The Challenge

Good contact data is key to scaling marketing/sales.  It lets you:

  • Reach your TAM faster (outbound)
  • Improve your domain reputation (fewer bounces)
  • Capture trigger events (job changes)

But most companies struggle to achieve this using conventional data providers… at the time of this writing, when we compared Linkedin Data to Apollo.io (one of the leading contact databases in B2B SaaS), we found:

  1. Linkedin had 35% more contacts
  2. 7% of the contacts in Apollo’s database had emails bounce
  3. Less than 25% of job changes in Linkedin were reflected in Apollo

Discrepancies like this can make or break your go-to-market, by giving you access to contacts your competitors don’t have, getting the right messaging to them faster and keeping your deliverability high.

If you’re struggling with these types of challenges and your TAM is highly visible on Linkedin, hyperautomation can greatly improve your GTM motion… read on!

 

Root Cause – Why Is Contact Data Provider Incomplete/Stale?

To improve on the results of data providers, first we need to understand why they have such mixed quality in their data.  

Let’s start with where they get their data:

  • scraping public sources (eg: Google, SEO indexed contact provider pages, etc), 
  • recycling/selling data from their clients (eg: they will ingest what is in your )
  • very rarely scraping private sources (eg: Linkedin).

Since most of these sources already have stale data in them, at least 5% of the contacts they ingest will already be invalid when entering their database.  More than enough to tank your domain reputation and email deliverability!

So why don’t they validate/clean them up after the fact?  Aren’t they equipped to do this data cleansing better than us given the MASSIVE SCALE they boast about?

Ironically, scale is what prevents them from being able to do this cost effectively…when you’re small and scraping Google bit by bit, nobody notices what you’re doing.  But when you have 240 MILLION contacts, any source you try to scrape/validate is going to notice and deploy countermeasures to stop you.  

After all, not only is scraping usually a violation of their terms of service (eg: Linkedin wants to sell more SalesNav licenses) but it also costs these companies mega-money to serve traffic to these bots, so they actively work against it.

Because of this, being SMALL is far better for contact cleansing than being big.  And this is where you’ll find an amazing arbitrage opportunity

 

The math ZoomInfo doesn’t want you to do…

The truth is, most of us don’t have a target market of 240million people.  

We probably aren’t targeting more than 100,000 contacts in B2B until we hit $10M in ARR.

Which means:

  1. we can afford to buy enough Sales Nav licenses to continuously pull data from Linkedin (at 500 leads/day, you could capture all 100k contacts every 20 days with just TEN sales navigator licenses – HALF the cost of Zoominfo!)
  2. we can do it without violating any of the providers’ terms/conditions – if you’re using Sales Nav licenses, viewing each profile one by one and not reselling the data, then you are just using the licenses you bought — it’s totally legitimate.
  3. we can do it without tripping major countermeasures.  Your small size IS your advantage, no matter what those providers tell you.

 

What’s stopping you?

As we’ve shown, it’s probably not the cost of the Linkedin licenses that’s stopping you.

What’s far more difficult/expensive is the human labor and orchestration required to build a contact mining/enrichment machine:

  • Building/prioritizing the right Sales Nav Queries
  • Distributing them to humans to prospect
  • Importing the prospect data into CRM
  • Normalizing the prospect data (eg: titles)
  • Segmenting prospects (eg: personalities, personas, interests)
  • Scoring prospects
  • Guessing/verifying emails
  • etc.

With hyperautomation, you can build software robots that execute every step of this process in a way that is perfectly orchestrated (devoid of human errors, coordination issues, etc) while maintaining complete visibility/control over the entire process.

 

How do I do this?

We’ve included a full tactical implementation guide inside our FREE Automation Academy.  Or you can request direct access to the cheatsheet here (gated, we’re keeping this inside the revops community only)

To get further installments like this in your inbox, you can also sign up for our mailing list directly and/or follow me on Linkedin