How Poor B2B Data Negatively Impacts Your Lead Generation

Sales and marketing play a pivotal role in the success of your company, bridging the gap between customer needs and your products or services. These processes, however, are only as good as the data that’s supplied to your sales and marketing teams, which when your customers are other businesses, is called B2B data (Business to Business data). 

What is B2B data?

This type of data drives your sales and marketing campaigns, helping to identify new leads, providing contact details and allowing your sales team to move them along your pipeline. Sources of B2B data include emails, social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so on), as well as your company website and those of your customers, and paid vendors who supply B2B data.

What does B2B data include?

There are four general types of B2B data: demographic, firmographic, technographic and chronographic, as follows.

Demographic data: Includes contact names, ages, email addresses, phone numbers, locations, skills, employment history and so on.

Firmographic: Includes company names, locations, industry, number of employees and publicly available earnings.

Technographic: Includes the type of technology used by each company and their employees.

Chronographic: Includes company relocations, acquisitions, funding, employment statistics, retention rates, and so on.

It’s clear that  B2B data can contain a wealth of information that can inform and drive your sales and marketing teams. For example, your sales team uses B2B data to help generate leads, identify potential customers and provide contact information.  

For your marketing team, B2B data confirms the accuracy of mailing lists, identifies decision makers in target companies, and drives personalised marketing and email campaigns. 

How does B2B data impact your business?

You might hire the best employees for your sales and marketing teams but without good data, their efforts are often in vain. For example, leads can’t be contacted, targets aren’t met, revenue is lost and your team loses confidence in their decision-making abilities, all based on poor CRM data. 

According to a 2021 Gartner Report, organizations lose an average $12.9 million USD every year due to poor quality data. The big mistake is to simply assume that your data is up-to-date, relevant, correct and ready to be used. This results in a lack of focused action and a misalignment between your sales and marketing teams and your target customers.

It’s no wonder that your teams make poor decisions when these are based on inaccurate data. It should also be no surprise when internal processes that rely on this data need to be revisited because the projected outcomes were not as expected. In fact, it’s well-known that poor data can lead to many negative outcomes, such as customers losing confidence in your company, damaged reputations, lack of trust, missed opportunities and lost revenue. 

How inaccurate data negatively impacts your marketing team

The impact of poor quality data on your marketing team is multi-faceted. It can lead to wrongly targeting people who were assumed to match your ideal customer profile. It can result in marketing strategies being less effective than anticipated or even completely unsuccessful. 

Bounce backs from email campaigns can be high and you run the risk of being blacklisted by your email provider. Inaccurate data can result in people being contacted who no longer wish to be on your marketing list or you might send them information that no longer aligns with their needs. Incorrect titles and misspelt names can irritate people and if your buyer personas are based on inaccurate information, entire campaigns can be in jeopardy.

An enormous amount of time can be wasted by your marketing team simply trying to verify the correctness of the data and replace the missing information.

How inaccurate data negatively impacts your sales team

Inaccurate data also wastes the time of your sales team who feel pressured to fix the problem but also feel overwhelmed with the situation. They dial wrong numbers, email old accounts, send emails to multiple accounts belonging to the same person or receive high bounce rates due to undelivered emails. Consequently, they spend valuable time chasing up correct data that could otherwise be spent talking to interested leads. 

Then there’s data that’s actually missing, leaving the sales team feeling that they don’t have sufficient information to make contact with a lead at that time. So they spend time searching for the required data before making contact. Once contact is eventually made with a potential lead, they may no longer fit your ideal customer profile or they have already solved their problem by engaging with the competition. These inaccuracies can cause your sales team to become demoralised and lose confidence in the quality of the data and your company’s CRM. 

The solution to working with inaccurate data

The solution is easy – you need better data! At DataList, we provide custom built B2B contact data for companies around the world (with a specialisation in the Asia Pacific region). Our data is built using a combination of human researchers, highly advanced technology and our proprietary database that holds over 80 million key decision-makers. 

We have the expertise to acquire the most accurate data for your target market on both a global and a local scale. We use in-country tools, high tech resources and local expertise to build your company a truly bespoke, relevant and verifiable data set consisting of golden records. These records are the key to unlocking your company’s potential, growing your market and maximising your revenue.  

DataList isn’t your average data provider. The data we collate for your company isn’t generic and applicable to every other company in your industry. Instead your contact data is based on specific data points that are unique to your business. We deliver authenticated leads in your target market that are tele-verified to be 99% accurate.

After all, your company’s prospecting is only as good as your data. The data you need is as unique as your company and we know how to find this information and deliver it in a usable format. With our data, you’ll be able to reach key decision makers faster, improve your customer acquisition and decision-making processes, increase productivity and team alignment, and maximise revenue opportunities.

Inaccurate B2B data can truly make or break your sales and marketing campaigns.

If you’re ready to access reliable B2B data for your company, don’t hesitate to contact us today!