Editorial
The Gist
- Data provider importance. Essential for GTM success, the right data provider enhances market identification and engagement.
- Data partnerships value. Strategic data partnerships drive market success, providing crucial insights and flexibility.
- Data requirements essential. Assessing data quality, compliance, and integration capabilities is key for optimal provider selection.
Within the realm of GTM (Go-to-Market), high-quality data is a necessity. It’s the linchpin that enables businesses to identify and connect with the best-suited individuals and accounts for their products or services, all while ensuring they can engage with them effectively. This critical data serves as the cornerstone for various activities, ranging from the creation of targeted account and contact lists to energizing sales prospecting and refining existing databases. Let's take a look at data providers.
B2B Data Today
In an era where buying groups are growing in size and diversity and buyer journeys have become increasingly complex, B2B data today goes beyond basic contact and company information. It now includes signals such as purchase intent and existing technographic infrastructure, among other types of data. And, B2B organizations must ensure they’re working with the right data provider because more data is only helpful if it’s the right data and it’s reliable. Here is some guidance about how to choose the best data partner for your business’s needs.
Related Article: The Right Approach to Modeling Can Make a Big Difference for B2B Marketers
Data Providers and Data Requirements
Forrester's "The Marketing And Sales Data Providers For B2B Landscape, Q4 2023" defines B2B marketing and sales data providers as “solutions that offer comprehensive data, insights, and data management services to optimize marketing and sales efficiency and effectiveness.”
To pick the right vendor, the report recommends you first verify that every provider you’re considering has accurate and complete data that spans all of the most important data types:
- Account identification: Matches unidentified signals to accounts and interprets patterns of engagement.
- Company data: Pinpoints the companies that matter most with information like industry, size, location and news.
- Contact data: Connects you with decision-makers using data such as name, title, email and phone, plus social profiles and connections.
- Technographic data: Shows you the technologies a company already uses and what they’ll buy next, so you can identify accounts that are the perfect fit for your offerings.
- Intent data: Determines which accounts are in-market for the products you sell.
Look for Volume and Quality
You should be looking for both volume and quality, and get hands-on with sample data sets before making your choice of data providers. Compare the accounts and buying groups you know best between solutions, and dig into important issues like compliance and privacy so you know where the data provider vendor stands.
Assess Additional Capabilities
Forrester says it’s also wise to assess additional capabilities, which may include real-time data search and import, matching capabilities, as well as native/API integrations. The key is to align the necessary capabilities with your specific use cases.
Prioritize Providers
For instance, let’s say that sales prospecting is an area of focus within your organization. In this case, you’d prioritize providers offering seamless integration with CRM systems and tools that incorporate AI-driven insights into the daily workflows of sales professionals. If your focus is on ideal customer profiling (ICPs) or territory planning, you’d place a premium on firmographic and technographic data that can be dissected to reveal market potential.
Alternatively, maybe data integration and data quality are at the forefront of your concerns. If so, your emphasis would be on API-level integration with customer data platforms (CDPs), data lakes, and data warehouses, data hygiene features, and supplementary value-added data services.
Related Article: Customer Insights Can Seriously Elevate Your B2B Game
Partnership Must-Haves
Pick a Guide
The data is one — essential — part of finding the right data provider, but the provider itself is the other. Seek out a partner who acts as a strategic adviser and has the experience and willingness to guide you into the future, rather than acting in a more transactional capacity. Remember this relationship should be long-term, so think about what types of people and practices you feel good about committing to. In the right relationship, value should increase over time.
Look for Flexibility
Also, look for flexibility. The tech and depth of data you need will fluctuate over time, so you want to make sure you’re working with a company that is happy to ebb and flow with you as your needs change. They should also make contracts that don’t lock you in with ridiculous opt-out clauses. After all, if a company stands behind its product, they’ll feel confident that you’ll want to stick with them.
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Final Thoughts on B2B Data Providers
By choosing the right data provider, your marketing and sales teams will have the tools to pinpoint your entire addressable market, enhance the selection of target accounts, engage hard-to-reach prospects, and surpass revenue goals. The data environment has grown increasingly complex, but with a strategic approach to your data partnerships, you can excel.
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