B2B data, or Business-to-business data, is crucial information about a company, including identifiers like name, revenue, funding, employees, and other similar metrics. Businesses use this data to understand their prospects and create tailored marketing strategies.

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B2B data can also help companies improve their decision-making process and generate new business opportunities. If you are interested in learning more about B2B data, this guide can be more than sufficient. Here, we will explore B2B data, its key benefits, and use cases.

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What is B2B Data?

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B2B data is critical information about other businesses stored in a dataset. The primary purpose of this data is to create tailored sales strategies and generate leads. Generally, B2B data include the following information about a company or business:

• Firmographic and technographic data of a company
• Financial and funding information i.e., revenue or investments
• Number of employees
• Information about the top management

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It’s possible to paint a clear picture of a company by relying on such information. You can understand how the company is performing, what types of challenges it might be facing, and what kind of solutions you can offer.

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Hence, company profile data is a goldmine and a valuable source. It helps generate new business opportunities, improve market research, and enhance lead generation.

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B2B Data Sources

It’s possible to divide B2B data sources into two groups: third-party external data and internal data. Third-party data is gathered from other providers, such as data companies. On the other hand, internal data is normally collected by the company.

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Below, we have discussed some of the most prominent external data sources:

Business Data Websites: This source offers firmographic data, including general company information such as funding, hiring activities, headcount, etc. Firmographic information is crucial for companies, as it’s used for marketing. You can use tools to retrieve desired data from the company's website.

Employee Data Sources: These sources include professional networks offering a wide range of valuable data about business professionals. This data can be used in various ways, such as analyzing the market, recruiting, and improving HR tasks. LinkedIn is among the most common and highly recommended platforms offering employee data.

Review Sites: This type of B2B data source can help you gather essential company data via review data. You can learn more about the company you are interested in by visiting the review sites. For instance, you can spot red flags and analyze how a company is performing.

Technographic Data: This is another data source offering clear insights into a company's tech stacks. If you know what type of tools or software a company is using, it would be easy to perform market research and generate leads, making it highly essential data.

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Data Providers

High-quality B2B data can be obtained through B2B data vendors or platforms. Usually, data platforms charge a commission fee from vendors, which increases the overall price of the data. Hence, it’s recommended to contact the data vendors directly. This will help you close a better deal.

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B2B Data Applications or Use Cases

B2B data plays an essential role in boosting the growth and sales of a business. In addition, companies can take advantage of the data to perform industry analysis, market research, and generate leads.

Below are the noteworthy use cases of B2B data:

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Lead Generation

In most cases, B2B data is used by the sales and marketing teams. In other words, businesses rely on this type of data to improve their sales and marketing strategies. This helps with the lead generation process and increases conversion rates.

For instance, a software company can track the technographic data of their potential customers. This allows marketing and sales teams to obtain valuable insights into the current tech stack their customer is using.

If the customer is in search of a solution to enhance its tech stack, you can offer your product as a viable solution or additional software. This is among the various examples where a company can utilize B2B data to generate leads.

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Outbound Sales

A sale is referred to as an outbound if the sales team initiates the communication by contacting the prospect first. This can be done by sending a sales email or via a direct phone call.

This might sound time-consuming, but connecting with individual prospects can help generate more leads. For instance, the sales rep can give a thorough explanation about the product, which can help persuade decision-makers to consider your product.

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Analytics

Apart from helping the marketing and sales department, B2B data can also help improve a business's analysis and research process. This includes:

• Competitive analysis
• Market growth
• Risk analysis

Companies can use technographic, firmographic, and intent data for competitive analysis. A company can leverage technographic data to monitor the tech stack of its competitors. Similarly, firmographic data can help with gaining knowledge about the company’s revenue, product launches, growth, and employee count.

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Advantages of B2B Data

B2B data is imperative because it can help businesses understand more about their prospects. This information helps them make informed decisions and uncover new opportunities.

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How can B2B Data Benefit Sales Team?

The sales team can take advantage of B2B data in the following ways:

• With B2B data, the sales team can better understand their prospective customers. This helps the team segment their clients according to their categories.
• High-quality B2B data helps understand a prospective client's needs. Knowing what your client wants makes it easy to create a perfect sales pitch.
• A sales team can ask more tailored and particular questions. As a result, sales reps can tackle prospects based on their particular pain points.
• B2B data can help enhance the knowledge about an industry or a product. It offers you the required information about the sentiments of prospective customers. With this data, you can make necessary adjustments to your product.
• With B2B data, a sales team can identify the people in key positions and find ways to contact them. By knowing your target clients, you can better understand their interests and needs.
• Your sales team can also use B2B data to enrich existing datasets. This helps with making accurate and prudent decisions. By adding more relevant data, you can make your datasets more actionable.

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How can B2B Data Benefit Marketing Teams?

When it comes to marketing, B2B data can be beneficial in a variety of ways. Some of these include:

• With B2B data at your disposal, it’s possible to increase demand generation. This data allows marketing teams to connect with the relevant prospects depending on their needs and preferences. When the content you are using is relevant to your target industry, you can easily generate leads.
• Marketing teams can easily create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This benefit is for both the marketing and sales campaigns.
• Businesses can make data-driven decisions and eliminate the guesswork. The decisions made using high-quality data tend to offer the desired outcome.
• B2B data can help you understand your target audience much better. This allows you to create tailored marketing content and connect with the most promising prospects.
• This type of data can also enhance the lead generation process. With more focus on the selected audience, lead generation can turn out to be more efficient. In addition, you can satisfy the target needs of your customers and implement tailored marketing strategies.

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Benefits for Revenue Operations Teams

The revenue Operations process helps integrate marketing, sales, and other relevant departments for better customer handling. With high-end B2B data, it’s possible to improve the efficiency of revenue operations.

It also helps generate extensive B2B insights and connects each team for better performance. Below are a few of the examples where B2B data can benefit revenue operations teams.

• Helps align marketing and sales teams around a well-constituted set of goals.
• Allows strengthening the operations through data enrichment and accurate insights.
• Makes it possible to choose the best leads from the contact list.
• B2B data can boost sales by offering tailored solutions to customers.

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What is B2B Data Enrichment?

The major goal behind data enrichment is to create datasets that are more actionable and complete. This includes adding the new data or filing in the missing fields. When it comes to B2B, data enrichment is a process where multiple data sources are combined to create a detailed and in-depth picture of a company.

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B2B Data Types

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Here are the major categories of B2B data:

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Firmographic Data

Firmographic data offers categorical information to the key decision-makers. This information is about the particular state of the company, its structure, employee count, revenue, and similar other unique identifiers.

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Technographics Data

This type of B2B data offers information regarding the tech stack used by a prospective company. Using this data helps businesses to have a better understanding of the technologies and tools that are crucial for a prospect. The most noteworthy examples of Technographics include tech stack lists, integrations, features, etc.

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Contact Data and People Data

People data is also referred to as contact data when we are considering lead generation. This data is either collected internally via a company’s CRM or externally by a third-party vendor.

Third-party people data from data vendors like Reverse Contact can help scrap data from information that is publicly available. Some of the people and contact data points include name, age, location, education, employment history, etc.

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Intent Data

This type of data is also referred to as B2B intent data. It provides information about the recent business activities of a company. With intent data, you can get an idea about the buying intent of a prospect. It also offers detailed data regarding search information, recent acquisitions, or purchased products/services.

Although there is a variety of B2B intent data vendors, they offer more or less similar kinds of information like company/professional name, company website, downloads, pageviews, subscriptions, etc. Demographic data also plays critical role when it comes to finalizing the intent data.

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What is a B2B Database?

A B2B database refers to a collection of information regarding potential customers or prospects. A B2B database usually offers identifiers like industry, size, business contact details, performance, locations, etc.

A database with sufficient B2B data can offer a wide range of benefits for both small and large companies. However, maintaining a database isn’t a simple task, as it requires consistent maintenance and cleaning to ensure data accuracy.

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B2B Database Processes

Here are a few of the most common B2B database processes that are used by data vendors and companies:

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B2B Data Sourcing

At present, businesses are capable of finding B2B data that is sourced specifically for them. B2B data vendors offer on-demand data either via raw files or database access. To maximize the data, companies must thoroughly analyze their prevailing datasets. Businesses should try to fill in the missing datasets with richer insights.

Below are the tips for sourcing high-quality data:

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Hire a Skilled Team: Before collecting the B2B data, it would be appropriate to rely on highly skilled people. They must have the experience to collect and analyze only the most relevant and up-to-date data. In addition, other people on your team should have the skills to take advantage of the insights you have been receiving.

Find Relevant and Accurate Data: The data under consideration must be relevant. Extensive datasets with the least level of relevancy won’t do any good. You can’t get any value from the irrelevant data, as there is a lot of noise. In addition, dealing with a large amount of irrelevant data costs both in terms of time and money.

Rely on Fresh Data: Apart from relevancy, your data needs to be fresh and updated. This is one of the major requirements for B2B data collection. You also need to consider this factor when choosing a data provider. This is so, as a top-rated data provider is more concerned about the data quality and freshness of its collected data.

Continuously Analyze Data: Data collection is a continuous process. Hence, you can’t use data repeatedly without analyzing it. You need to analyze your data every time before using it to create marketing strategies. Especially data-driven businesses rely more on continuous analysis of the collected data.

In short, your efforts will bear no fruit, as the data is purely irrelevant, outdated, and incorrect. Therefore, rely only on accurate and complete data that is specifically collected to meet your business needs. Once you are sure that your B2B data is relevant and up-to-date, it’s time to create a powerful marketing campaign.

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B2B Data Cleaning

Businesses are increasingly relying on data, which is why companies are increasingly concerned about the importance of cleaning their B2B data. Data cleansing allows companies to correct or remove inaccurate data within a dataset and ensures that the collected data meets data protection regulations.

Since the data requirements for a business change frequently, the datasets might lose accuracy or relevancy. Therefore, it’s essential for businesses to regularly go through their datasets and check for missing entries, duplicates, or errors. This process also enhances data security by removing unwanted data.

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B2B Data Validation

Just like data cleansing, it’s also critical for businesses to perform B2B data validation. Data validation is a process of analyzing how accurate are the datasets. This process is started after data cleansing. It involves checking data for correctness and meaning when matched with predefined validation constraints and rules.

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Is B2B Data Integration Hard?

At present, B2B data integration isn’t as hard as it used to be in the past. This is so, as now we have access to a range of no-code tools and learning resources. So, accessing fresh data is possible for almost every business. You can do this even without technical knowledge.

Using a B2B data API is one of the most recommended and easiest ways to do it. This makes it possible for us to integrate fresh data into existing data. Generally, you only need a simple code or URL generated by the vendor, which can be added to your existing data cloud storage platform.

This process is quite simple, yet each data provider comes with a slightly different approach. Therefore, you need to contact your account manager before starting the integration process.

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Final Thoughts

No doubt, B2B data has proven its worth by helping businesses generate more leads and boost sales. This is why we have generated this guide to help you seek the answers regarding B2B data. With a better understanding of the B2B data, it’s possible for you to find a perfect data provider. By doing so, you can get the desired outcome through your marketing strategies.

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