During B2B interactions, addressing your clients’ requirements can be nearly impossible if you are unable to understand their challenges and capabilities. Similarly, lacking a consistent lead flow means that your sales team is unable to attract new clients. Unfortunately, up to 55% of marketers state that they don’t have enough consumer data. For B2B interactions, a data vendor could differentiate between a weak lead pipeline that wastes your resources and a consistent lead flow.
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What Is Firmographic Data?
Firmographic data is used to categorize companies into specific groups for different purposes, including personalization of marketing campaigns, obtaining competitive advantages, and creating innovative products and services highly relevant to the key audience. Firmographics data include different data points, such as:
- Company size and industry
- Company location
- Company revenue
- Number of employees
How Is Firmographic Data Sourced?
Firmographic data can easily be found online – on company websites, social media platforms, reports, and others. However, many businesses find that having an in-house team that sources firmographic data is not financially viable. It is not only a time-consuming process, but it can easily boost expenses and waste resources that could be otherwise allocated to improving customer experiences. Many organizations opt for a firmographic data vendor that can deliver up-to-date, reliable, and accurate data sets to solve these issues.
Choosing A Firmographic Data Vendor
Firmographic data vendors can be difficult to assess. You need a reliable data supplier to ensure that you don’t waste time and resources to validate the data yourself. Thus, a trustworthy provider is key to enrich your business processes with fresh, accurate data. There are several aspects you need to consider when analyzing different firmographic data vendors.
Data Practices
The way your chosen vendor sources its data is extremely important. You need to ensure that the information is fit for business use. For instance, you may have to verify if the data are GDPR-compliant in the EU or similar legislation in other regions. Some vendors list this information on their website, or you may have to contact them directly to find out how they source the data.
Data Maintenance
It is proven that about 20% of data becomes irrelevant each year. As a result, you need to know how your chosen data vendor cleans and maintains the datasets. For instance, Coresignal updates its 140 million records each month, ensuring fresh and accurate data.
Data Availability
Data-as-a-service companies are of different sizes. Thus, their capabilities also differ. Some data vendors focus on niche markets or certain industries; others like Coresignal have a broad database, covering almost every market available while using 20 different sources.
Data Formats
Next, your firmographics data vendor should be able to send you the required datasets in a convenient format. This makes it easy to use and understand by different departments in your company, maximizing its efficiency. For instance, Coresignal provides CSV or JSON files to your preferred storage or via a web link. This eliminates access issues or format inconsistency.
What You Should Know About Firmographic Data Quality
One of the key considerations when selecting a firmographic data vendor is data quality. Undoubtedly, paying for inaccurate datasets, redundant information, or missing entries is something that every business professional should avoid.
When assessing the quality of firmographic data provided by a data vendor, there are a few aspects to consider.
Accuracy
Accuracy is the most important factor because inaccurate data means that you will make the wrong business decisions. For instance, approaching a company based on wrong firmographics implies that the enterprise may not be able to afford your product and services. In turn, you waste your marketing efforts on this lead – time that can be spent on identifying and approaching the right customers instead.
Data Completeness
Having accurate data will not be very helpful if you have lots of missing entries. Complete datasets help you reveal the whole picture, understanding the client’s requirements. Regardless of your industry or target audience, complete firmographics data help you identify the most relevant aspects when engaging with clients.
Additional Questions To Ask Your Data Vendor
It’s highly recommended to contact your data vendor before purchasing the datasets. This can save time and money by avoiding the data vendors who are not suitable for your company’s needs. Here are several questions you may want to ask them to make sure the data supplier is the right fit for your enterprise:
- How do you collect your data?
- What are the main markets you collect data from?
- How often do you update your data?
- How many companies or records do you have?
- What data formats do you have available?
- What are the main data fields?
Summary
All in all, there are many firmographics data vendors on the market. You need to opt for the best one according to data relevance, accuracy, and quality, among others. The data availability is important if you decide to scale your activity or create an integrated database. Lead generation efforts can be easily smoothened by using high-quality firmographics data sourced by a trustworthy data vendor.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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