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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
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