Data, in the form of fields containing companies and their contact details, is the main asset within any business development campaign.  Unless the correct audience is in place at the heart of a campaign, results will be poor.  Clever copy writing will go into a black hole and expensive telephone marketing will be burned up with few results. And yet so many organisations have traditionally ignored the sound logic of creating and maintaining data sets for business development activity, preferring instead to periodically lease data from data providers.

Most business-to-business audiences for high-end products and services are counted in the thousands, rather than tens of thousands.  The justification for buying the same companies over and over again across the years seems lacking, when these records could be updated and validated, creating a valuable asset.  If universe data was in endless supply this would be a different proposition.  It would then be possible to buy data to fulfil a target objective and go back for more the next month without duplicating the previous set.  Consumer data can be thought of in this way.  We don’t mind who buys the household products and services we may have on offer because there is always someone else who will do the same, tomorrow, next week, next year.  We don’t need to know anything about them, whether or not they have changed their names or moved house. But the companies that represent our future business partners should be seen in a different light. Business-to-business data should be farmed rather than quarried; carefully tended to form a valuable source of future business revenue.

In the past companies would often turn away from the task of developing in-house lists in favour of the short-term approach of buying-in yet another batch of names from a variety of providers.  But change is afoot.  Could it be that harsh times have brought a sea change in data practice?  More and more marketing and sales directors are seeing the value of building and maintaining data lists as an investment in future sales.  It matters not whether these details are kept in a complex CRM system or in a simple database programme for sales and marketing use.  The importance of this changing attitude to data is that it represents a real engagement with target markets, with long-term objectives that will underpin economic recovery in the business-to-business sectors.