It’s a good question. It comes down to whether the b2b data supplier makes enough money to keep the database up to date. The bigger the database, the more agents it needs to call it all. If the data company is having a tough time taking revenue (5 years of recession!), then they will strip back on the heads calling the data, and then hope nobody complains, or hope that nothing changes in the data to cause those complaints.
A typical line used by a sales person would be, ‘all of our data is constantly updated’. It’s not. What they mean, or, I hope they mean, is that their agents are calling their entire database continuously over a period of time.
Just do the math. A single caller using a predictive dialer can make around 100 reception level calls a day. Let’s say they are all complete calls and the caller gained all the info she needed.
Over a year, 228 days, that caller would clean and update 22,800 records. If a database has 2.2 million companies, then they would need 100 operators to clean the data on a 12 month cycle, making sure each company has been updated once. So the company needs to be making some decent money to pay for all those callers.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that changes will happen within a business during these 12 months, and the data owner can’t update the details quick enough, so the data gets old.
Databases range from 9 months recency – 5 years! It is impossible to make the data 100% accurate. If my company called you today and checked the information was correct, but you handed your notice in 2 months later, the data would be inaccurate. I wouldn’t have been able to call you again that quick! To be honest, the inaccuracy should count for only about 2% of a file. The DMA can provide you with some figures of what gone-aways you should expect.
You can trial some of mib’s data free to get an idea of what to expect. Free Trial.
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