10 Common B2B Data Challenges and How to Overcome Them

If you work in the B2B industry, you probably know the importance of data. All leads, interactions and sales metrics are represented by data. As you acquire relevant data, you can apply it to your B2B company's sales strategy. There are several common challenges associated with B2B data, however, that you'll need to overcome.

#1) Data Decay

Decay is a concern when acquiring data for your B2B company. Failure to use the newly acquired data fast enough may result in it becoming outdated or obsolete. A process known as data decay, it will render the data useless. According to a study conducted by Gartner, the average rate of decay for B2B data is about 70% per year. To overcome this challenge, you need to use new data immediately or shortly after acquiring it.

#2) Incomplete Data

Incomplete data is exactly what it sounds like: datasets that are only partially filled. They may contain some information about a prospect, but other information about the prospect will remain missing. Incomplete data is common when using lead forms. If you use forms to generate leads, you may discover that some prospects only complete some of the fields. The empty fields will result in incomplete data. You can overcome this challenge by prohibiting prospects and other users from submitting forms with empty fields.

#3) Lack of Insight Into Target Businesses

Even if you generate leads or otherwise acquire information about prospects, you may have little or no data on your B2B company's target businesses. Target businesses, of course, are the businesses that you are trying to capture and convert as customer accounts. The more you know about them, the better your chance of landing them as a customer. Unfortunately, many B2B companies focus on demographics data. They acquire data about prospects, such as the genders, age ranges and job titles of high-level executives, only to turn a blind eye to business-related data.

You can improve your B2B company's sales process by using a combination of both demographics and firmographics data. Demographics data is exclusive to people. As previously mentioned, it includes information like genders, ages and job titles. Firmographics, on the other hand, is exclusive to businesses. It includes information like the number of employees a business has, the region in which a business operates and the age of a business.

#4) Low-Quality Leads

Low-quality leads is a common challenge when acquiring data for use in B2B sales. Research shows that up to 40% of all leads consist of bad or low-quality data. For every 100 leads that you generate, for instance, less than half of them may be viable sales opportunities. You'll waste time and resources chasing down the majority of the leads. To overcome this challenge, you should focus on acquiring higher quality leads. It's not the number of leads that matters most. Rather, it's the quality.

#5) Protection From Breaches

Data often contains information about prospects and buyers. Therefore, you'll need to take precautions to ensure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. During the third quarter of 2022 alone, 15 million data records were exposed. If your B2B company experiences a data breach, you may lose some of this data. Hackers or other bad actors may obtain it, which can have a catastrophic effect on your B2B company's reputation. You can protect against data breaches, however, by following some basic steps. Encrypting data, for instance, will make it unreadable without the decrypt key, and only storing data on secure platforms, such as a local server or device, will further minimize the risk of breaches.

#6) Data Silos

Another challenge associated with data in the B2B industry is silos. Data silos are segments of data. Also known as information silos, they are particularly common among B2B companies with a dedicated sales team and a dedicated marketing team. The sales team will have its own data, and the marketing team will have its own data. Rather than sharing their data, they will keep it isolated to their respective data. This is an example of data silos. The sales team and marketing team have segmented data or "data silos." You can overcome data silos by encouraging sales reps and marketing professionals to share data.

#7) High Cost of Acquisition

How much money does your B2B company spend on acquiring data? Even if you in-house methods to acquire data, your B2B company will incur costs. And spending too much money on data acquisition can make it difficult for your B2B company to turn a profit. Fortunately, there are ways to lower the cost of data acquisition. Leveraging automation, for instance, can save your B2B company money on data acquisition. You can also cut the cost of data acquisition by using account-based marketing (ABM).

#8) Duplicate Data

Duplicate data is a challenge faced by many B2B companies. It involves two or more identical records. When you have duplicate data, you may unknowingly reach out to the same prospect multiple times. You can deal with duplicate data by regularly checking your B2B company's data records for duplicate entries. If the same record or entry appears multiple times, remove all but one instance of it.

#9) Poor Data Management

Poor data management is a common challenge of which you should be aware. Acquiring relevant data about your B2B company's audience is only half the battle; you must also put that data to use by including it in your B2B company's sales strategy. Data data management is the process of maintaining and keeping data records so that you can use them for sales, as well as marketing, purposes. You can use software like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to better manage your B2B company's data.

#10) Corrupted Data

Corrupted data is a concern as well. Data is considered corrupted if it triggers an error during writing, reading or processing. Most forms of B2B data consist of files. Like all other computer files, these data files can become corrupted. You may not be able to use a data file if it's corrupted. You can overcome the challenge of data corruption by regularly backing up your B2B company's data. If you encounter an error with a particular data file, you can use the backup copy to restore it.

To get quality data with your sales leads, be sure to ask SalesLeads about our project reports. These are identified projects, meaning they have a project either going on or about to start. This is perfect if you are looking for potential new sales in order to grow your pipeline and business.