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B2B Solutions
Solutions for Your B2B Data
B2B data must be treated differently to B2C. For B2C there are plenty of external reference files to validate data against, hence, the B2C market is very much a commodity today, with many data bureaus providing solutions.
B2B data is more difficult to validate. Companies can be validated and hierarchical information exists to create corporate structure information, but contacts at companies can only be validated via telemarketing.
You can buy lists of contacts, but beware of the Data Protection Act. Ideally,contacts can be generated from list building activities, such as internet marketing, email marketing, direct response marketing, and so on.
Here are the B2B solutions we offer:
Corporate Solutions
Creating business hierarchies by finding the parent, subsidiary, and child relationships for both UK and International companies. Read our article I want to create business hierarchies for more information.
B2B Data Cleansing
B2B data cleansing involves account (otherwise named companies or organisations) and contact information. Accounts and contacts have different cleansing strategies. Our approach is to ensure every field of data in your database is appropriately cleansed.
Cleaning is more than just address cleaning, it’s involves looking at company names, contact names structure, telephone numbers, email addresses, websites, and so on.
I want to cleanse my data and The Seven Dimension of Data Quality (see Whitepapers) to see how detailed Acuate cleanses your data.
Deduplication
Deduplicating accounts and contacts is more complicated than B2C data. There are 3 cases to consider:
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Deduplicating companies
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Deduplicating contacts within a company
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Deduplicating contacts across companies (in case people have moved within in overall company structure or to a completely different company)
Read our article on I want to eliminate duplicates and see our demos on deduplication. Also we have a whitepaper on The Science of Deduplication (see our whitepapers section.)
Creating Golden Records
Creating a Golden Record (single customer view) for B2B data can be related to both a company and contact. When a group of companies or contacts are identified as the same then they are grouped together in a cluster. One record is required to be the golden one.
The process of identifying a golden record is dependent on the organisation’s business. Common factors affecting the result could be:
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Latest record updated
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The most contacts linked to an account
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The most recent order placed
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The frequency of orders placed
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The age of the account
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And so on
Read our articles on I want to create golden records and you will also find more information on our blog outlining the process used.
Much of the process can be automated but some will have to be identified manually.
Merge/Purge
After creating golden records, you will want to merge records and purge those that are not relevant. This step is undertaken immediately after identifying a golden record.
If we have group records that are to be merged and purged, then the non-golden record information is merged into the golden record by taking the best information from the other records and any other linked information.
The merging criteria are specific to a client’s data. Once the merging criteria are established then the process can be automated. It doesn’t matter how complicated your database is, the process can always automated to a high standard.
Read our factsheet on Data Migration FAQ , also see the section on Data Migrations and read The Science of Deduplication whitepaper for more information.
Industry Classification
The industry norm is to use Standard Industry Classification (SIC) codes to identify the industry an organisation belongs to.
Some of the problems with using SIC codes will come from your database not holding the same company or address that is available in SIC database.
Your results will be dependent on the:
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Quality of your data
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Quality of the matching software from the vendor you use
However, if you do not have this information then applying the SIC codes will certainly increase your profiling ability.
Telemarketing
We offer a telemarketing solution to validate B2B contact details. This is the only reliable method to verify if the contacts are still there.
We have created a process whereby we, firstly, email clients to validate their details and, secondly, those that are not validated, we call them to verify such details as:
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Job Title
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Email
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Telephone Number
Acuate’s Seven Dimensions of Data Quality provides a comprehensive measuring methodology to truly determine the quality of your data. By performing this audit, you will be:
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Able to create a baseline for your data quality
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Identifying the key areas to improve
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Compare values before and after a cleanse
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Proactive improve your data
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Stop your data from degrading
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