If your organization is in the market for a contact database of leads, you must find a provider who can offer you a sufficient amount of contact records. But how many leads is enough for you? Does a larger database make a vendor a better option?
Let’s look at a few essential factors that should be considered in addition to the size of your prospective sales intelligence vendors’ databases.
Accuracy Rate
The accuracy of a vendor’s leads database is more important than its size. It doesn’t matter how many leads you have: if they are inaccurate, they won’t be useful. A vendor offering 100 leads with a 90% accuracy rate might have fewer leads than another vendor offering 300 leads with a 50% accuracy rate, but think about how much time you will waste when half of your leads are invalid. This is why accuracy should always be considered hand-in-hand with database size.
Horizontal vs. Vertical Database Depth
The composition of a database is an important consideration. A more “horizontal” database consists of more companies with fewer individual contacts at each company. Conversely, a more “vertical” database has fewer companies but more contact records per company.
Which type of database is best? That depends on your organization and its needs. If the target persona for your sales efforts is an uncommon or highly specific type of employee, you’re probably better off with a more vertical database.
Company and Industry Definitions
The size of a provider’s database correlates directly with how they define companies and industries. The way they count company records and categorize them can make their database seem much larger or smaller without actually adding or removing any records.
For example, take a business category like auto repair shops. There are plenty of standalone auto garages that only do repairs and routine maintenance. But most major car dealerships around the country also have a repair or vehicle service department. Do these dealerships also count as repair shops? Or are they only categorized by their primary business function, selling cars?
These aren’t questions that you might think to ask upfront, but you must consider them if you want to choose a B2B sales leads provider with a database that meets your needs.
