Don’t Let Data Be Misunderstood

In B2B, data is the building blocks an eventual sale is built on.

Data is often misunderstood. The word itself is misinterpreted. A dictionary definition is 'individual facts, statistics or items of information' but the marketing community treat it like a commodity. Damn it, we even sell it like cans of beans.

To me, data equals information, and information equals power. As a young salesman, in the days before computers, I was bullied into keeping sales records on my territory.

It was my first experience of a database. Like most sales people, record keeping was not a core skill, and I let it slide. Most of the changes I ought to have recorded were in my head, and I only learnt my lesson when I got a promotion, and took over another territory. Trying to open doors when I did not have a name, or sometimes a reliable address, was a pain.

B2B marketing is the same. However good your proposition, you have to get it in front of people. Information, beyond name and address, is often the key to the door. So, why is it that I can buy B2B data for beans?

Because some data on the market is barely fit for purpose, or well past its sell buy date.

Buyers beware.

If a data supplier is telling you that their data is brilliant, but they are prepared to sell it to you for less than the price of a night in the pub per thousand, something is badly wrong.

Lifetime Data Purchase equals Turkeys looking forward to Christmas

Selling the baby with the lukewarm bathwater!

One thing I have never understood in the data industry is clients being offered – and accepting – data to purchase on a one-off forever basis. It came up again this morning and it makes no sense whatsoever.  

The client rarely if ever benefits, because in reality clients do not keep their database warm enough to pick up every change. And suppliers prepared to offer it for peanuts more or less hold their hands up and say our asset has no value. I have just started a new job, and it will not happen here. Why spend good money building and maintaining a database and then give it away?  

Business data decays at an alarming rate – 30-40% per annum according to industry folklore. Clients should be made aware of that, and encouraged to license data with regular updates. Building prospect pools is rightly fashionable, but that does not mean that the data within the pool can be left unrefreshed. Marketing activity generates customers, but rarely identifies negative changes within the prospect pool. 

 In most B2B scenario’s, the marketing team can identify a finite prospective customer base. Data suppliers can target those and supply a pool of data, but that pool is never stagnant water. In my client days, younger and far less cynical than I am now, I remember buying a list of small roofing contractors for a little mailshot. It was probably my first experience of buying data, and I thought I did a good job buying a list of 14,000 from a small supplier who put no restriction on usage and halved the prices I had got elsewhere. A week or two later my corner of the marketing department was knee deep in returns, and I moved onwards and upwards, chastened but unbowed!  

Responsible data suppliers try to get an understanding of what their clients are trying to do and structure a deal accordingly. So if you are offered data for a one-off purchase price that does not require a mortgage to pay for, buyer beware.

The Yanks are coming!

More competition, just what we need.

Interesting news on Brand Republic earlier this week from our friends across the water. A major data supplier planning to set up a Manchester call centre to create a comprehensive UK business database. Good news for Manchester!

I did some maths, based on experience, and it suggested 500+ new jobs for the city, and long term jobs too – creating a database of that size means contacting close to 4m businesses to be truly comprehensive.

And it will take more than one call to get all the data InfoUSA talked about in their press release. But it begs a question. Why do it? From D&B, Biznode, Experian, Thomson and right on down through the often confusing myriad of different suppliers, most angles seem to be pretty well covered. In fact, partly because of the amount of competitors, let alone the varying quality of available data and the price it is sold at, this feels much like a commodity market to me.

I am a big fan of telephone verification, done properly. It confirms the prospect is there, or rather was there, when last called. Responsible data suppliers seek recency because they understand that it equates with quality.

However, I would argue that there is quality data out there if you know where to look. (If you don’t, get in touch, and I’ll tell you!). So, if the yanks are coming, where do they see the market?