B2B Data: The Most Potent Tool To Drive Growth And Success

Data is the main driving force behind all marketing campaigns. Whether phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, or physical addresses – data is the key to unlocking your marketing potential. Several businesses make the big mistake of treating data as an afterthought, which makes their marketing efforts go down the drain. If your campaigns are not bringing the expected results, it may be down to who you are sending them to rather than what you are sending.

This guide will answer your most pressing B2B data questions for definite success.

What is B2B Data?

B2B Database includes everyone and everything that qualifies as good sales leads and the information you can use to get in contact with them, such as – Business names, Names of organizations’ heads, their employee names, email addresses, phone numbers, firmographics, and technographic. B2B Database is mostly focused on the firmographic details of the target customers, which are the descriptive attributes of businesses.

This data is used by sales and marketing teams to get a complete picture of their target businesses to strategize their marketing efforts accordingly.

Why is B2B Data Important For Businesses?

B2B contact data helps businesses see a 360° view of other businesses to generate business opportunities, improve decision making, and support marketing and sales strategies. With a high-quality business contact database, businesses can get valuable client information, more easily coordinate customer contact cycles, and sync up their content strategies.

Types of B2B Data

To target accurately, marketers and salespeople need to know the different types of B2B data, which is broadly divided into these types.

Firmographic Data

It provides definite information about an organization to identify its qualities, structure, and other unique identifiers.

Some examples include company name, industry, location, size, number of employees, revenue, business email list, etc.

Technographic Data

It provides information about a company’s technology stack. Using technographic data, you can access details surrounding the technologies and tools used by a company.

Some examples include a business’s tech stack list, marketing automation tools, and integrations.

Demographic Data

It is the fundamental information that every marketer needs to gain insights into whether a person fits their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). In terms of B2B marketing, demographic data means collecting the following data points:

• Name
• Age
• Location
• Telephone Number
• Email address
• Skills
• Employment history

Buyer Intent Data

This type of data describes a company’s recent business activities related to a product or service. In other words, buyer intent data is used to know someone’s purchase intent.

Specifically, examples of intent data include – lead information, website visits, page views, registration and attendance of webinars, downloads, and subscriptions.

Chronographic Data

Also referred to as “sales triggers,” this type of data includes any company change impacting B2B sales.

These include:

• A new acquisition
• Company location move
• A major new hire
• Company funding
• Company IPO.
• Event appearances.
• Company job hiring, etc.

This information enables B2B marketers or sales teams to pinpoint when a prospect would most likely buy a product or service.

How Businesses Can Use B2B Data?

When it comes to sales and marketing, relying on guesswork is not smart work. Today, information is literally available at our fingertips, enabling us to dig out trends, identify opportunities, analyze demand and supply, and predict future trajectories. Talking specifically about B2B marketing, data is being leveraged at every stage of the customer journey.

Below are some use cases of customer data in B2B.

Newsletters

Newsletters are heavily content-focused emails that aim to build meaningful relationships with clients. Developing strong relationships with clients via emails involves offering them relevant and useful content. That’s where data steps in. It helps marketers gain insights into clients wants and needs.

With this information and a verified business email list, they can create worthwhile content and send it to those prospects who would find the content useful.

Using data, marketers can fulfill customers needs better through their newsletters. They can offer their customers newsletter content that is highly relevant and correctly matches the search parameters of their target audience.

Market Research

Data helps marketing and sales professionals to understand their prospects and audiences better. With the help of data, they can plan and prioritize their outreach campaigns for better results and get more B2B sales leads.

Businesses that conduct frequent research grow up to 70% faster.

Source: HingeMarketing

Data can help with a range of activities such as prospecting, cold reach, ABM (Account-Based Marketing), etc. Typically, market research involves these two procedures:

• Qualitative Research: This type of market research involves talking directly with people to gather their opinions about your business, their experience with your brand/product, or other aspects of the marketplace. It is useful for understanding why something is happening in the marketplace. Face-to-face interviews, phone interviews, focus groups are some methods of conducting qualitative research.

• Quantitative Research: For this type of market research, a standardized survey questionnaire is used. It is useful for understanding what is happening in the marketplace. Quantitative research is conducted using various formats, including online, mail, and telephone surveys.

The market is always changing, and the only way businesses can keep on top of all that change is by researching regularly.

Telemarketing

Businesses use telemarketing to make sales, generate B2B sales leads, and perform several marketing activities to interact with their customers over phone calls.

An accurate B2B sales leads list of relevant and verified potential leads is pertinent to drive a successful telemarketing campaign. A telecalling database that includes properly profiled customers helps marketers to focus on them and see great outcomes.

But merely having a B2B sales leads list is not enough for successful telemarketing. An unrefined database can have vague information of the prospects, missing certain attributes such as geography, income, or area code. Therefore data optimization is very important to ensure you are reaching out to the right prospects. We will discuss data optimization processes later in this guide.

Targeted Promotion

To achieve the desired outcomes with your marketing endeavors, narrowing your marketing to focus on a more targeted audience is good. Targeted marketing with the help of accurate B2B databases ensures a greater success rate, whereas, with a broader target, you often end up wasting your resources on businesses that won’t be interested in your products or services.

Another benefit of targeting small customer segments is that it allows you to test your market before investing heavily in marketing. Using this strategy, marketing teams can focus their time and effort to increase sales and ROI.

Broadly the targeted promotional strategies are classified into the following types.

• Mass Marketing: It involves marketing to the entire population with a single strategy.
• Segment Marketing: In this marketing, the focus is placed on a section of people known as the ‘target audience’.
• Niche Marketing: This marketing is also known as concentrated marketing as it targets a small section of the market. For example, marketing of luxury goods.
• Micro Marketing: This type of marketing focuses on a much smaller section of people than niche marketing. As the products are customized to the requirements of the customers, marketing is only aimed at a very specific group.
• Local Marketing: This marketing strategy involves neighborhoods and areas. It is used to thrive on local connections.

Direct Marketing

Data has become vital for direct marketing. Data plays several roles in direct marketing, such as:

• Calculating market potential and how much share you can have of it.
• Audience segmentation for better targeting.
• Finding the geographical spread of your target group to create a suitable budget.
• Determining the cost of campaign postage.
• Informing the printing and publication of your campaigns.
• Determining the benchmarks against which you can measure your results/ROI.
• Using historic data to predict future interactions with your customers.

Cold Calling

The success of cold calling campaigns depends on the work you put in before you pick up the phone. The more you research, the better your outcomes will be. Data helps you to achieve this goal.

For example, every successful marketer knows that cold calling messages need to be as relevant to your prospects as possible. Therefore, you need to have B2B contact data to create a laser-targeted business contacts database, focusing on an extremely thin section of the market.

Following a data-driven approach to cold calling, you can get better outbound, smashed targets, high-quality leads, greater efficiency, and consequently, more revenue.

Sources of B2B Data

B2B contacts can be collected over time internally or from a third-party vendor. Acquiring and storing a high-quality B2B database requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. Therefore, many companies opt for purchasing their data from a third-party data provider. Below are some commonly used sources.

a) Business Directories

b) Trade Shows

c) Yellow pages

d) Government Records

e) Membership

f) Event Attendees

g) Newsletter

h) Compiled lists

i) Opt-in email

j) Seminars

k) Magazine subscription offers

l) Exhibitions

Challenges in Maintaining B2B Data

B2B contact database management is a top directive for enterprises, but data never remains the same. It becomes old and redundant with time. Old and outdated data is the most commonly cited database quality challenge among B2B marketers. If you look at the recent surveys and reports, you’ll get an idea of how much the organizations are suffering from this issue.

Latest marketing reports cite that 71% of marketers consider data quality as one of their top three issues. 74% of marketers consider the accuracy of marketing data a critical weakness.

“Siloed or inaccessible customer data” is cited as a major obstacle in marketing by 32% B2B marketers.

But, the good thing is that marketers are increasingly becoming aware of the effects of dirty data and using strategies for better data management. For example, This year, 30% of marketers scrubbed their data quarterly, but it was just 16% last year.

Also, close to 50% of businesses use data appending and data enrichment services to supplement or enrich their customer databases.

Issues with data are at the heart of many sales and marketing worries. Research from Dun & Bradstreet (DnB) shows that 80% of businesses have issues managing the volume, velocity, and variety of their data.

How to Maintain the Business to Business Data Efficiently?

Your marketing and sales success begins and ends with the quality of your database. Below are some procedures to keep your data healthy, optimized and high-quality.

a) Data Cleansing

30% of B2B contact data becomes redundant and invalid within a year, leading to wastage of time, money, and resources. For successful sales and marketing activities, it’s significantly important for businesses to have up-to-date and accurate information about their customers.

But, when businesses begin their marketing and sales campaigns with dirty data, the marketing or the sales team cannot make well-informed decisions, resulting in loss of investment and lowered productivity. Below are some startling facts about the impacts of dirty data.

The best cure for all such problems is Data cleansing, which removes all the incorrect and redundant data from your business contact database, helping businesses achieve desired outcomes.

Data cleansing improves your data quality and, in doing so, increases overall productivity. By getting your data cleansed regularly, your sales and marketing teams do not have to wade through countless outdated documents and focus on the most important prospects.

b) Data Appending

Data appending not just removes the incorrect and outdated information but replaces them with updated and new information. The below image summarizes the entire data appending process.

Data appending impacts lead quality on a larger scale and helps achieve the following benefits:

• Help you reach the right leads.
• Enables you to implement better lead engagement tactics.
• Data quality becomes very good, which helps you get better responses.
• You can gain better customer insights after data appending.
• Find more potential customers.

According to Openprise Market Industry Report 50% of b2b marketers buy or demand b2b sales leads mainly for appending purposes. It’s the third-largest preference for the b2b marketers to manage b2b data.

c) Data Enrichment

This process involves combining first-party data from internal sources with third-party data from external sources or differing data from other internal systems.

Enriched data is viewed in high regard by organizations because it becomes more insightful and useful. Organizations use data enrichment services for their raw data to make informed decisions.

More and more organizations today are using this procedure for their database management. In 2018, data enrichment grew by 80%. The reason for this growth is the value data enrichment provides to the data. It helps brands to gain deeper insights into their customers’ lives and understand them better.

d) Data Validation

Your business research and intelligence are only as good as the data that goes into them. 35% of the lead data filled in forms is incorrect, which means if you conduct sales and marketing without validating your data, you will be hugely disappointed. Validating prospect data right from the beginning can significantly impact business success.

There are numerous methods of data validation. All of them are based on prefabricated validation rules.

Why Blue Mail Media?

We are a global sales acceleration company providing business organizations with robust and high-value data to power up sales and marketing activities. We have been providing data solutions to businesses for more than a decade now and are trusted by several big and small companies for the most accurate B2B leads lists. Our data, sourced from the best sources and verified using the most stringent protocols, serves as a powerful tool to generate sales, drive conversions and maximize business ROI.

Being a proud member of the DMA or Direct Marketing Association and having several years of experience under our belt enable us to help you get ideal customers through accurate and responsive data and business email lists. Below are some key features that help us provide the best-in-class data for all business needs:

• We maintain a rich data repository of over 100M+ B2B contacts, which are updated regularly.
• Our data experts make 500K+ Verification calls and send 8M+ Verification Mails every month.
• We are Better Business Bureau accredited.
• Our data is configured as per industry, geographic regions, demographics, size of the prospective market and is deemed in high regard in the industry.
• We have served 2K+ Clients Globally Since Inception.

In today’s times, having a verified data set that is safe, legal, responsive, and makes sense is crucial to stay competitive in the tough business world. We can be your reliable data partner by providing you with immaculate business data, and B2b sales leads list to support your business and marketing goals at each step of the way.

Wrap Up

The value of the data lies not only in the data itself but the actions that arise from it. So, use this guide to source your B2B contact database from a reputable data provider and pair that data to match it with the right sales and marketing strategies. With the right B2B contact data and strategies, you are more likely to convert prospects into clients and receive the best outcomes from all your outreach campaigns.