Scrutinizing the data quality of B2B marketing leads

As a B2B marketer, buying or renting a lead list is part of your bag of tools to find new prospects. Unfortunately, it’s also often one of the most negative experiences a B2B marketer can have. The data quality of B2B marketing leads is almost always lower than advertised, and you often encounter fly-by-night and unscrupulous vendors. So, as the buyer of these lists, how do you protect your marketing investment and maximize ROI? Here we share with you a few best practices from Openprise customers.

Get A Full Preview of B2B Marketing Leads

It’s a common practice for lead vendors to send you a preview data set to illustrate the quality of their B2B marketing database. Preview data usually has no name or contact information. But it often contains job, company, and industry information. The preview is often a small subset of a few hundred to a few thousand contacts. It can even contain organizational hierarchies.

That’s not good enough.

It’s too easy for a vendor to disguise the quality of B2B marketing leads list by selectively showing you a preview of their best leads. Instead, insist on getting a preview of the full list you’re looking to acquire. Whether that’s 50,000 or 1,000,000 contacts, get the full list. If a vendor refuses the request, you should think twice about buying the list sight unseen.

In the following screenshot, you see the available data fields from the preview of a 477,000 lead database.

With the list in hand, you can analyze its quality to ensure it meets your expectations. Openprise is a very handy tool for analyzing a large data set like this. The path you take for your analysis should be unique to your business and situation.

Using Openprise to Do an Industry Analysis of B2B Marketing Leads

First, see if the list has the right mixture of industries. For industry-specific B2B companies, this is critically important. Leads from industries you do not sell to are practically worthless. For non-vertical specific B2B companies, there are often industries that are your sweet spots. There may be industries you want to run specific marketing campaigns for.

The Rank Analysis in Openprise is very useful for this purpose. In the screenshot below we ranked the top 25 industries from this list based on record count. Education came in at the number one spot with nearly 30,000 contacts, or roughly 6% of the total database. Government came in at the number four spot with nearly 17,000 contacts. So education + government contacts make up 10% of this list. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your target industries.

Using Openprise to Do a Job Function Analysis

Let’s say education is one of the verticals you wish to target, but you’re concerned that there may be a large number of student contacts in the list. You specifically want to see contacts in the IT department. To drill down, you click on the FILTER DATA button to filter for only contacts where industry contain the word “education.” Next, change the ranking attribute from industry to job function. You can see the result below. We see the majority of job functions are IT, support, and engineering. That’s good.

Job Title And Job Level Analysis

The next question to ask is: Are these contacts at the right seniority level? Some B2B products are more suitable for calling high into the organization, while others are more suitable for calling directly into the technical staff. To answer that question, further filter for contacts where job function contains the words “IT,” “information,” and “engineering.” Changing the ranking attribute to title and job level accordingly shows you the title and seniority breakdown of this list. There are a large number of manager-level contacts. Interestingly there are also a lot of contacts with the CTO title.

You can perform further analysis based on SIC code, company size, or even strategic account names.

Buying a B2b marketing leads list is not cheap and can be a frustrating experience. With the help of Openprise and a little bit of time analyzing the preview list, you can ensure your B2B marketing database investment gets the proper ROI.