What Is B2B Data? Main Types, Sources, Uses & How to Secure It

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, accurate and timely B2B data insights are essential to ensuring smooth operations, driving growth, and maintaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. In this article, we will provide an overview of B2B data, its different types and uses, and how to secure this important data.

What is B2B data?

Business-to-business (B2B) data refers to critical information that is exchanged between businesses and is used to help with revenue generation, drive sales processes, and enhance data-driven marketing strategies. B2B data helps provide a better understanding of the overall landscape of a business.

B2B data can come from a variety of sources and is typically grouped into internal and external data. Internal B2B data is generated and collected through the internal operations of a business. External B2B data is found outside an organization and can be sourced from external resources such as third-party providers, public databases, or market research.

Consumer data, sometimes called B2C data, focuses on individual demographics like income or purchasing behavior, which are collected to inform customer-facing marketing and sales strategies. B2B data focuses on businesses and information about those businesses, such as company size, industry, or revenue. For example, B2B data would include details on specific companies, while B2C data would include details on individual consumers. While both types are valuable to your business, they drive fundamentally different strategies and operations.

Learn More: What is B2B Integration? Types, Processes, and Challenges

7 Types of B2B data

Firmographic data describes the attributes of a business/organization. This can include details such as the industry the business is in, company size, location, revenue, and other characteristics. Businesses use this data to help segment markets for more tailored messages.

Contact data includes details about a business or organization and its employees used for direct and personalized outreach. This contains personal details such as an employee’s name or job title/role in the business, as well as contact information such as an email address, phone number, or LinkedIn profile.

Technographic data is information about a company’s software and hardware solutions. This details which systems or software a company has and can describe how the company uses those solutions. This data is useful for finding out how your company’s solution can align with a business's current tech stack.

Intent data illustrates a company or customer’s interest in specific products or solutions. This is generally search behavior, content consumption, or material and software downloads. Intent data can assist with prioritizing leads who will more likely have a strong intent to purchase a solution.

Chronographic data surrounds events or organizational changes in a business. Sometimes referred to as ‘sales/event-based triggers,’ this information can include events like a company changing locations, a new company partner, or when a company is acquired or receives new funding.

Behavioral data is information on how customers engage with a business. This data can include data about transactions, website interactions, in-person interactions, or social media interactions and is used to identify a customer’s preferences for tailored marketing strategies.

Engagement data is a subset of behavioral data and provides details about the interactions between a customer and a business. This can often refer to event participation, email marketing data, like open or response rates, or social media interactions, such as likes, shares, or comments.

Main B2B data sources

Internal sources

Internal data sources are pieces of data that are gathered from within the organization or business. This data can come from internally used software systems, like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, tracking website analytics, or from customer service logs.

External sources

External data sources refer to data that is obtained from outside the business/organization. These data sources can include social media networks such as LinkedIn, industry databases/directories such as ZoomInfo, or government/public records such as the US SEC or patents.

Emerging sources

Emerging data sources are innovative sources for in-depth and real-time insights that traditional data sources can lack. These data sources can often leverage AI and machine learning to predict intent and identify leads, use social listening and monitoring tools, or use Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect data on operational status or usage patterns.

Third-party data

Third-party data sources include data that is collected from third-party providers. These data sources are typically from market research firms, data aggregators, or lead generation platforms.

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5 Use cases for B2B data

1. Lead generation and nurturing: Marketing and sales teams have a key focus on generating quality leads and increasing the likelihood of successful conversions. B2B marketing data plays a crucial role in lead generation and nurturing by analyzing engagement behavior, technology adoption trends, and detailed company profiles. Once potential customers are identified, this data also supports personalized communication tailored to their needs or challenges.
2. Total addressable market (TAM) measurement: Total addressable market (TAM), also known as Total Available Market, is a monetary value that projects the maximum potential revenue for a product or service in a specific market. Accurate B2B firmographic data is essential for calculating TAM by analyzing company size, industry, location, and other key metrics to estimate potential revenue.
3. Outbound sales: After generating quality leads, the marketing and sales teams can utilize B2B Contact data to identify and target high-value prospects with customizable pitches to increase the likelihood of closing sales. Using B2B company data for outbound sales helps to improve sales efficiency and effectiveness by ensuring resources are being allocated to the most promising opportunities.
4. Sales automation: Sales automation is the use of software to automate sales tasks that are often repetitive in nature and time-consuming, such as email outreach, follow-ups, and lead sourcing. These software programs rely on accurate B2B data to ensure that automation processes run smoothly and effectively. This can reduce the number of manual tasks from sales representatives, so the sales process is more efficient, ensuring consistent communication with leads, and reducing manual errors.
5. Business analytics: Business analytics rely heavily on B2B data to analyze market trends, monitor competitors, and track customer behavior to inform strategic decision-making. With accurate B2B data, businesses and organizations can optimize processes and provide actionable insights to enhance overall results and growth.

Data cleansing for B2B data hygiene and quality

What is data cleansing?

Data cleansing, also known as data scrubbing, aims to maintain accurate and up-to-date B2B data to improve its reliability and effectiveness for sales and marketing teams. The process involves correcting errors, identifying inconsistencies, and removing outdated information from your database. This ensures that businesses and organizations can maintain proper data hygiene and quality to avoid operational mistakes due to dirty data.

How is data cleansing applied?

Data cleansing involves systematic processes that maintain data accuracy, reliability, and overall quality. Here are some specific examples of how these processes are applied:

• Remove duplicates: Duplicate data can lead to inefficient lead outreach and lead generation. Removing identical or redundant data entries, such as the same prospect or company listed more than once, is a vital step for maintaining clean data.
• Standardize formats: Sometimes referred to as data normalization, standardizing your data formats ensures consistency across your datasets. Various data points sometimes don’t follow a specific standard, such as job titles, phone numbers, or addresses. Creating and maintaining a standard for these fields can make it easier to analyze and group your data. Examples:
  • Chief Product Officer = CPO
  • Product Marketing Manager = Manager of Product Marketing
  • NC = North Carolina
• Audit data: Auditing data can include updating outdated information or validating data fields. This process is completed by checking and cross-referencing your datasets against reliable data sources to ensure fields such as emails, phone numbers, or company details are validated and trustworthy. With contact and company details that are accurate and actionable, this keeps outreach efforts relevant and can help save time and resources.
• Enrich data: Data enrichment takes your existing database records and enhances these records by adding missing information or adjusting existing data points. This can include adding or adjusting firmographic data, such as company size and revenue, or technographic data about a company’s technology stack. Enriching your B2B data can provide a more comprehensive picture of leads and assist with effective targeting and segmentation.

Learn more: Data Enrichment: A Complete Guide with Definitions, Key Benefits, and Tools

• Automate data cleansing: After your B2B data is cleaned, it can be beneficial to automate segments of the cleansing process. There are many tools and platforms that can be used to cleanse your data that utilize algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to automatically detect duplicates, identify and correct errors, and validate data. Leveraging these tools for B2B data automation can reduce errors and ensure data quality while saving time and resources.

Learn More: Connecting B2B Integration with Salesforce

How to secure B2B data

When working with B2B data, there is often sensitive information such as customer/prospect details and contact information, financial records, and strategic insights. Protecting B2B data is vital for maintaining market trust and ensuring regulatory compliance. Ensuring your B2B data is secure is key to avoiding the risks and consequences of a data breach, which can include financial losses, reputation damage, legal and compliance issues, operational disruption, or theft of intellectual property.

Essential data security practices for protecting B2B information:

• Data encryption: Encrypting data makes it impossible to read and can only be accessed using a decryption key. This ensures that even if your data is accessed by unauthorized users, it remains unreadable and unusable.
• Access controls: Controlling access to sensitive data based on specific organizational roles and responsibilities can minimize the risk of internal breaches or accidental exposure. This is done using Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure data is accessed only by authorized users.
• Compliance with data privacy regulations: Regulations and laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US, should always be followed and adhered to. Following these laws and regulations put in place reduces legal risks and can demonstrate a commitment to protecting your customer’s data.
• Constant employee training: The leading cause of data breaches is human error, so it is vital to constantly train and educate employees on the importance of securing data and the best practices for keeping data secure. This can be done by reviewing cybersecurity policies, attending regular data security workshops, and simulating phishing attempts.
• Security audits: Monitoring and auditing your security systems regularly can help identify vulnerabilities or security threats in your B2B data. You can use a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution to help detect and mitigate potential data breaches before they escalate or even happen.
• Data backup and disaster recovery: Having a backup of your data and a disaster recovery plan in place can help ensure recovery after any incident. You should regularly back up your B2B data and test your recovery processes to protect against data loss and reduce the impact of any incidents.
• Partner security: While your internal data security is crucial, it is also important to ensure your vendors and partners comply with similar robust security standards. You can conduct vendor risk assessments so that no one in your supply chain can expose your data to breaches.

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