Sales and marketing teams rely on a myriad of customer data to do their jobs. Unfortunately, that data often leads to more problems than benefits because of its siloed, unstructured nature. Static data, which refers to data that does not change once it is created, has several inherent problems and limitations. Acquiring a variety of static data from multiple vendors means that we get to see several aspects of our buyers at specific moments in time, but we still need to manually piece it all together and continuously amend it in order to paint a picture of our buyers that we can actually use to ..read more

Recognizing signs that your customer data is causing problems for your sales and marketing teams and addressing them quickly is crucial for maintaining effective operations and achieving business goals with data-driven decision making. It all starts with high-quality data. Personalized campaigns, territory planning, lead routing, lead prioritization, cross sell/up sell, analysis, reporting, and the implementation of AI models all rely on having accurate, up-to-date customer data. Unfortunately, unifying your first-party data with numerous siloed, static third-party databases, and then pushing ..read more

If you’re part of a sales or marketing team, then you’re used to leveraging numerous systems full of people, company and account-level data in an attempt to decide where to focus your resources and effort – but how many of you have hierarchies mapped so that you can explore how your profiles for people and companies connect to each other? Can you look at a company’s profile in your system, then click your way through to that company’s global ultimate, subsidiaries, divisions, employees or buying groups? Do you know who people report to? The parent/child relationships in their corporate family ..read more

As I’ve discussed in recent blogs, one of the main issues sales and marketing teams experience is not getting enough value from their data. Unfortunately, simply adding more data hasn’t been solving that issue. The reason for this lack of value is that customer or buyer data is naturally fragmented. The data comes in many different formats and with different IDs. The number of sources is growing, which makes tracking identities across them even more difficult. On top of that, cookie loss and privacy rules are a constant, evolving battle. Identifying buying groups, companies and individuals, an ..read more

Can our data keep up? That’s the question B2B sales and marketing operations executives need to ask when considering their often jumbled mess of static data. Pushing numerous siloed data sources into your CRM and Marketing Automation systems is par for the course, but the problems will stack up and compound over time. Odds are, your CRM is full of duplicates with poor fill rates – and your leads, contacts and accounts don’t map back to their corporate families or hierarchies. When someone changes jobs, your CRM won’t know about it and neither will you. Every year, the mess within your CRM is g ..read more

Last week our team had the privilege of attending the Forrester B2B Summit 2024 in Austin, Texas, and it was one heck of an experience. If you took the time to attend the event, odds are that you saw the Leadspace team hustling at our booth or across the show floor in our awesome shoes – but we know that it’s our approach to data profiling that really grabbed your attention. Wherever we met you at the event, we truly enjoyed telling you about Leadspace and learning what kinds of problems sales and marketing teams are facing when it comes to operationalizing B2B buyer data. We posed a question ..read more

As we discussed in the previous blog, the main obstacle with operationalizing buyer data is that it is static. It takes a lot of data to build the buyer profiles that our sales and marketing teams need to effectively hone-in on closeable business. Procuring all these static signals from numerous vendors gets expensive – quick. Blending it all together is brutally cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone. Keeping it up-to-date is tedious and often neglected. Acquiring a variety of static data from multiple vendors means that we get to see several aspects of our buyers at specific moments in ..read more

B2B Sales and Marketing teams, in particular, absolutely love buyer data – they depend on it to do their jobs! Unfortunately, most companies are failing to use it to its potential. The goal is usually to use buyer data to determine who might want their product, but a company’s data is often such a mess that they only experience the bare minimum their buyer data has to offer. But, they understand how valuable it is in such a competitive environment, so much so that companies spend thousands, even millions of dollars accumulating data from various third-party data vendors – trying to get more an ..read more

When it comes to tools, everyone appreciates the ones that work, and usually that means they are easy to use. Unfortunately, analysts report that at any time, 25%+ of our business software is actually shelfware. Shelfware refers to software or technology solutions that have been purchased by a business but are not actively used or adopted. If you’ve bought useful tools from major software companies, you’ve probably fallen victim to the promises of what software can do, then realized that actually implementing it was too difficult and slow to end up using it. Additionally, you’ve probably bough ..read more

If you’re involved in enterprise-level B2B sales and marketing, you know that in order to compete, you’ll need a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to maintain the massive amount of buyer data that goes into data-driven decision making. If you’re still trying to decide which CDP is best for your company, you’re in luck, because Forrester has been evaluating and scoring your options to help you figure it out! In Forrester’s The B2B Customer Data Platform Landscape, Q3 2023 report, their analysts explored the B2B CDP landscape and key factors that would go into their evaluation. In their 29-criterion ..read more