch our customers achieve new levels of success after using our contact data. I hope you enjoyed this look behind the curtain of why SalesIntel has been set up the way it has, and I look forward to sharing more exciting news about our platform soon!

Data Research Update

This month the SalesIntel research team continued its march toward providing the largest volume of human verified contact available on the market today. Not only are we adding more and more contacts, but we are adding the contacts our clients care about.

This week we had a client ask us for a tiny list of contacts with specific titles at companies that have Salesforce installed. Since the list was relatively small and our primary objective is to provide accurate information to our clients, we did a little QA on the list of 100 contacts before sharing the file with the client.

There were a total of two mistakes in the entire file – one was a typo (the title was “CRM Administator,” missing that first ‘r’), and the other was a contact who had left their organization at the end of May 2019. In addition to getting the right data, we also added those titles to our priority queue for contact verification to help get our client exactly what they need.

I share this anecdote to illustrate that we have designed a process that allows us to efficiently process through millions of contacts every quarter to ensure their accuracy, and that process is working. We will continue to keep accuracy under a microscope so that our end users can remain confident that when they send emails and make phone calls based on the data in SalesIntel, their messages aren’t going into the void.

Product Update

We’re excited to release the newest updates and additions to the SalesIntel platform: upload a Suppression List, easily view contacts from Company Searches, and export “all” from search results.

Now when you run a company search you’ll see a new filter in the side panel, suppression lists. This feature lets you upload a list of emails, domains and titles you want to exclude from future search results. This is great if you have a list of existing customers that you don’t want to pull into a new campaign list or if you know certain titles are not your target audience.

Export All Contact Results and View Total Contacts/Pending Contacts

In addition to Upload a Suppression List, users will now see the total number of human verified contacts and contacts still pending verification next to the total number of companies found. Simply click on either number and you’ll be brought to those contacts instantly. Then with our new Export All feature, you can export all of your results to your email marketing system, CRM or CSV document.

Upcoming Events

Date : July 18, 2019 Time : 01:00 pm – 01:30 pm EDT

In this 30 minute webinar you will learn:

How to leverage LinkedIn to drive conversions and engagement without paid advertising, social posts, or InMail messages
Generate conversions for inbound content, i.e., webinars, white papers, podcasts, video landing pages, etc.
Generate registrations for in-person events, i.e., executive dinners, mastermind groups, conferences, workshops, etc
How to drive engagement with your ideal client profile using account-based targeting methodologies
How not to piss off prospects when sending cold messaging

Your presenters are Gregg Anderson, CEO of 41 Orange, and Jason Hubbard, Chief Revenue Officer at SalesIntel.io.

Location : RopeSwing Office 805 Mainstreet Hopkins, MN 55343

We’re hosting a happy hour summer camp for adults with RopeSwing to bring together local panelist Mike Paradis, Founder and CEO of Demand Chain, Susan Rylance, VP of Growth at Fahren, and Stacey McGuire, Senior Marketing Manager at Ascentis.

During this happy hour panel, we’ll discuss:

How data quality impacts your sales and marketing teams
Why and how to build a buying group at your target accounts
The process for gaining engagement from your leads with targeted content
How data, content and creativity work together for your overall sales and marketing strategy