How to Purchase Business Data

The Complete Data Purchasing Guide for Tech Marketers …

Buying B2B data is a procurement exercise, not simply a transaction: the quality of the brief determines the quality of the database, and buying too much data can be just as wasteful as buying too little. An effective marketing team builds its success on quality data. Having a fuller understanding of an account – including multiple stakeholders, their roles, priorities and relevant company information – materially improves win rates. Somehow, many B2B technology companies still treat data as an afterthought, even though it must always be the starting point for your marketing planning.

More data doesn’t mean more value – better account intelligence does.

Take Your Business Data Seriously

Buying good data can be expensive, but the costs of bad data can be high. Many small businesses start their data journey by buying a list when the sales team needs prospects, downloading a spreadsheet from a data provider, scraping a few directories and then adding some LinkedIn research. Then they wonder why their campaigns are producing poor results. The problem is how the data was purchased in the first place.

A marketer cannot simply specify:

• Company Name → Contact → Email.

Marketers must think about the depth of account intelligence required to sell, such as:

• Firmographic → Technographic → Contact → Role → Responsibility → Buying Committee → Trigger Events → Intent → Engagement.

If you’re buying data for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), don’t ask the data supplier for contacts; ask them for the information you need to understand and penetrate the account. Buying B2B data is not like buying office stationery. You cannot tell a data broker that you want “UK technology companies” and expect to receive a database that perfectly represents your target market. A full understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is necessary before you think about procuring data.

The more precise your requirements, the more useful the resulting dataset will be. This is important because data can become one of your most important assets or one of the highest hidden costs in B2B marketing. Buy too little, and your sales team runs out of prospects. Buy too much, and you spend money acquiring contacts you will never use. Buy the wrong data and you can end up wasting marketing budget, sales time and technology resources on people who were never part of your ICP in the first place. For all businesses, especially startups, getting this right is important.

Build or Buy Your Database?

Bootstrapped and early-stage startups often don’t have the money to purchase databases, so they must be more creative. This usually means building their own. They research companies in multiple ways using LinkedIn, industry directories, Companies House records, attending events, downloading membership lists, identifying people by job title and gradually building their own target account database.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach. In fact, it can produce excellent intelligence because the people doing the research become intimately familiar with the market. The problem is the time it takes, as this approach is highly labour-intensive. If your target market consists of a few hundred companies, manual research may be perfectly manageable but can still take months to complete. If you are targeting tens of thousands of companies across multiple countries, it becomes a very different proposition.

Even if you think you have the time and bandwidth to build your own data list, there is another uncomfortable reality: you are unlikely to find a complete, free industry list online. So, how do you know when you have finished? The chances are you never will know and never will finish. Whichever way you start putting your target data together, eventually, most growing technology companies will need to buy data. The trick is buying the right data.

Start With Your ICP – Not the Data Broker

The biggest mistake marketers make is starting the conversation with the data supplier before fully forming the requirements. NEVER DO THIS. Always start with your own ICP and work from there. Before approaching a data provider, define exactly what you are trying to find.

For example:

• Industries
• Geographic markets
• Company size
• Employee numbers
• Turnover
• Ownership structure
• Technology environment
• Business model
• Growth characteristics
• Relevant trigger events
• Job titles
• Job responsibilities
• Contact information
• Existing customers
• Exclusion criteria

The more detailed the criteria, the better. Suppose your startup sells cybersecurity services to manufacturing businesses. “Manufacturing companies in the UK” is a poor data brief. Something like this is much better:

• UK manufacturing companies
• 100–500 employees,
• Above £50m turnover
• Privately held or investor-owned
• Operating multiple sites,
• Using Microsoft 365,
• A dedicated IT function, with senior IT/security decision-makers including CIO, IT Director, CISO, Head of Cyber Security or equivalent.

Now the data broker has something meaningful to work with. More importantly, you have something against which to assess the results.

Define Every Data Field You Need

Once you have defined your target companies, decide what information you need for each account.

A useful purchasing brief might include:

Company information

• Company name
• Website
• Industry
• Sub-industry
• Employee numbers
• Turnover
• Headquarters
• Number of locations
• Geographic footprint
• Company type
• Ownership
• Parent company
• Subsidiaries

Technology information

• Technology stack
• CRM
• Cloud provider
• Security technologies
• ERP
• Marketing automation platform
• Relevant software platforms
• Technology adoption indicators

Contact information

• First name
• Last name
• Job title
• Job responsibility/function
• Email address
• Direct telephone number
• Mobile number where appropriate
• Company telephone number
• LinkedIn profile
• Business address

There is an important distinction here that many marketers overlook: The job title and job responsibility are not necessarily the same thing. A company may have an “IT Manager” who is responsible for cybersecurity, infrastructure and procurement. Another may have a “Head of Technology” who is focused almost entirely on product development. If your proposition is selling cybersecurity, simply filtering for “IT Manager” may not be enough. Tell the data provider what responsibility you are trying to identify, not just the title.

Turn this brief into a spreadsheet with defined column headings that match the ones in your CRM. A data broker can then match their data into the format you need, so do that first and give it to them up front. This is far more efficient than buying a database in whatever format a broker chooses. Do that, and you may waste lots of your time working on the data post-purchase to reformat it so it will upload correctly into your chosen marketing system.

Decide Whether You Want Partial Data

This is another important consideration when purchasing B2B data. Do you want a record only when the provider can supply every field or are you prepared to buy records where some information is missing? Consider this before you speak to a broker, on the assumption that they will hold data that matches many of your requirements but will be missing certain fields, such as a valid email address, etc. That record may still be valuable to include in your list, rather than leaving a hole in the data. If your marketing team can research and append missing information, the company and contact intelligence may be enough to justify buying an incomplete record.

There are relatively simple ways of finding email addresses manually or through enrichment tools, but you cannot do this at scale. Decide in advance what you are prepared to pay for, but do not automatically reject a valuable target account simply because one field is missing. The right answer depends on the cost of acquiring the missing information and the value of the account. Get the information from the data broker first on what they have that matches your criteria as well as what is a good match but has some fields missing. When you see the numbers of what is available, you can then decide what is best to include and exclude at this stage.  

Don’t Assume One Data Provider Has Everything

Data providers often specialise, and their own data may not be complete. One might have excellent company-level information, while another might have stronger contact data. Another may have better technology-stack intelligence, while an industry-specific provider might have far better coverage of a particular vertical. Some will have great large enterprise information, while others focus more on small and medium sized businesses. This means your final database may need to be assembled from several sources. That is not a failure; it’s just a practical reality you will need to contend with. Bringing different supplier lists together can produce a better representation of your market.

For example, you might combine:

• Purchased company data
• Purchased contact data
• LinkedIn research
• Industry directories
• Event registrations
• Trade association membership
• Online industry listings
• Companies House information
• Existing CRM data
• Website enquiries
• Webinar registrations
• Conference attendees
• Customer referrals

Ultimately, that’s what data in a dynamic CRM system looks like. The challenge is then joining these sources together without creating a mess. This is where data enrichment and data hygiene become critical.

Buying Data for ABM Is Different

Account-Based Marketing makes the need for quality data even greater. If you are running ABM, you are not looking for a large number of email addresses; you are trying to understand an account at a deeper level.

That might mean identifying anywhere between five and twelve people within a target company across different functions, such as:

• C-Level Decision Makers
• Economic Buyer
• Technical Buyer
• User
• Influencer
• Procurement
• Finance
• Executive sponsor

If your purchased database gives you one contact per company, it may not be sufficient. You may need to append additional contacts and intelligence to build a complete buying-group picture. This is why account lists and contact data should be treated as two related but different assets. A good ABM database tells you not only who works there, but why that account matters and who is involved in the buying decision.

Ask the Data Provider Difficult Questions

Before signing a contract, interrogate the supplier to better understand the type and quality of data that is on offer.

Questions to ask a data broker include:

• Where does the data come from?
• How frequently is it updated?
• How is accuracy verified?
• How are duplicate records handled?
• How are people who have left companies identified?
• How are bounced or invalid email addresses handled?
• What percentage of records have verified email addresses?
• How current are the telephone numbers?
• Can you specify job responsibility as well as job title?
• Can you filter by employee count and turnover?
• Can you identify ownership?
• Can you identify technology usage?
• Can you receive a sample before purchasing?
• What happens when records are inaccurate or emails bounce?
• Can inaccurate records be replaced?
• How are suppression and opt-out records handled?
• What are the permitted uses of the data (license to use)?

A good supplier should be able to answer these questions quickly and clearly. If the provider cannot explain where its data comes from or how it maintains quality, be cautious.

Always Test Before You Buy

Never make a large database purchase purely on a sales presentation. Instead, start with a sample, a good data provider will be happy to provide this upfront. Give the supplier a tightly defined section of your target market and ask them to demonstrate what they can produce, then review it manually.

Look at 50 or 100 records and determine:

• Are all the companies in your ICP?
• Are the employee numbers credible?
• Are the turnover figures useful?
• Are the contacts genuinely relevant?
• Are the job titles right?
• Are the email addresses valid?
• Is the technology information useful?
• Are there duplicates?
• Are there companies you know should be there but are missing?

This exercise can completely change your purchasing criteria, and that is a good thing. The first data search should be treated as part of your research process, not the final answer.

Price the Data Against the Cost of Your Own Research

One of the most important questions is not simply how much does this data cost, but what would it cost for you to create this yourself? Chances are you couldn’t do it, even if you had the time, so the value must be considered in terms of what it will allow you to do and the speed-to-market it will provide. Make sure you understand the cost per record of the data matched to your criteria, as this gives you the best understanding of value. Incomplete data must be costed differently than fully matched and complete records.

Make sure you always focus on records that are a close match to your ICP and that the data broker filters out unwanted records before you buy. Be as strict as possible with the data broker, because they are far more comfortable with poorly matched data than you are, as more data means a bigger sales invoice. Always push back on data that doesn’t match and have it removed. Always buy the best quality data you can afford, but if there are too many unanswered questions, walk away. Low-quality or incomplete data has a higher cost of ownership due to operational inefficiencies, so it will cost you more and deliver fewer results.

The cheapest data to buy is rarely the cheapest data to own.

Data Hygiene Does Not End When You Buy a List

This is the most important point of all. Buying business data is not a one-off activity, because your database will decay. People change jobs, companies are acquired, businesses close, websites change, technology platforms change, job titles change, email addresses stop working, organisations move, turnover changes and employees join and leave. Therefore, your database needs a maintenance programme.

Your business data maintenance programme must include:

• Regular Validation: Check email addresses, company information and contact details.
• Deduplication: Prevent multiple versions of the same company or person appearing in different systems.
• Enrichment: Add missing information as your understanding of the market develops.
• Suppression: Maintain records of people and companies that should not be contacted.
• Purging: Remove data that is no longer required or useful.
• Source Tracking: Know where each record came from and when it was acquired.
• Date Stamping: Record when key information was last verified.

This isn’t just about good database management, because accuracy, data minimisation and storage limitation are fundamental data-protection principles. The European Commission, for example, states that personal data should be accurate and kept up to date, limited to what is necessary and retained no longer than necessary.

Then There Is Compliance

This is an area where marketers need to be particularly careful. The idea that “B2B data doesn’t need consent” is far too simplistic. In the UK, the rules depend on who you are contacting and what type of subscriber they are. The ICO states that unsolicited electronic marketing can generally be sent to corporate subscribers without consent under PECR, but sole traders and certain partnerships are treated as individual subscribers and have stronger protections. Where personal data is involved, UK GDPR requirements still apply. If you are relying on legitimate interests, that does not mean simply declaring “legitimate interest” and carrying on. You need to consider whether the processing is necessary and balance your interests against the individual’s rights and expectations. There are also requirements around transparency, identity and providing a means to opt out, as people have the right to object to direct marketing.

Importantly, the rules are not the same in every country. If you buy data in one country and use it to market to contacts in another, you need to understand the rules that apply to your processing and marketing activity in the relevant jurisdictions. For example, holding prospect data in the UK does not mean you can ignore the legal requirements that apply when marketing to people in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. The safest approach is to treat compliance as part of the data procurement process, not something to investigate after buying the database. Your supplier should be able to explain the provenance of the data, its permitted uses and its compliance processes. Your own legal/privacy team must then determine whether the intended use is lawful.

The Objective Is Not Always More Data

There is a dangerous obsession in B2B marketing with building ever-larger databases, but this is the wrong objective. The objective must be to build the right data. If your target market contains 15,000 companies but only 2,500 genuinely fit your ICP, you may not need 100,000 contacts in your CRM. You need the right information on those 2,500 accounts, and this is consistent with the data-minimisation principle: Organisations must hold information that is adequate and relevant for the purpose, rather than simply accumulating everything that may or may not be useful one day.

For a tech startup, this can make an enormous difference. Instead of spending £20,000 buying a large database and then paying marketers and salespeople to work through it, you might spend £8,000 buying a smaller, but highly targeted dataset and another £2,000 enriching and validating it. You have spent less and potentially created something considerably more valuable.

Build Your Data Like Building a Product

Business data must be treated like a business asset, following this process:

• Define the requirements
• Build the specification
• Test the market
• Buy a sample
• Validate the results
• Refine the criteria
• Purchase the dataset
• Combine it with your own intelligence
• Enrich it where necessary
• Connect it to your CRM and marketing systems
• Keep it clean.
• Review it regularly.
• Remove information that no longer has a legitimate business purpose.

Good marketing is built upon a foundation of good data, but good data starts with knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve before you buy it. One last point, although included in the questions to ask above, it’s worth reiterating. Always be clear what the license agreement is before buying any data. Are you buying the data outright or does it come with limited-use restrictions?

You may want to read: “Why Startups Must Take Target Data Seriously.”