It boggles my mind that our
industry takes such a lackadaisical attitude towards the quality of data we
sell to our customers. Nobody’s perfect, I understand, but we’ve been
putting a lot of work into this issue and tracking the accuracy of our sales
contact data internally and today we decided to publish that rating. The
reason is that we have just made a big leap forward on the issue of maintaining
and improving data quality, especially in a user-contributed environment, so
we’ve decided to be the first in the industry to put a stake in
the ground. Sales people can’t waste time contacting executives who are
no longer working at a company. Your next search will show data accuracy
ratings. Go try it!
Quality standards are, quite
frankly, all over the map and there isn’t a provider out there that talks
clearly about their policies on this issue. The industry has migrated to
a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach where customers think about the question,
but don’t ask because they know they won’t get a straight answer from vendors
who may sell any old data regardless where it came from and how old it is. A
contact might have retired 7 years ago and be sitting on a beach somewhere
enjoying his twilight years, but the data vendor is happy to sell you his
record as long as your money’s green. So go waste your resources
marketing to someone whose retirement party was in April of ‘01. And a
fine party it was!
One of our most notable
competitors (who shall remain nameless)
goes so far as to ask their customers to take time out of their busy day to
clean their data! The quality of their data is dependent both on
customers spending time cleaning it as well as the accuracy of unconfirmed data
submitted by users. They assume their customers have all the time in the
world to peck through their database and clean up their data. I would
imagine that most people would rather do anything other than data entry.
But I know that sales people can’t afford to waste time which in their case IS
money.
Before contacts are merged
into the NetProspex database they are thoroughly scanned, cleaned and validated
via our proprietary technology. Their estimated or actual accuracy is
rated on a scale from 1 to 100%, with 100% being the highest possible
accuracy. We all know that executive contact data is like fish - it
goes off after a while - and that’s why we continuously re-rate our data over
time. Because people move on, and from our analysis we know that there
is a less than 50% chance that a contact record is valid after 2 years, we remove old records from the database automatically.
So, what can you do with
accurate data? You can spend less time calling, emailing, cleaning up
other vendors’ data and more time making money.
If you’re not already signed
up, you can test drive NetProspex with a free trial account
and we’ll start you off with 25 free contacts. From there you can trade in your data for free
downloading privileges or sign up for one of our subscription options.
