The last concern when acquiring or developing a list, and here it is: does your potential list broker, database, or whatever, not only acquire contact data from a variety of sources, but does it use comparative logic in its methodology to assess which contact data is most accurate across those multiple sources?
A mouthful I know. But here’s what I mean…if you could compare data on one prospect across multiple sources, and make a logical choice as to which is more accurate, would it not be more accurate than just looking within one resource based on when the record was last updated? Very few companies are doing this today. InsideView is one of them but, on the matter of comparative advantages and disadvantages, it tends to focus only on director and higher contacts and pre4sently only allows you to pull 2,000 contacts at a time. BUT, if you’re looking for a small c-level list with email addresses, they can make a lot of sense.
On this topic, I’ll leave you with the thought that there’s no one answer that fits all. But I must comment on an emerging approach to increasing both accuracy and deliverability in list methodology, similar to that mentioned above, which is used by WebAttract. It converges traditional subscription-based contact data with social media, like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Pulse, etc. for highly accurate, highly-deliverable emailing. Think about it. The premise behind social networking is that information is voluntarily supplied by the participant for the purpose of expanding social and professional contacts, furthering careers, to do demand generation, whatever. It tends to be more accurate that COLLECTED data because it can be verified or challenged by anyone in the network. It’s self supplied, and self-correcting. AND, social networks like LinkedIn are huge. LinkedIn presently has 45 million members. Jigsaw, the largest of the “you buy-you own” email databases, has only 15 million.