The Rules of Business Data

A new study evaluating several sources of business-to-business data has a seemingly simple question at its heart: Which source is best?

There's a second question lurking in the background, however. How do B-to-B marketers use data from outside sources?

The first question has a quick enough answer: It depends. Among five data firms examined, InfoGroup had the highest counts of U.S. entities within six of 10 industries, with Dun & Bradstreet's Selectory reporting top quantities in the remaining four categories. The number of records returned by three other data suppliers — Demandbase, Jigsaw and NetProspex — trailed those two by wide margins.

But when the study's authors — Bernice Grossman, president of DMRS Group Inc., and consultant Ruth P. Stevens — looked at total contact counts at 10 major companies, Demandbase and Jigsaw most often provided the highest quantities.

Marketers' needs vary widely, both in their general business rules and within specific campaigns. For some, a massive number of names suffice. Others require firmagraphics — company demographics such as the number of trucks in its fleet, or Mac computers, or physical locations.

“If I have a million of what I don't want over there, and 100,000 of what I do want over here, which am I going to take?” asks Grossman.

For Theresa Kushner, director of customer intelligence within the strategic marketing organization of Cisco Systems, the process through which a rented name becomes a prospect is a little less straightforward than buy and blast. At Cisco, rented names can both provide potential contacts and help determine if an existing client is a viable prospect for specific offerings.

“We might use it to find all the individuals [within a single company] who are spread across the U.S.,” Kushner says. “If we see a lot of street addresses without suite numbers, that gives us an indication that a lot of people are working from home. We develop systems and applications that help people do their work when they are not in the same place.”

Once Cisco has incorporated rented information into its 20-million-name file, it has a number of options for reaching out to new prospects. But e-mail isn't one of those options.

Cisco is very cautious about sending unsolicited e-mail to rented names. Cisco is an international company, Kushner explains, and given the patchwork of e-mail regulations in various countries, the company prefers to go with the strictest standard. “We stick to opt-in,” Kushner says. “We deal with multinational companies.”

Kushner does not have the same compunction about telemarketing. “We are a B-to-B company,” she says. “We pretty much still adhere to the fact that a business is a business and we are calling for a purpose.”

Close Call

But there is a difference between an unsolicited call and a blind call. “If I have a contact in, say, Verizon in the networking division, and I need to gain an understanding of the human resources or marketing division, I can flow [rented third-party] information to our sales team.” For instance, if an outside data source has provided the name of a director in HR, Cisco sales managers can use their existing contacts to verify that information.

“I am not really acting stupid at that point,” Kushner says of this strategy. “I am acting as if I know something about this person's company when I say ‘I have a product that would help your company, and I understand that Mary Smith is your CMO. Could you provide an opportunity to meet with Mary?’ It's not ‘Who is your CMO?’”

Kushner acknowledges that prospecting has changed of late. Overall, Cisco is using fewer lists, especially from compilers. This is especially true when targeting the nonprofit, medical or academic sectors, which the Grossman/Stevens study found to have spotty coverage among the compilers it surveyed. But even then, Kushner is careful to enquire about the source of names before soliciting them.

“If a list of hospital administrators comes from the American Medical Association, I'm more inclined to rent it,” she says.

When she does rent compiled data, she applies stringent criteria before committing a lot of money to a source. Most industries have seen a lot of churn during the last two years, and she wants to be sure she's getting viable names.

“We are testing it more,” she says. “We will ask for a sample to see if it is worth the value.” She also bumps new lists up against her existing file: A list with significant overlap may not be a good value for the company in terms of the amount spent to acquire a truly new prospect.