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Fall Cleaning for B2B Data: How to Keep Your Leads Fresh

Posted by IndustrySelect on Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Freshen Your B2B Data with a Fall Cleaning

3 MIN. READ

The arrival of fall presents a perfect opportunity to give your data a much-needed refresh.  This cleanup will involve reviewing and updating your market database, but you’ll ensure it’s accurate and free of “dead wood.” By refreshing your information, you will target your prospects better, add more personalization to marketing campaigns, and strengthen customer relationships.

What Is Your B2B Database?

If you’re going to clean, it helps to know precisely what you’ll be scrubbing. Your B2B database is anything you know about your business customers relevant to locating prospects and closing sales. It includes business capabilities, funding, revenues, and who is qualified to sign on the bottom line.

How Do You Use Your B2B Database?

Whether you plan to pick up the phone, send an email, or post on social media, you depend on your B2B database to provide you with productive leads. The more accurate your data, the more likely you are to convert a lead to a sale. You can use your database to:

● Investigate clients.
● Improve your industry knowledge.
● Tailor your questions.
● Gain a deeper understanding of customer pain points.
● Locate key contacts.

Your marketing team can also use a comprehensive database to:
● Identify prospects with an ideal customer profile (ICP).
● Increase demand.
● Design data-driven campaigns.
● Identify campaign targets.

What Needs Cleaning?

dirty database can have many flaws, interfering with effective prospecting. They include:

● Missing contact fields.
● Duplicate entries.
● Outdated information.
● Misspellings.
● Typographical errors.

What could be more frustrating than following a lead only to discover that the email address or phone number needs to be updated? Failed contacts will pile up when you call the same person multiple times or get their name wrong. Most leading data providers take a "hands off" approach to gathering data, scraping the web or using AI to obtain key information like email address and phone numbers, leading to inaccurate or outdata information. A good cleaning will eliminate many or all of these debacles. 

Related: What These Terrifying Images Say About the Limitations of AI in Sales and Marketing

Outdated Already?

Business information churns at a dizzying rate. During one 30-minute period, changes include the following:

● 120 business addresses.
● 75 telephone numbers.
● 15 company names.
● 30 new businesses form.
● Ten businesses close down.
● 20 CEOs leave their jobs.

If you're working with a data provider that's not on top of all these changes, you're more likely to encounter bounced emails and wrong numbers. The more outdated your information, the more you and your team will need help to reach your prospects.

Who Is Cleaning Up?

Many companies need more time and resources for new projects. It takes surprisingly little effort if you need to convince the executive suite of the profitability of a database cleaning. A recent survey of B2B enterprises found that many had data-related goals.

Not only were they planning to involve their marketers in technology selection, but they planned to use it for several purposes. Those included reaching customers at every contact point, incorporating data-gained insights, and measuring results. Their first step toward these goals was producing clean data.

How Do You Clean Up?

Your database cleanup will involve two main steps: verifying your data for accuracy and enriching it to fill in and update your fields. However, as your database grows, it poses a greater risk to privacy. Your cleaning should proceed in a way that adheres to government privacy regulations.

For maximum benefit, your database needs both cleaning and maintenance. While cleaning ensures you have error-free information, maintenance allows your company to manage database processes. Cleaning and maintenance are two halves of a package crucial to B2B success. You can use software to schedule regular cleaning and maintenance.

Cleaning up B2B data is more than just a one-person job. For the highest success, encourage collaboration. Various teams may contribute to developing goals, sourcing technology, choosing and installing software, and data entry. You may also receive hands-on feedback concerning the effectiveness of modifications and upgrades.

How Do You Measure Success?

The primary metrics for B2B sales and marketing professionals will always be sales numbers. Are you making your quotas? Are you surpassing your quotas? Are you getting referrals and repeat business?

On the way to closing a deal, you can also use analytics to measure engagement, lead generation, and conversion. Less obvious but still vital metrics include:

● Revenue growth.
● Customer acquisition cost.
● Customer retention rate.
● Average contract value.
● Total customer value.
● Return on investment.

If your numbers – except for customer acquisition cost – move upward, your cleanup succeeded.

Want to Skip all This? Here’s Where to Find Clean Data

Cleaning is always easier if you have less dirt to begin with. While we embrace technology at IndustrySelect, implementing our own proprietary technologies for data verification and quality control, we don’t rely on it exclusively. We’ve stuck to our tried-and-true method of contacting each company in our industrial database IndustrySelect directly—meaning real people getting other real people on the phone or via email to personally verify each and every data point we collect on the nation’s industrial companies. As a result, IndustrySelect offers the cleanest data on the market. Try a free demo today and see how refreshing clean data can be.


Article Sources:

https://www.sayprimer.com/blog/b2b-marketing-data-in-2023
https://coresignal.com/blog/b2b-data/
https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2022-12-b2b-data-2023
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/data-maintenance-vs-data-cleansing#:~:text=Data%20maintenance%20allows%20for%20the,may%20improve%20their%20business%20operations.
https://blog.gitnux.com/b2b-metrics/
https://www.industryselect.com

 

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