B2B data providers

Most of the market is sold to sales and marketing teams who want to find accounts, reach people inside them and keep their CRM from going stale. The product usually comes in four shapes, and one contract often bundles several of them.

The four shapes of a B2B data product

• Company records: legal name, domain, industry code, headcount band, revenue estimate, locations and corporate family.
• Contact records: a named person's job title, seniority, department, work email and direct or mobile phone number.
• Enrichment: an API or CRM connector that fills in missing fields on records the buyer already holds.
• Signals: hiring, funding rounds, technology installs or research activity, sold as triggers for outreach.

List prices are rare at the enterprise end. The most useful public benchmark is procurement data from Vendr, which reports what its customers actually signed. Treat these as indications of the spread, not quotes: scope, seats and export rights move the number a long way.

Company fields are mostly assembled from things a business publishes about itself: filings, websites, job ads, press releases and government registers. Contact fields are harder. Providers combine web crawling, email pattern guessing with verification, professional profiles and, in some products, contact details contributed by their own users' address books or email signatures.

That last source is efficient and also the one buyers and regulators ask most about, so it is worth asking any provider directly whether it uses it.

Decay: why one-off lists lost ground

Decay is the hidden cost. People change jobs and companies move, so a file bought once loses accuracy every month. That is why the market has drifted from one-off lists to subscriptions with continuous refresh.

• Email: the FTC's CAN-SPAM guidance applies to business email too. There is no B2B exemption; each message needs accurate headers, a postal address and a working opt-out.
• Privacy law: a named person's work email is still personal data in the EU and UK, and state privacy laws such as California's can reach work contact details as well.
• Registration: a company selling personal information about people it has no direct relationship with may count as a data broker under state registry laws, including California's Delete Act.
• Calling: phone outreach brings in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and do-not-call rules, especially for mobile numbers.

1. 1

   Test on your own accounts

   Send a sample of 200 companies you know well and score what comes back for accuracy and coverage, field by field.

2. 2

   Ask how contacts are sourced

   Get the answer in writing, including whether user-contributed data is in the file and how opt-outs are honoured.

3. 3

   Read the export clause

   Check what you may keep if you cancel, and whether records can be loaded into other tools.

4. 4

   Price the renewal

   Ask for the uplift cap at signing. Multi-year deals often carry yearly increases.

DataBroker doesn't sell contact lists or company records, and we hold no database to search. We run a paid course and a set of tools for people who arrange data deals between companies.

In the B2B space, that usually means finding a business with a niche dataset other providers lack, such as a trade directory or a vertical software firm's aggregated market data, checking it may lawfully be licensed, and introducing it to companies that license data in. If you only need contacts for your own sales team, a provider above is the right route.