RevenueBase Blog

Mark Feldman December 15, 2021

The Biggest Mistake B2B Revenue Leaders Make

How would you describe your prospect database?

If you’re anything like 99% of B2B organizations, it’s a careless mishmash of purchased contact lists, manually uploaded trade show names, junk inbound form fills and hastily typed garbage from well-intentioned salespeople.

Here are some words I typically hear from revenue leaders when they describe their database:

• Oooof
• Messy
• Incomplete
• Chaos
• Unreliable
• Out of control

One word is missing: Strategic.

(Also: Clean, accurate, reliable, up-to-date…)

Why don’t we treat our B2B database as a strategic asset? It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see revenue leaders make.

Every great revenue leader understands that we can only reach our target audiences if we have a reliable set of underlying data that drives connection. This means we need to start treating our database like we do any other strategic asset – as a priority.

Without it? 

• Our campaigns under-perform
• Contacts we thought were a great fit have changed jobs
• Companies not qualified to buy our products / services receive our outreach
• Our sales team become frustrated and ineffective
• We miss revenue targets, MQL goals, and other KPIs

As a former VP of marketing and revenue operations leader, I get it. 

Manually maintaining a complete database of our target market is time-consuming and difficult. Perfection is impossible, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

Even a minimal improvement in database quality can impact our downstream campaign performance – in our experience, as much as 3-5X! 

I’m still shocked at how often revenue leaders overlook this one key element that could easily drive new growth. 

3 ways to treat your B2B database as a valuable, strategic asset. 

1. Acquire data responsibly – You’re likely working with multiple data providers and internal sources (from salespeople to trade shows). Work with vendors like Revenuebase who understand the need for constantly up-to-date data that meets your niche, targeted, bespoke criteria. Relevance above all!
   
2. Maintain your data over time – We’re a database-as-a-service company, so we’re familiar with the challenges of database maintenance. Normalizing, de-duplicating, filtering it, routing it, and tagging it is all part of a smart approach here.
   
3. Keep it up-to-date – People change jobs all the time, companies grow, downsize, and merge, and offices change location (especially these days.) A database is a living and breathing representation of your target market – and that means it needs constant refreshing and updating.

I like to think of a B2B database as a strategic asset, something that we need to build thoughtfully, protect over time, and invest in wisely. It’s been a problem I tackled for brands when I worked at NetProspex (now part of D&B) and in-house for many B2B organizations. 

My firm, RevenueBase, is here to change the B2B contact database game by helping you with all the frustrating parts of B2B data management: acquiring, integrating, and maintaining quality data, while always ensuring that it is up to date.