Press Release
REDWOOD CITY, CA – (March 22, 2017) – Openprise, the leader in data automation solutions for marketing and sales, today issued its 2017 B2B Data Market Industry Report. Openprise surveyed 175 U.S.-based B2B marketing professionals to identify data marketplace trends. A copy of the report is available at: https://bit.ly/2n4q26s.
The report takes a look at the challenges B2B marketing and sales teams face with their use of external data and their relationship with third-party data providers. Some findings of the survey include:
Satisfaction Runs High with Third-Party Data Providers
While marketers are often frustrated with the state of their house data, their sentiments towards B2B marketing data providers are much more positive. 56% of the marketers surveyed said they’re “very satisfied” with their current data providers, while another 38% reported being “somewhat satisfied.” Commenting on these findings, Allen Pogorzelski, VP of Marketing at Openprise, said, “It makes sense that most companies are satisfied with the quality of the data they’re seeing from reputable data providers. The data issues most companies are struggling with are in normalizing and integrating that data from different vendors into their house databases to make it useful.”
Trying Multiple Data Providers Leads to Greater Satisfaction
The marketers who have tried four or more B2B marketing data providers tend to be happier: 80% of those respondents are “very satisfied” with their current data providers. For everyone else, that number drops to around 50%. In a nutshell, these results indicate the more data providers marketers work with, the more likely they will find the right fit. Since each data provider has its own unique strong suits, it makes sense that marketers are more satisfied when armed with multiple providers. Backing up these findings, the survey found that on average, B2B marketers plan to engage with a total of three data providers in 2017.
Large Companies are Harder to Please
While 67% of marketers at small companies are very satisfied with their data providers, only 31% of their counterparts at large enterprises agree. This finding reinforces the notion that larger companies have tougher and more complex data requirements than smaller ones. It may also be that data issues compound when the size of a database grows, making data management for large enterprises exponentially more challenging, and impacting the satisfaction rate with providers. “Incorrect field values” in third-party data is also a bigger issue for larger enterprises with 25% of those marketers viewing it as the top concern, compared to only 14% of their counterparts at smaller companies.
ABM Isn’t Getting the Help It Needs from Third-Party Data
Perhaps fueled by the rise of Account-Based Marketing (ABM), the report found that B2B marketers’ primary use of third-party data is to identify contacts within target companies (62%), followed by identifying new target companies (52%). Subsequently, 41% of the marketers surveyed identify “missing contacts at target companies” as data providers’ biggest weakness. Of note, less than half of marketers surveyed leverage third-party data for their ABM efforts. This outcome is perhaps a reflection of the fact that ABM practices are still gaining widespread adoption.
Marketers Have the Most Confidence in Their Own CRM Data
While it may come as a surprise to some, the survey found that only one in three marketers tap B2B marketing data providers for data cleansing purposes. In fact, just one in five choose to update their records if existing values conflict with third-party data. This may be that overall, compared to third-party data, marketers have more faith in data entered by their sales team and captured via web forms.
Interestingly, the survey found that when marketers’ records are in conflict with content from third-party data providers, over a quarter of respondents said they “keep both (records) and reconcile later.” By not reconciling this data, these marketers are limiting its usefulness and compounding the dirty data problem.
Methodology
Openprise’s B2B Data Market Industry Report is based on an online survey with 175 respondents collected from U.S. based B2B companies with a minimum of 200 employees. The survey was conducted in January and February 2017. Download the full report at: https://bit.ly/2n4q26s.