Data decay is a big challenge affecting millions of B2B businesses, can you afford to let software append and clean the most crucial part of your sales process - data.

1. Is data decay really a thing?
A guide by BizProspex

2. What is data decay?
Data decay ( in customer, contacts or data
lifecycle) means gradual loss of accuracy in data.
Have you ever called a business to realize they
closed two years ago? Well, we all have.
That my friend, is data decay.

3. B2B data decays for 3
main reasons:
➔ Company closed
96% business fail in the first 10 years, reports:
inc.com.
➔ Person Switched Job
People change jobs, that’s not something new.
➔ Retired
About 4 million people retire every year, as of
2014. From 2014 to 2034, about 80 million
people are expected to retire.

4. Like bananas, your customer data starts
out green, begins to yellow, and before
you know it it’s attracting flies.
Don’t let this happen to your
CRM data.
Tip
Clean and append
information to it on a
regular basis, if your
CRM data mainly
consists of big
companies, setup
LinkedIn and Google
alerts to be notified of
changes.

5. How effective your sales strategy be when you
are trying to contact a director of marketing
Who left last year?
The answer is not very much.
Tip
Do a background check
on the data in your CRM.
Append everything you
can find about them
before making that call.

6. Don’t ask your sales reps to
spend time to clean messy
data, they aren’t equipped to
do so plus that one hour
everyday is effectively loss
of productivity.
Hire experts to clean, sort
and append information to
your CRM and start better
prospecting.

7. Both successful sales
directors, working in mid sized
B2B companies in the US.
Assumptions:
1. They both spent the same amount
of the money to generate leads.
2. Had the same number of leads in
their CRM.
3. Had the same ARPC (average
revenue per customer)
4. Had same selling skills to sell the
software.
5. Had the same budget for data
cleaning 4000$ for 2016 (apart
from the usual marketing spent
on online / radio and paper ad).
To make this interesting, allow me to tell you the story of Kumar and Robert.

8. Meet Robert.
He recently moved up as the regional
VP of sales for a SaaS company in
Atlanta.
His target is to close 15 deals per
month with 8 sales people and
maintain ARPC of 500,000 $ / month.
He was told that there are on an
average 100 new leads in pipeline any
given month and 8000 leads in total
in their CRM and marketing
automation software.

9. Meet Kumar.
He recently was awestruck when one
of his sales rep informed him of how
big of a mess his CRM data is in.
5000 leads are at stake.
What do you think Kumar will do to
next?
Story for illustration purposes only

10. The logical next step for
both was to do some
Googling.

11. Typical solutions they found or had heard of in the
market.
➔ Automated
Companies like data.com offer appending and
cleansing services at as low as 10 cents per lead
and help them regenerate interest from those
stale leads, but, automated solutions lacked
when it came to accuracy.
➔ Manual
Companies like BizProspex offer data appending
and data cleaning through manual research and
human logic ensuring data is as good as it can
be.

12. Kumar, decided to go
with manual data
cleaning because he
wanted to personalize
each and every
interaction with the
leads in his CRM and
hired BizProspex to
manually append and
clean the messy data.

13. Robert hired an automated data cleaning
company (web based SaaS service) to de-
dupe and append information from
whatever was available with that SaaS
company.
At 10 cents a lead he was told to expect
over 60% accuracy.
What he wasn’t calculating was that 40% of
the leads are going 100% wasted.

14. On the other hand
Kumar was expecting over 95% accuracy and
almost over 80% match rate, because manual
approach to data cleaning meant researching for
new information on the web for those leads,
through company website, business networks,
personal websites, human logic, etc.
Download BizProspex’s 5 step CRM cleaning guide.
Tip
Ask your data cleaning
company to do a small
test, compare manual vs
automated results
before selecting the
vendor to clean your
entire CRM data.

15. It’s no surprise that Kumar had far better data,
closed more deals and saved more money.
Let’s look at
some stats that
helped Kumar
score homerun.
Tip
Do the math, how much
is an average lead worth
to you?
If it is ten X of the
investment, you don’t
want a machine to
append it.

16. Kumar (manual) Robert (automated)
Spent 4000$ to clean to clean their CRM (spent 100% of
the budget).
Spent 800$ to clean their CRM data (spend only
20% of the budget)
TAT for manual work for 8k leads is a month atleast. TAT for automated work for 8k leads is 3 - 5
days at max.
Spent the total amount on manual data cleaning, and got
back ~20% more data that Robert missed on because of
the automated system.
As they had spent same money on lead gen and has
same no. of leads, that meant Kumar had 1600 leads
more than Robert.
20% of 8000 total leads is 1600.
Spent the rest 3200 on generating new leads
(considering a 5% opt in rate) at 5 $ / click, he
got 640 clicks and 32 opt in’s in pipeline, that is
100$ / opt in.
Avg. close rate to opt in is 15 - 20% atmost, that
means he might have got 5 to 6 conversions at
best.
Got more leads with higher accuracy because manual
data research ensures every contact is duly researched,
unlike SaaS solutions that only use the below mentioned
techniques.
Lost 16,000 $ worth of leads because his
automated system could only match records that
are available in the pre scrapped data that the
SaaS software had.

17. So, how does manual and automated
system differ exactly?
Manual data cleaning requires a human to look
up each record, Google them, find them on
LinkedIn, update information, do background
research, append, edit and improve information.
Manual appending also can help append critical
information like recents updates, achievements
for their company, or on the personal front to
ensure you KNOW everything about the lead
before making that critical phone call.
Every automated data appending company
maintains a master record file (which they
assume is more accurate than yours), because
they constantly buy data from other data
vendors.
They majorly check for 4 things:
Is this record available in their master data file,
if yes, update info in the CRM. If no, move
forward.
Check for typos in the email, name etc, correct

18. Manual data research ensures to not just
check for email bounces but other fields are
also checked and updated, more often than
not, emails are kept active even after
people leave companies to receive critical
emails.
Check for email bounce, if it bounced,
remove record, if it didn’t perform the next
step.
Check company validity through human
logic.
Check company validity through DnB
master data through API.
Apart from data standardization and email
bounce check, human logic can keep an
eye for anomalies that softwares can’t.
No automated data cleaning system can
manually research and update information
to CRM, they only check for standardization
and email bounce check through pre fed
logic, and append whatever info is available
with them for that company.
Leads that are marked important are given
more time to ensure nothing is missed
Every lead is just another contact, nothing
more, nothing less.

19. 5 Reasons to go manual:
1. Sales managers are under pressure to decrease CPL and increase conversion
rates.
2. There is tons of unnecessary sales waste: sales teams spend enormous
amount of time researching prospects and contacting wrong leads.
3. Traditional “lead list” providers suck: legacy “lead list” vendors offer outdated,
badly categorized and mostly irrelevant data.
4. Manual offers new ways of lead qualification: modern logic-based signals
(technology in use, website features, advertising) give the customer much
better contextual businesses information.
5. Sales teams deserve better data: sales teams have long been left in the
darkness of being told that this is the most perfect email list. Not anymore.

20. What people are saying
When you hit your
1st campaign, that
is when you realize
the value of
manual cleaning.
(Video)
Gary Sullivan, Founder and
CMO
BizProspex helped
us generate leads
without spending
money on new lead
generation. (video)
Gary V, B2B IT Consulting
Biz
Manual data
appending paid for
itself with just 2
new leads. (Video)
Ivan, Founder VideoJuke

21. Want to give it a try?
First 100 leads or 5 hours of work is
on the house.
Also, we offer 120% money back. (no, this
is not a typo).
And have a 7 day (few questions asked)
money back policy. Learn More here.

22. Good luck!
We hope you’ll use the information above to
make a educated decision!
For more (free) data cleaning tips relevant to
B2B business, click here: BizProspex
Download our 5 step
CRM cleaning guide by
clicking here or on the
image at side.