Your Data Vendors are Lying to You

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Your Data Vendors are Lying to You.

In their defense, they don’t mean to.

The weird thing about being a data validation provider is that we see a ton of lists from a ton of sources.

Every year, new data enrichment vendors pop up, promising the world.

Literally.

The world.

“8 billion contacts! 100% Coverage!”

Many are inaccurate.

If you’ve ever spent time with a CRM, you know this in your bones: it’s full of junk.

Part of that is a design problem, sure: it’s hard to build systems that humans use that allow for speed while preventing slop.

But part of it is the fault of data vendors, who have long volume over veracity.

Even Clay, which I use and love, makes this claim front and center in much of their ad copy.

These claims are what’s called “data coverage” - the amount of data a vendor has about people or companies, or about a particular segment.

For instance, you’ll hear people say “ZoomInfo is the best in the US, but Cognism is better for EMEA.”

They generally mean ZoomInfo has more data about US businesses and contacts, and Cognism has more about EMEA business and contacts. Rarely do they mean better data.

Unless you’re dealing with specific niche industry segments like construction, or healthcare, where many individual contributors and even managers are not on LinkedIn, you don’t really need to worry about data coverage. You will have more than enough contacts to work through for a few years at least.

So why are we ok with data vendors hyping up the number of contacts? 

It’s ubiquitous too. Here’s a list Claude and Clay helped me pull together of 93 data enrichment vendor claims about contact coverage:

I have always loved Jacob Tuwiner’s work he did on this Clay blog about which mobile data vendors have the lowest wrong number rates (shoutout to Leadmagic). It’s the right kind of analysis for data vendors.

I think for a few years, email deliverability and even phone connectivity was so forgiving, that you could legitimately by the data vendor with the most coverage, and hit it with all phasers on full blast. Enough would reach your ICP that you could build a business case to do more, and eventually have healthy pipeline.

That has ended.

We have reached the end of “Forgiving” Sales Channels.

They were already dying, thanks to COVID and the rise of sales automation.

But AI has landed the final blow.

And yet…

Most outbound teams still cold call bad data all day.

They get clever and cold call it faster (multiple lines at once, after all).

But you’re not most outbound leaders are you?

If that’s the case, and I really believe it is - you’re reading this newsletter after all, and you’ve made it halfway down - then please, I beg you:

Calculate your Cost Per Conversation.

Fully burdened annual SDR + tooling + data costs divided by 260 working days in a year, divided by how many conversations one SDR has per day.

It’s scary how much orgs are paying for a little bit of talk time. We commonly here $300-$800 per conversation.

(And I know we keep talking about the same stuff, but most people are stuck with the same problem).

When we GTM leaders build our outbound systems on a “healthy mix” of activities and databases, we can expect to water down the impact.

Instead, we need to break out our channels, segments, tactics into distinct groups (test sets). We nurture each into optimal state, or disqualify it entirely and never go back.

This where signals fail most leaders too - they muddy the waters so you can never say “these signals didn’t work and these ones did” but instead end up firing the entire SDR team.

This is what has entered into the void left by the failures of spray-and-pray outbound at scale: junior reps tasked with phenomenal feats (think: 10+ years of experience demand gen/revops style kung fu) of creativity. This is also why GTM Engineering is on the rise - because it can work. But you can’t really build a team of 20 GTM Engineers and justify it - the integration overlap and technical debt would be astronomical.

…So here we are…

Just this week, I talked to 3 companies who will likely trim many or all of their SDRs in the next 1 to 12 weeks.

In each case, if they had focused on conversations that tied to macro business objectives, they would’ve kept and scaled the SDR function. 

The story is getting tired.

So much so we’ve started to infuse this question into every conversation, to try to inspire a sense of hope, instead of the doom scenario everyone is racing toward:

“In your dream scenario, how many conversations are your reps having each day?”

Then go deep into the math of how to get there, and what impact that will have. 

Watch Joey break it down here: 

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)