3 Challenges of Using Sales Data Vendors

In my 8 years of leading start-ups, I’ve worked with and evaluated 54 different data vendors, with the majority of reviews taking place in the last 18 months.

Here are 3 challenges I’ve frequently encountered with sales data providers.

Challenge #1: None have all the data you need

Currently, there’s no solution on the market that provides every type of data you need or want. Some try to get close, but at the end of the day, there are always gaps or weaknesses in data coverage and quality.

For example, vendors that have good emails aren’t good at searching for companies.

Very few have good phone numbers for cold calls. Maybe one of the few exceptions is TitanX (previously Phone Ready Leads).

And vendors with rich company data for good customer profiling – such as tech stack, growth, and fundraising rounds – frequently can’t map their company data to people.

Then there’s the question of real-time LinkedIn data. Some have it. Some don’t.

As a result, you’re left with three options:

1. Make do without some type of data
2. Subscribe to multiple tools and look for an ad hoc way of merging all data to make it usable
3. Find a sales tool that provides access and the ability to use data from multiple providers

AiSDR tries to tackle this challenge by integrating several lead databases, website visitor tracking, and news providers into our AI Prospecting feature to give you as complete a picture as possible.

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Challenge #2: Most data providers focus on data quantity, not data quality

Visit the home or product page of any data provider. You won’t need to scroll far before you see huge numbers: 

70M phone numbers. 174M verified email addresses. 700M leads.

Why?

Huge numbers impress. It shows you have a ton of data. And out of that ton of data, chances are you’ll find something you can use.

However, very few companies will give you a straight answer about:

• How do fields like industry, company size, revenue, and location get populated? How well?
• How do job titles, departments, and roles get populated? How well?
• How often and how thoroughly is the data updated and verified?

And this applies both qualitatively and quantitatively.

They either don’t know the answer, or they know you won’t like the answer. I’ve tested the data quality of a few data providers by simply searching for AiSDR, and we were listed less than 30% of the time for 3 different industries.

Without quality data, searching for reliable lookalike audiences or buyer intent signals you can use won’t be easy.

And in a worst-case scenario, you might burn through all your leads with low-quality messaging before you can see outreach results.

Challenge #3: Too many email bounces

The frequency of bad email addresses would surprise you. From my experience, it fluctuates between 40–60% of the time. In other words, 2 to 3 out of every 5 email addresses aren’t usable.

At this point, it’s somewhat market standard, but it still surprises me. I ask myself, “How is this okay if you’re in the data business?”

Most other businesses wouldn’t last long if it failed at its goal half the time.

After all, data is the core of good outreach. Yet it feels like no one took the time to do it well.

And the consequences are real and lasting. Too many bounced emails, especially within a short window of time, can lead to your email account getting blocked. This leaves you with either eating the cost of the account or going through the long process of getting it unlocked.

At AiSDR, we do everything we can to avoid burning a customer’s email account by:

• Warming up the account for a month or more
• Triple-checking all lead email addresses to minimize bounces
• Setting accounts to “cool down” if it recently sent a lot of emails