ROI of Investing in a Quality Company Data Provider

Poor quality data is the ultimate evil in today’s data-driven world for businesses. In fact, recent studies show that businesses lose an average of $12.9 million annually due to poor data. This makes investing in a quality data provider a critical step in moving towards boosting your commercial performance.

Data provider ROI is measurable and dependent on how they improve your business’s targeting, driving better conversions, and optimising sales & marketing functions. So, how can you differentiate between a good data provider and a bad one, and what kind of measurable impact can it have on your business? Let’s find out.

Quality data provides a level of operational safety for all teams like no other. It shapes how efficiently your teams function across the board, and how sustainably your business grows. When teams operate on accurate, structured, and complete company data, they are able to prioritise the right accounts, improve messaging, scale personalised engagements, and minimise wasting resources.

A strong data foundation can impact every operational activity, whether it is territory planning, strategising for risk management or forecasting. Data provider ROI takes into account all of these improvements and turns your revenue operations into a scalable and sustainable system.

While B2B teams operate in very complex buying environments with constantly evolving needs from consumers, they need to rely on correct timing and relevance to achieve successful outcomes.

This is where ROI from investing in data providers comes into play. A strong data provider equips your teams with enriched insights from updated and high-quality data, which can reveal intent, classify opportunities, and guide your strategies. The ROI in question reflects sharper targeting, good coordination between sales, marketing, & revenue operations teams, and boosted activation.

Your company’s revenue performance will improve when the engagement with prospects is precise. With high-quality business data, teams can reach the right account with high buying potential, deliver relevant and value-driven messaging, and capture the right timing for activation.

The friction in the funnel can be reduced significantly with good quality data, and improve your conversion rates by shortening sales cycles and concentrating on opportunities that have a high probability of closing.

Now that we have established the importance of a good data provider, let us see how you can tangibly see what contributes positively towards their ROI:

• Improved lead quality

  Quality leads are a key component of successful sales and marketing efforts, as quality firmographic and linkage data can help eliminate low or no-fit leads early in the sales process for an improved and more relevant sales pipeline.

• Higher conversion rates

  The use of accurate, complete and consistent data enables agencies, brands, and other sales organisations to communicate with buyers based on their unique context, size, and needs. As a result, your business can observe exceptional levels of engagement and conversion from your outreach compared to alternative methods.

• Reduced wasted outreach

  Having clean and continuously refreshed data helps sales teams avoid wasting time and money contacting out-of-date, duplicated, or irrelevant records, which directly influences their revenue potential by freeing up sales teams from making unnecessary calls and creating ad spend.

• Faster sales cycles

  When sales reps have reliable company data at the beginning of an opportunity, they spend less time doing research on a company and devote more time to selling. D&B customers have been able to accelerate their deal velocity by eliminating the friction associated with missing hierarchy, ownership structure, and visibility of decision makers.

To measure the ROI from investing in data providers, you must track the revenue impact and operational efficiency effects on your GTM teams. You can do so by analysing the following:

• Revenue impact metrics

  To assess the revenue effects of data providers, you should look at your growth in qualified pipeline, your win rate improvement, and growth in revenue per sales rep. By evaluating these metrics, you can maximise your business’s growth opportunities via better prioritisation, timing and deal execution.

• Operational efficiency gains

  When we look at operational efficiency savings, we want to evaluate reductions in time consumed in manual research, increased speed in data enrichment and reduced frequency of CRM updates. By using quality data to eliminate some of the administrative tasks that take away from selling or planning, you can create more effective sales cycles.

• Marketing performance indicators

  These are simple indicators that can help you track various things, like high email engagement, improved segmentation, and accuracy in lead scoring. With good quality data, your campaigns are more effective, which can be tracked with marketing performance.

The cost factors for having a good data provider and how effective collaborating with them go beyond just subscription prices. To determine the ROI of these cost factors, you must evaluate the following:

• Cost per lead reduction

  With good quality data, your teams reduce their spend and time devoted to low-fit leads. This lowers acquisition costs across the board, all the while improving conversion efficiency.

• Lower data cleansing expenses

  With your data being regularly refreshed, there is little need for constant cleanup for duplicate data or constant third-party validation. A strong data provider covers this aspect and saves your business a good chunk of expenses in data cleansing activities.

• Sales productivity savings

  Your sales reps will spend less time researching accounts and more time engaging high-value prospects with reliable data and contact insights. This will directly increase your selling capacity and improve your revenue.

TLet’s recap what benefits a reliable data provider brings to your business with its marketing contribution.

• More qualified meetings with the right decision-makers

• Less friction within buyer interactions (leading to shorter sales cycles)

• Better win rates with optimised segmentation and messaging of accounts

• Personalised and value-driven campaigns that have helped to enhance engagement and response rates

• Refined email messaging with decreased bounce rates for improved lead capture efforts through email marketing

Building an ROI framework to evaluate your data provider ROI is dependent on your business goals and budgets.

For this calculation framework to be effective, you must analyse the following KPIs to track your ROI from investing in data providers:

1. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

2. Lead-to-opportunity rate

3. Revenue per account

These elements will help you create this framework:

1. Define investment costs

   You should account for all the charges during the onboarding process, which include subscription fees, implementation costs, integrations, internal training, and internal resources needed by the data provider to put operations in motion.

2. Track revenue attribution

   You should always measure generated pipelines, with influenced opportunities and closed revenue. This will help you in attributing the revenue impact of good quality data in real-time.

3. Measure efficiency gains

   Quantify time saved across sales, marketing, and operations from reduced research, faster enrichment, and fewer manual updates as a net positive ROI.

4. Evaluate long-term value

   Finally, you can assess whether the value brought in by the data can have a sustained impact on your account expansion activities, retention, and the accuracy of forecasts.

If there are operational gaps in your business, even high-quality data will fail to deliver ROI from investing in a data provider. Make sure that these common barriers are dealt with to avoid this:

• Poor data adoption

  If you are not embedding insights from high-quality data into your daily workflows, your teams will go back to making instinct-driven solutions, which will limit the impact of your investment in data providers.

• Lack of measurement

  If you don’t clearly define KPIs and attribution models based on your business goals, you can struggle to connect the dots between data usage and revenue outcomes. This will make it almost impossible to calculate the data provider ROI.

• Outdated records

  With stale company and contact data, you can significantly reduce the efficiency of targeting accuracy, leading to reduced engagement. Hence, you must keep your company and contact data up-to-date.

To evaluate if your data provider is helping you maximise your ROI, you should analyse these components:

1. Coverage and depth

   Analyse how comprehensively your data provider covers your ICP by evaluating which firmographic data and hierarchies they focus on to improve your targeting.

2. Compliance and governance

   Monitor regularly to see if your data provider is adhering to data privacy and regulatory standards to ensure that your business is protected from any risks or fines.

3. Integration capabilities

   Before onboarding, ensure that your data provider can integrate seamlessly and sustainably with your CRM and marketing automation platforms. This will help in ensuring quick adoption and consistency in data usage from your teams.

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