most companies are satisfied with the quality of the data they’re seeing from reputable data provider, but that’s not helping ABM grow
It’s true that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has out-grown other marketing technologies to become the most insight-led aspect of marketing with sales partnership. According to ITSMA, ABM delivers the return on investment (ROI) compared to any other B2B marketing strategy. In short, it’s here to stay and deliver. However, maturity-wise, ABM is yet to galvanize as the “Go-to” force for marketers– mostly, because of the challenges arising from the use of external data provided by third-party vendors. Openprise identifies “missing contacts at target companies” that puts ABM on a “steeplechase” course.
Openprise, the leader in data automation solutions for marketing and sales, announced the release of a new report, titled “2017 B2B Data Market Industry Report”, based on its survey involving 175 US-based B2B marketing professionals. The latest Openprise’s report identifies the challenges B2B marketing and sales teams face with their use of external data and their relationship with third-party data providers.
Openprise’s 2017 B2B Data Market Industry Report picks Database segmentation, cleansing, and correlation as universal challenges for marketing and sales ops. For each of these, Openprise has built a SaaS solution to automate these tasks.
Here’s what the report says—
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.
Satisfaction Runs High with Third-Party Data Providers
56% of the marketers surveyed said they’re “very satisfied” with their current data providers, while another 38% reported being “somewhat satisfied.”
While marketers are often frustrated with the state of their house data, their sentiments towards data providers are much more positive.
Very few B2B vendors meet universal expectations
Openprise report affirms the fact that very few B2B vendors can actually sell to companies of any size, including start-ups and SMEs. The data, therefore, needs to be segmented and placed into meaningful context for automation tools to derive value out of them.
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 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.
Generic Role Segmentation data never works
The report squarely identifies third-party data vendors for not fulfilling B2B expectations. Openprise recommends B2B marketers to create customized segmentation rules that fit individual businesses purposefully. Segmenting every job function to the most granular detail may not be scalable.
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.
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 data providers for data cleansing purposes. In fact, just one in five chooses 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.
Openprise, through this report, recognizes the struggle every B2B marketer faces while creating segmentation rules. Using Openprise Data Automation Mechanic helps get under the hood and diagnose the pain points of data quality and CRM performance with automated enterprise intelligence.
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