Imagine starting your day with what appears to be a promising lead, only to find out the contact information is outdated. Instead of wasting time chasing dead ends, why not ensure you have reliable, actionable data from the start?
A high-quality data provider ensures you have up-to-date, actionable leads who are ready for your pitch. Here’s all the essential information to help you understand the benefits of cutting-edge data solutions.
What Are B2B Data Solutions?
Data solutions refer to platforms, tools, and services that collect, analyze, and manipulate data. When we add B2B to the equation, we get a suite of data-driven software that helps businesses find and contact the right leads – whether for individuals or other businesses.
Through B2B data solutions, you can access databases across all industries to find leads that fit your criteria. This includes key information on other companies, including organizational structure, firmographics, technographics, and employee details.
Of course, if you wanted to do the heavy lifting yourself—hours of manually scouring the web for data to assemble in a database—you could. But why devote your time and resources to such mundane tasks when a B2B data solution can automate that entire process? You can also use automated validation, cleansing, and filtering—such as real-time updates and cross-referencing—to ensure the information is accurate and relevant. Tools like UpLead aggregate the latest data points in one place, ready for analysis.
Essential Qualities of B2B Data Solutions
The best B2B data solutions will have verified contacts, high-quality data, integration capabilities, and analytics and reporting features while providing compliant and secure data. Here’s what that means in detail:
Verified Contacts
Having many potential contacts is great, but as any veteran B2B sales expert attests, the number of contacts is less important than their quality. You can maximize your deliverables when you ensure that the contacts are accurate and recently vetted.
A verified contact is a business lead whose contact information, such as email address and phone number, has been recently authenticated for accuracy and validity. The most robust B2B data tools validate contact information across multiple sources and use algorithms to confirm the format.
This ensures that your emails won’t be sent to non-existing or deleted inboxes, directly leading to higher deliverability and open rates. Consistently undelivered emails can damage your lead-generation capabilities in the long run.
According to a HubSpot survey, 56% of B2B companies verify leads before contacting them. Lead qualification is important enough for most companies to include it in their workflow, but there’s still tremendous opportunity for companies to leverage that practice.
UpLead allows you to verify contacts individually or en masse once you have created or uploaded your contact list.
If you don’t have a list, the creation process is simple:
- Go to the My Lists section,
- Select leads via Contact or Company Search
- Go back to My Lists, and then select the Download icon.
Now, you can decide on the number of leads you want to verify and which emails you’d like to download from your list.
If you already have an email list, go to the Verify section, upload the file, and wait for the verification to complete.
High-Quality Data
High-quality data includes complete, up-to-date contact details—like current emails, valid phone numbers, and accurate company information—so you can confidently reach decision-makers. By contrast, low-quality data might have outdated emails or missing phone numbers, so your messages bounce back and your calls fail to connect.
To maximize your company’s time and effort, seek solutions that provide information like firmographics, technographics, and intent data. The more of these insights you have, the clearer you can identify whether a business fits your parameters as a client.
For example, UpLead provides intent data, meaning you can access information on the types of purchases a business is interested in.
UpLead categorizes each business by dozens of topics, allowing you to filter different companies and create lists based on the prospects that fit your search criteria.
Let’s say you’re looking for businesses in the retail trade industry. You can use the Company Search feature to generate a list of all prospects that match this profile.
But this is just the surface of what intent data can do. UpLead also provides details such as companies’ tech stacks, purchase intent, employees, social media posts, and more.
Integration Capabilities
Integration capabilities with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, data analysis, and marketing platforms make the process of managing and utilizing data more efficient.
For example, when you import new leads, they automatically update in your CRM, feed into your analytics dashboards, and are ready for your next outreach campaign—all with just a few clicks.
G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior Report found that integration functionality was the single most important consideration for sales and marketing software.
UpLead stays ahead of the curve by integrating with the most robust CRM software, such as Salesforce. First, sync prospects with your go-to sales tool and instantly start with personalized prospecting. Once you integrate your UpLead account with Salesforce, you can export contacts with the click of a button, as seen below:
Compliance & Security
While compliance and security don’t directly improve process efficiency, businesses that fall behind in these aspects can experience legal problems, ultimately slowing down work by diverting valuable time and resources to resolving those issues. When choosing a data solution, you must ensure it complies with relevant regional and local regulations.
For instance, if you operate in the EU, CCPA for California, or PIPEDA for Canada, make sure the data provider you choose is GDPR compliant.
B2B Data Types
Understanding the type of data you need can help you pick a data solution provider. Some of the most crucial data types for finding and analyzing business prospects are as follows:
- Firmographic Data: This is information about a company’s general characteristics, such as industry, size, revenue, and location. This information is obtained through public records, business directories, company websites, financial reports, etc.
- Technographic Data: Details regarding the technologies and software a company uses, aiding in understanding its IT stack.
- Intent Data: Signals indicating a company’s or customer’s intent to purchase or interest in specific products or services.
- Demographic Data: Information about individuals within a company, including job titles, roles, and seniority levels.
- Engagement Data: Evidence of interactions between a company and its prospects or customers, such as website visits and email opens.
Use Cases for B2B Data Solutions
There’s a lot of room for innovation and creativity when it comes to leveraging B2B data, but it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with some familiar and key use cases:
Building a Reliable Contact Database
When building a list of prospects, you want contacts that are reliable, legitimate, and verified. UpLead allows you to save contacts and categorize them based on role, location, company, and industry factors.
First, use the Contact Search feature to implement filters and export the contacts to a list. For example, you can export “VPs of marketing” to one list and “business development executives” to another. From there, you can sort your contacts within each list based on your target parameters.
Enriching Existing Data
Data enrichment is the process of “improving” existing data by adding relevant information. UpLead allows you to enrich individual contacts and companies by uploading their basic information and providing additional information for deeper analytics. This allows companies with existing databases to enhance their records with accurate, up-to-date details.
According to Enricher.io, data enrichment can increase annual ROI by up to 27%.
Data enrichment is often used to find emails or LinkedIn profiles, but UpLead also allows you to append 50+ other useful pieces of information – from verified contact details ( direct work emails, phone numbers, and mobile numbers) and professional attributes ( job title, management level, and department) to comprehensive company data (website, company size, and revenue) as well as social media profiles and technographic insights.
Data-Driven Forecasting
It’s near impossible to predict the “next big thing assuredly.” However, data-driven forecasting allows you to see insights into market trends, giving you a leg up in preparing for all possibilities.
This process starts with collecting data, in this case through UpLead, and allowing businesses to leverage statistical models and machine learning algorithms to gain insights.
According to MIT IDE Research, businesses that leverage data-driven analytics had an increase of 6% in revenue.
Data-driven forecasting ensures that business decisions are backed by insights based on real and accurate information.
Boost Sales & Marketing Efforts
B2B data providers allow you to create outreach campaigns quicker because you can access millions of leads at once.
With just a few clicks, you can narrow down potential leads through specific filters such as industry, industry size, revenue, and others, removing the need for extensive prospecting.
Tips for Choosing a B2B Data Solution
When choosing a B2B data solution, you must ensure it’s suitable for your use case. As you vet data solution providers and platforms, consider the following factors:
- Data Accuracy: Check the data accuracy of a B2B data solution by comparing its data with verified contacts and leads in your database.
- Coverage: There are data solutions providers that gather general data and ones that cover specific industries. UpLead covers industries from public administration to agriculture, making it a perfect choice for a wide array of businesses.
- Integration: Ensure that the data provider’s platform can be integrated with the tools that you’re already using. UpLead supports integration with 15 different outreach, CRM, and email marketing tools, such as Salesforce, Woodpecker, and Hubspot.
- Compliance: Depending on your location, business size, and industry, you need to pay attention to relevant data regulations. For example, if you’re working with clients from Europe, ensure that the data solution you pick is compliant with GDPR.
- Scalability: It’s important that you pick a platform that will feed you data as you scale. This means that even if your sales team sends out hundreds of pitches a day, your chosen data provider will have enough leads.
Why Companies Pick UpLead for B2B Data
While it’s technically possible to manually collect vast amounts of contact data from the web, the quality is often poor — and the process is incredibly time-consuming. By using B2B data solutions, you’re saving time and resources.
UpLead provides businesses with verified contacts, including emails, mobile numbers, and intent data. With more than 160 million leads boasting 95% accuracy, businesses in all industries can benefit from our data, allowing them to make better long-term decisions.
If you want to test this for yourself, you can start your free trial today!
FAQs About B2B Data Solutions
B2B data integration is the process of merging business data from multiple sources.
A B2B data provider is a company that collects, verifies, and provides business-related information to other businesses. This data can range from marketing metrics to the company’s earnings, location, and size.
Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. Their industry is business and employment, with 18,500 employees and revenue of more than 13.8 billion dollars in the fiscal year 2022. This is what’s called firmographic information.
You can get B2B data from primary sources such as direct customer interactions, company websites, government records, industry reports, surveys, and first-party analytics.
The best B2B database is one that offers accurate, detailed, and up-to-date information tailored to your industry and target market. While you can always opt for a more comprehensive database, it’s best to pick the specialized one for your goals.
Depending on your business’s industry, sales goals, and use cases for data integration, UpLead might be the best option for you. Still not sure? Contact UpLead today for more information or to begin a free trial.
