BUSINESS DATA REPORTedly degrades about 3% to 5% per month. Whew. That means a third or more of your company’s information on business buyers and prospects may be useless by the end of every year. Given this, the need for list hygiene is critical.
Here are some annual percentages by data element from Dun & Bradstreet:
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In a year, 20.7% of the business postal addresses on your file will have changed. If your customer is a new business, the rate is higher (27.3%).
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Phone numbers change at around 18% overall, and 22.7% among new businesses. No wonder your sales force is always complaining that your data is no good (although they probably use more colorful words not suited for a publication like Direct).
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Even the company name is unstable, changing at the rate of 12.4% among all companies and a whopping 36.4% among new businesses.
But it’s not only about data churn, it’s also about the complexity of a business’s customer record itself. Leaving aside important factors like purchase and promotion histories, let’s just consider contact information. In a typical B-to-B database, you need details about what the company does, postal address, phone and fax numbers, as well as
