CleneStep: Three-Dimensional Verification

Jimmy Becker, SVP Content, NetProspex

In a prior blog post,  I offered some specifics about how we approach quality. In this discussion, I wanted to continue that discussion by specifically describing how we verify our data.

 I started out that post by defining what quality means to us. It is worth re-stating:

Can you connect to this person via the phone number and/or email address that we have provided in our business contact record?

 Other B2B contacts providers rely on the crowd to verify their data. That is, users may chose to indicate which records are current and which ones no longer are. This approach is fraught with challenges and shortcomings. How many users contribute to this data cleansing effort? Are their motivations selfless or selfish? Are consistent standards applied? What quality control procedures are used? 

At NetProspex, we verify our database records in a very different manner. We take a scientific approach that is both more rigorous and more comprehensive, and re-confirmed through continual testing.

Our framework to verification is what we call CleneStep^TM – a set of initial screening algorithms, combined with our proprietary three-dimensional verification.

First, we screen out all records that are:

• Incomplete (do not contains all the necessary fields)
• Duplicates (of what we already have)
• Personal emails (eg, domains such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail)
• Generic emails (eg, prefixes such as sales@ or info@)
• Invalid postal addresses
• Invalid phone number formats
• Potential spam traps

Next, we apply our three-dimensional verification:

• We make 1 million phone calls per month to ensure the contact is phone-connectable
• We test 1 million emails per month to ensure the contact is email-deliverable (including sending the contact an email with an option to remove her/his record from our database)
• We compare our networks to social media to confirm the contact’s company affiliation remains current

This verification framework allows us to repeat the process and re-verify at regular intervals.  In addition, because each of the three tests is verifying a different dimension of quality, we can integrate the test results and triangulate to a higher level of insight and quality for each record.

That is, we know a lot more about the quality of each record by integrating all three dimensions than if we just used any one or two of them. The result is a higher level of overall quality than other contact databases, for both email and phone.

We welcome your comments and questions about our verification process, as we aim to constantly provide B2B demand generation marketers with targeted prospects that exceed their quality standards.