When you are operating B2B sales team, you have to reach out to as many in your target market as possible. Often the market is quite small. It could be as little as 300 companies, 700 companies or just 1,000.

 

What do you think? I believe you can’t afford to miss 40% of businesses that could be perfect clients simply because they did not register on LinkedIn. Do you agree?

 

So where can you go for a list of quality b2b contact details?

 

You can go ahead and read all about the key New Zealand B2B data players in this complimentary report.

The post What is whoiswhere? appeared first on whoiswhere.

Question 1: Where does your data come from?

Any quality data provider should be able to easily tell you where they get their data from. Answers may vary but a good provider has proactively collected the data specifically for the database. By doing this the provider is able to give some guarantee of the completeness and quality of their data. Since having a legitimate data source is the foundation for a quality database, this is a key question to ask.

For example, the data we use in our whoiswhere database has originally been collected, quite literally, by walking down the street and writing down who is where. Now as you can imagine, walking the streets is a pain in the neck. But it does mean have confidence in our data source.

Answers that don’t inspire confidence are: we’ve taken it from a public directory, because sadly those are not maintained very well. Worst of all you don’t want some nonsense response that doesn’t clearly answer your question!

So the next time you want business data to embrace a new target market, reach everyone in a particular industry or simply want to clean your data – discover where their data is coming from and make sure you work with experts in the field.

Question 2: How often is it updated?

The responses vary from daily to annually. The reality is daily updates do not mean up-to-date data, unless data verification is carried out on a continuous basis. Even then, claiming daily changes is somewhat misleading because all the information is never checked daily. See more about this in the next question.

So what about an annual or bi-annual check? This is simply not enough. The rate of change is such that even three times a year data verification adopted by us, is not sufficient for certain pockets of the market. In some cases verification on the phone every 45 days is necessary.

Question 3: How accurate is your data?

Many boast about up-to-date data, but rarely do they disclose what steps they take to achieve it. Lets face it, when you deal with hundreds of thousands of records it’s truly impossible to keep them all 100% up-to-date on a daily basis. Simply because companies may close literally overnight, people leave business, or even die, businesses move unexpectedly or at short notice.

So even when someone on our team checks company details on the phone, 5 minutes after the phone conversation, a major change in company details may occur, and it will take sometimes months before this change will get on to the website or will become public knowledge.

Of course you might believe in the power of the internet and the possibility of on-going crawling through websites to check and update information. There are three main reasons why this approach is only half-helpful. These three reasons are not widely known, even though they are somewhat obvious:

1. In New Zealand, for example, at least 35% companies do not have a website – nothing to crawl!
2. Website information does not get updated on a regular basis. In fact our phone research shows that 37% of company information we can find online turns out to be incorrect.
3. Vital company contact details and names of owners/executives are not readily available. This includes companies with no contact details except a standard contact us form, companies that are not registered and have no names of owners on their website. The number of these is on the rise and according to our conservative estimate over 60% of websites do not have names of owners or any contact details at all.

Discover at what length we are going to ensure accuracy of data – as far as we know very few companies take data maintenance this seriously.

When you find a company which owns their B2B data, is able to explain how data is collected and maintained, and update it all on a regular basis – be rest assured you are on to a winner – that’s the company to work with.

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Ask any B2B data provider how they keep their data accurate and you’ll be met with a flurry of responses that won’t really mean much. For E-ideas Limited vague responses won’t work. We use our own whoiswhere™ data to create profitable marketing campaigns for clients. And that is why our data has to be the most accurate possible.

Celebrating 10 years on the market, we reveal to the world how whoiswhere™ data is kept accurate. No other B2B data company fully explains how they verify data. We have developed a three step data verification process to guarantee whoiswhere™ data accuracy.

Step 1: The boring bit
E-ideas started collecting raw data in 2005 for the whoiswhere™ database. And since then, our prime source of data comes from walking streets. This incredibly tedious and menial job is realistically the only way to gather data. Because only on the street it is clear if a business is open or shut for good.

TIP: In case you choose to walk the streets yourself in search of clients, be careful of missing street numbers. You’d be surprised by how many are!

Step 2: The tedious bit
Information gathered from the streets undergoes rigorous online research. Almost 100 sources are used to enrich the data from streets with often hard to find information.

TIP: Be careful when doing research online. After more than 100,000 hours of research, we’ve found 37.5% of online data to be incorrect. This is because of incorrect information listed on websites and closed companies still shown online.

Step 3: The expensive bit
The final, mandatory, and most expensive step is checking data on the phone. Connecting with businesses in person adds a lot of value to data. Often times this is the only way to increase data accuracy. And this is precisely what puts whoiswhere™ data head and shoulders above the competition.

TIP: Sometimes businesses aren’t fully open to sharing their information – we respect that. However most businesses understand the value of direct marketing and know that one day they may enjoy using accurate whoiswhere™ data.

So there you have it, our three step verification process for the world to see. Business is about connecting people. Which is why our information is verified not by programs scrolling the net (with a 37.5% error rate), but by real people.

Your database is likely the most valuable asset your business owns. So as long as NZ business data is changing at a staggering rate of 2-6% per month, you have to look at ways to keep your data accurate.

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