Business Information Services and Market Research: 2020

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Data Fill Rate Vs Turnaround Time – Bridge the B2B Data Gap

Data Filling and Turnaround time based on Market research are critical to businesses in order to take strategic calls on overall business growth, B2B data workflows, lead-to-account management, competitor analysis, duplicate record prevention and email validation. Complete and real-time business data is also important for account planning, messaging and reducing time spent by the sales team in entering and maintaining company and contact data for lead generation.

The emergence of Business Information Services firms like crunchbase, dealroom.co, craft.co has addressed these requirements to a great extent. Such companies effectively collate company data and identify, evaluate, select, and organize business information, presenting them to clients in a format that helps them meet business goals.

But it is a fact that there exists no master database of private companies that is 100% accurate, complete and up-to-date. There is always a bit of gap that exists between the actual data and the available data. Business information providers need to be mindful of the lack of completeness of data in their databases, the reporting biases that might creep in during data collection and the issue of time delays between the occurrence of a strategic event and its update in the database.

Before getting into the role that Market Research Service Providers can play in this regard, let’s first discuss some of the known issues with the available B2B data out there. These are the most common issues faced by all aggregators of private company data.

Reporting delays or Turnaround Time

Let us start with a classic example. Generally, venture capital deals are not disclosed at the precise time they are signed. This is important to remember when looking at “snapshots” of private company funding data. There is often a gap of several weeks between finalizing paperwork and public disclosure, even for big rounds raised by companies. There is a time delay between the public disclosure of such deals and the addition of this information to the database. Unless these deals are manually added to the database, it might not show up-to-date company data.

Data Fill Rate

Data fill rate refers to the completeness of a company record in a B2B database. More often than not, a company record in a BIS database ends up being a ‘micro profile’, that contains some, but not all the data pertaining to it. Like for instance, the address or the contact details of the key decision-makers or Leadership data may be missing. Such micro-profiles do not add any value to the client or the business that makes use of this information. It is therefore very important for BIS service providers to maintain complete, accurate and up-to-date company data in their databases.

Selective reporting bias

As data is gathered by BIS service providers from multiple sources through Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning, there is also a chance for such data to be somewhat biased towards certain companies and investment. Accordingly, this may paint a rosier picture of a company or industry. There has to be a whetting process for all the data collected that ensure transparency and accuracy.

Sector and business under coverage

Because there are so many companies out there, most private company data aggregators focus on a particular subset of companies, industries, or transaction types, which necessarily limits the scope of its coverage.

Geographic under coverage

The quality and quantity of information a private company data aggregator collect are not geographically uniform. There is always some sort of sampling bias while collating company data spread across states or countries. For instance, a data set of American startups, compiled by a US-based company, is probably going to be more comprehensive than an Indian data company’s collection of American startup information. These sampling biases are more pronounced when there’s a language or cultural barrier. To mitigate this, many aggregators of global startup data often partner with local Market Research Agencies and data collectors to enrich and verify data. But all these can be easily overcome by the real Market Research Executive at lessburn, who are both locally and globally mindful about sourcing the relevant data irrespective of the geographic location in a cost-effective way thereby reducing more than 60% of your operational expense on a local & in-house team.

The Role of Market Research Service Providers

From employing industry-best practices and systematically gathering, recording, and analyzing data to offering market assessment, benchmarking, data mining, segmentation, competitor analysis and industry trend forecasting, Market Research Service Providers can help Business Information service providers maintain relevant, credible and accurate information on their databases.

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment incorporates fresh information into existing company records to improve its accuracy and value. Data enrichment improves the quality of leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities with accurate business data that drives actionable insights for sales and marketing success. Most often manual data validation and curation becomes necessary to ensure the completeness and credibility of company data. Also, analyzing key interconnections in the data to develop algorithms, and provide valuable insights can be made better possible through human intervention.

We are here to help

As a part of lessburn’s Market Research Services, we profile and segment the Firmographic and Demographic data of the companies with respect to multiple industries, collect and analyze the funding rounds, anticipate the industry trends with prompt actions. We are a team of 60+ Full-Time resources with 800+ On-demand resources working round the clock to fulfil your data needs at the right time with instantaneous response. Our market research specialists are adept in gathering hard-to-find information through online research across multiple platforms to turn up with the real and valid data with faster turnaround time. lessburn acts as your extended team from another location working to fulfil your vision thereby slicing 60% of your Operational expense on your in-house researchers.

With industry experience spanning over a decade and a passionate research team that is always on top of the game, lessburn ensures that your business information is right, relevant, accurate & most importantly ON-TIME!

Friday, May 15, 2020

Optimizing Organizational Growth through Data-driven Business Models

There were times when businesses could leverage data to gain a competitive advantage and deliver better products and services. However, moving with current times, if a business doesn’t become data driven, it will become obsolete. There have been numerous classic examples where valuable companies built on data have transformed the entire industry, like Amazon in retail, AirBnB in the hospitality and Marketo in the Sales and Marketing.

Why does business data matter so much?

While looking at marketing to another Company, or selling to, partnering with, working for or investing in, businesses and sales professionals have always struggled to identify suitable resources to get valuable data and news that’s up to date. Actionable business data at the right time is essential to help prioritize sales efforts and identify key buy signals in the market. Availability of such data allows users to follow investment trends, identify growing industries, and streamline sales and marketing efforts by discovering the companies that will be driving their business objectives and impacting their bottom line.

While Data about public companies are more readily available out there, the same cannot be said so for private companies. Information about such companies is scattered and unverified, making it hard to track. A simple Google search might not be enough to find the kind of data that is required in such situations, that often results in incomplete and fragmented data, subject to inaccuracies.

This means, decision makers must be able to first identify the right kind of data, derive meaning from it and drive decision-making that can be translated into specific action to be communicated to others. Confronted with vast amounts of data, businesses must isolate those bits of data that provide information leading to actionable knowledge. This is no easy task because the environment is constantly changing.

Essential elements needed to generate actionable knowledge include:

Having valid and timely information
Making informed choices
Monitoring of both the validity of input information and implementation of decision

In a world that is characterized by rapid change, having valid and timely information is not necessarily an easy task. Information that may be valid, meaningful, and useful today may not be so a few days or months down the line. Changes in the internal or external environment can make valid, meaningful, and useful information from today for the questionable value of tomorrow. Therefore, it becomes critically important for Organizations to constantly monitor both data and information as well as output in the form of results and make adjustments as needs change. The result of not doing so will lead to decision-making based on flawed information. Actions based on invalid or flawed information may lead to negative outcomes. This process ultimately is critical to the success of organizations of all size, type, and industry.

Inability to get this type of data and information that is both broad in terms of coverage (number of companies) and deep (rich in type of company information), as well as easy to find and use is a problem that could be addressed well by companies providing business information.

Right Information at the Right Time

Such companies by providing accurate, up-to-date business information, help business professionals around the world outsmart their competition and uncover the latest industry news and alerts. Even for such companies, staying ahead of the game can be a bit of challenge in terms of the huge amount of data mining, research, market analysis and number crunching involved. Tracking news about events like funding, acquisitions, product launches and leadership changes for Companies and updating the database is crucial for sharing such insights and key alerts to clients who are interested in a particular company or industry.

To Conclude

Knowing when to take the right action is the key for empowering teams with actionable data at the right time. From market research to data enrichment, comprehensive company data helps businesses make strategic decisions at the right time by facilitating ease of spotting opportunities before the competition does.

If Data drives your business, then let it be the real data. Update your existing database with 100% hand-curated data having >99% accuracy with lessburn. We are a team of vibrant market researchers on providing accurate, timely, predictive and handy data to the Business Information Service Providers with faster Turnaround Time with quality deliverable. With a penchant for data-driven business decisions, lessburn capitalizes on its superior data-mining capabilities, which factors a lot of intelligence from the market, the competition and your potential.

Reach us at research@lessburn.com if you’ve got a quick question or you want to run through the details of your business data service requirement. We’re always on our mark for a longer run!

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Is Data Decay Challenging your B2B Business Growth?

Data decay refers to the degradation in the quality of data in the marketing and sales databases of companies. Data elements like phone numbers, addresses, employee roles are subjected to frequent change on account of companies relocation, employees getting promoted or quitting, phone numbers getting changed, so on and so forth. This goes on to impact the performance of all outbound marketing channels – telemarketing, email marketing or even direct sales.

Marketing data integrity poses a real problem for many businesses bringing down efficiency and profits.

Consider these statistics by ZoomInfo,

40% of email users change their email address at least once every two years

15% of email users change their email address one or more times a year

20% of all postal addresses change every year

18% of all telephone numbers change every year

21% of all CEOs change every year

25-33% of email addresses become outdated every year

60% of people change job titles within their organizations each year

Given that the data in the marketing database is subject to frequent changes, it is important for businesses to ensure that the quality of data is ensured at all times.

Impact of data decay

Bad data brings down marketing efficiency and sales performance while good data is a prerequisite for fruitful sales follow ups and customer acquisition.

Here are some ways in which data decay can cause an adverse impact on B2B marketing and sales:

Higher number of customers unsubscribing or opting out of email lists

Higher rate of email hard bounces due to invalid or inaccurate email IDs

Higher chances of putting off customers and prospects due to inaccurate addresses or irrelevant marketing content

Incomplete or inaccurate data can stop sales teams from effective follow-up communication or the ability to develop effective relationship strategies

The Way Out – Fixing Data Decay

Sadly, the data decay problem is a known issue that every business goes through. According to a study by Internal Results, 40% of all B2B sales leads contain bad data. This quality issue could be due to data entry errors, missing or invalid fields, outdated information or record duplication. Such obsolete data can be one of the main reasons why many businesses end up with unsuccessful marketing campaigns.

It is highly recommended that businesses conduct periodic data audits and data cleansing on their sales and marketing databases to keep a check on data decay.

Businesses need to periodically analyse existing data, work with solution providers to fix inconsistencies and review data collection methods that are in place.

However, Organizations also need to look beyond one time clean ups at periodic, ongoing data maintenance strategies for improved marketing efficiency. With such an approach, businesses can improve brand credibility with access to the most recent and accurate email addresses, decrease the sales turnaround times with better routing, improve segmentation, and lead nurturing.