Sales and marketing organizations spend a healthy amount of money on third-party data to enrich and grow their databases, from account and contact data to technographics, intent data, and more. Openprise has helped enterprise customers with automating data enrichment and acquisition processes for the last eight years, and we see how poorly GTM organizations spend, track, and manage this fairly substantial budget. For example:

• Data vendors are often selected without an evaluation process, with “leading vendors” selected based on reputation or past experience. Given how quickly the vendor landscape changes, a vendor’s reputation and its data quality can get out of sync quickly.
• GTM teams are rarely able to monitor the performance of data vendors over time or measure database improvements that can be attributed to third-party data.
• Different departments and geographies often have their own data vendors. There is no centralized effort to make sure the collective data budget is well spent, that vendors are complementary, and that different enrichment sources do not actually degrade overall data quality.

While we don’t expect CxOs to be experts on data enrichment and buying third-party data, these are a substantial investment and CxOs should know which probing questions to ask and how to hold their teams accountable. Here are five questions CxOs should ask to ensure their budget is well spent:

1. What is the impact of enrichment on CRM data quality?

The reason you spend money on third-party data is to improve the quality of the database that impacts all of your customer interactions and GTM decisions. So it makes sense to measure the impact of your spend on the quality of your database over the contract period. Doesn’t matter which vendor you use; you should know if the juice is worth the squeeze.

How Openprise helps

Openprise automates enrichment and acquisition processes, capturing the data needed to measure the performance–and thus the ROI–of your enrichment program. Taking periodic snapshots of your database over time helps you compare the before vs. after state of your database and quantify which vendor (or combination of vendors) drives the most value over the contract period.

Common metrics you can track:

• Percentage of database enriched
• Completeness of critical data fields (mobile number, job title, industry, employee count)
• Quality of critical data fields (email and phone number, including business, personal, and disposable email address)
• Contribution from each data vendor
• Completeness of database segmentation (job level, buyer persona, buying group, account size)

2. How much is the sales team using it?

The first place a third-party data budget usually goes is to prospecting portal access for the sales team. Many companies expect that sellers will use this resource to research accounts and prospects, find new targets, and improve CRM data.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality in most companies. When sales leaders run a usage report, they often find that only a handful of sellers use the database extensively, while the majority of the sales team hardly does. Even when sellers use the database, they often look at the data but fail to sync the data into the CRM. This is why a company can subscribe to a third-party database for a decade and watch their data quality continually decline.

Buying a database subscription for the sales team and expecting your CRM data quality to improve is like buying a gym membership for every employee and expecting them to become healthier.

How Openprise helps

Would you rather have your sales team doing research and data entry, or selling? If your GTM team has a solid understanding of the ideal customer profile (ICP), your sales or marketing operations team can ensure every company and contact that fits your ICP is populated in the CRM and kept up to date. In other words, every person your sellers would want to talk to should already be in your CRM. Spending your data budget on automated enrichment and acquisition ensures your sales team can maximize its efficiency, and that every penny of your data budget actually improves the quality of your database.

3. What’s your current match rate, and how would increasing it by 40% improve ROI?

Most single data vendors only match about half your database. That leaves a large portion of your records un-enriched. The situation stays stagnant if you keep using the same data vendor every year. If you use a different vendor every year, you can improve the coverage over a longer time horizon. Since no two vendors’ databases are exactly the same and you can improve your database by “rotating the crop” every year, the best solution is to always use multiple sources. A multi-vendor approach can improve your database match rate by up to 40%.

Think of it this way: if you shrink the “unmarketable” segment of your database from 50% to 10%, you empower marketing and sales teams to engage more effectively. Higher engagement typically translates to higher conversion rates and pipeline contribution.

How Openprise helps

Openprise pioneered a Multi-Vendor Enrichment (MVE) solution that consistently delivers a 30% to 40% improvement over your existing data vendor. For example:

• A Fortune 500 cybersecurity company uses Openprise MVE to enrich the leads its contact enrichment vendor has failed to, especially for European contacts. Over the last 12 months, Openprise enriched 51% of these “leftover” leads.
• A Fortune 500 digital media and technology company has been using a leading account enrichment vendor for the last 10 years. While this vendor did a good job on the enterprise account database, it was only able to enrich 50% of the SMB database. At the beginning of this year, the company’s IT team brought in Openprise MVE and overcame a 50% enrichment gap, achieving a total enrichment rate of 88% for its SMB database.
• A fast-growing 800-person data management technology company completed a head-to-head bakeoff of Openprise MVE against two leading contact data vendors. The enrichment rates were as follows: Openprise 79%, Vendor Z 56%, Vendor L 55%.

4. How many hours does your team spend on enrichment?

Using multiple data vendors produces great results, but it takes a lot of work. To be successful, you have to:

• Research and test 20+ vendors, at minimum
• Learn each vendor’s data model, pricing, and usage terms
• Integrate their APIs and orchestrate enrichment workflows
• Manage security, compliance, and procurement with each vendor

And you have to do this EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.

Simply put, do-it-yourself MVE is hard and expensive.

How Openprise helps

Openprise has surveyed and tested over 40 data vendors and picked a complementary combination of data sources to generate that 40% lift in match rate. Instead of dealing with multiple contracts and integrations, you sign one contract with Openprise and pay once per record, no matter how many sources are used. We constantly monitor and survey the market to ensure we provide the highest-quality data using the best sources. Openprise delivers the benefit of MVE without the pain. You can outsource the “sausage making” to us and focus your team on generating revenue.

5. How much money are you really spending to acquire new records?

If you think enriching existing records using multiple data vendors is hard, acquiring new records from multiple vendors is even harder. Evaluating whether a record fits your ICP is not as simple as setting some filters in a user interface. Instead, you need to:

• Compare new records to existing records so you don’t pay for duplicates or inadvertently delete the “better” record.
• Segment vendor data the same way your database is segmented so you can make apples-to-apples comparisons.
• Score candidate records the same way you perform demographic scoring on your database so you can decide if they are good enough to acquire.
• Compare the same record from multiple sources for recency and completeness, and potentially combine data from different sources to create a “golden record.”

For example, one Openprise customer uses a leading data vendor for acquisition of new leads. Last year, they had to acquire 1.3 million records to see if the records passed their very precise ICP definitions. Of the 1.3 million records they paid for, only 300,000 records passed the inspection criteria—meaning they paid 4x the contracted cost for each new record.

How Openprise helps

Openprise’s Automated Acquisition solution enables you to evaluate a large pool of candidate records but only pay for the records you keep. You can use the power of the Openprise platform to compare, segment, score, deduplicate, and unify candidate records using precise logic that is meaningful to your specific business. By unifying data from multiple enrichment sources, you build a more complete, accurate set of new leads and ensure your data budget is not wasted on “window shopping.”

Make sure your data strategy aligns with sales goals

In today’s fast-paced market, data is the key to driving smarter sales actions and better customer interactions. As a CxO, it’s up to you to make sure your teams are accountable for how they manage and use that data. Your enrichment spend should be treated as an investment, one that directly impacts your sales productivity and customer engagement. By asking the right questions and measuring how well your data is actually improving outcomes, you’ll ensure that your data is truly working for you. Take a proactive approach to your data strategy and make sure it’s helping your teams achieve their goals.