Is your data up to scratch?

By Jade Greenhow, operations director at Insight Data.

It will come as no surprise to those within the industry to hear that we’ve seen a rapid rise in M&A activity in recent years.

For some businesses, it has proven to be a fast-track way to scale up, enter new markets and to secure both customers and supply chains. For those who don’t have the appetite for major growth or investment, or maybe approaching retirement, it’s presented an ideal opportunity to exit.

Either way, the increase in activity has helped generate the highest rate of change seen within the industry. By tracking dozens of metrics across our live database, from suppliers and products, to directors and business activities, we can see that the rate of change has increased by more than 30% in the last 12 months.

With the industry landscape changing so rapidly, it’s now harder than ever before to communicate with new potential customers.

The once trusty marketing spreadsheets and one-off data lists are now destined for the archives because they simply cannot keep up. Businesses that use these outdated methods, or do not cleanse their data, risk wasting their time contacting individuals who have changed jobs, retired, passed away, and businesses that have ceased trading.

Continued use could also result in potential damage to reputations with high bounce rates leaving businesses looking unprofessional and facing the prospect of being blacklisted by email providers. That’s without even mentioning the issue of GDPR, with regulators across the UK and Europe demonstrating that businesses of all sizes fall in their crosshairs.

Through updating our live prospect database, which provides real-time business information and contact details for more than 70,000 potential customers across the industry, our in-house research team conduct over 20,000 calls and interviews every month. This is just one step of our seven-stage verification process that generates more than 1,200 changes and updates to our data every month.

These important changes will be missed by out-of-date spreadsheets and lists; whereas users of our Salestracker platform consistently achieve strong results from prospecting and from their email and direct mail campaigns.

With real-time business info and contact details for businesses in fenestration, along with housebuilders, local builders, main contractors, architects and builders merchants, Salestracker also presents a valuable opportunity to explore new markets and target new customers.