Reading the Tea Leaves of B2B data

In a blink of an eye and the casual touch of a stranger, COVID-19 seems to have changed everything.  It’s starting to feel bigger than 9-11.  Bigger than mortgage derivatives.  Maybe bigger than Pearl Harbor or the Equal Rights movement in some ways.  A globalization of a different sort than any of us ever imagined.  Although theorized for some time by some as a likely future risk, never really was it understood in our collective consciousness as the tsunami wave of destruction it has unleashed.

Could any of us non-virologists really have predicted this?  If you were to tell me as late as February that my family’s international summer vacation, 3 years in the planning, would be canceled; my kids’ school would shift online indefinitely; and none of our employees would be going into our LeadGenius offices around the globe as of May, I would have called you nuts.   

This is all to say, most of us didn’t see COVID-19 coming.  Personally, I didn’t stock up on toilet paper.  I didn’t sell all my equity in March.  I didn’t buy a bunch of anti-bacterial wipes and N95 masks. Even as the first wave of the pandemic was approaching our shore, I didn’t want to believe it.  My confirmation bias that ‘everything is great’ was just too strong to believe a black swan event was upon us.  You too, right?

Ironically, this post is about predictions and despite my COVID-confessions, I don’t think foolhardy to offer.  While some societal changes might sneak up and overwhelm us, others are more obvious and clear.  You can see them coming over multiple years and their pace is easier to forecast.  With this in mind, I would argue that B2B data space is in the middle of grand shifts and changes long in the making.  

For those of us that make a living in the B2B data space, tectonic changes are upon us.  Data gathering methods, outreach effectiveness, buyers’ journeys, and a shift towards effectiveness vs. efficiency have all conspired to create a ‘perfect storm’ shifting the B2B data landscape right under our feet.

How you viewed, procured, and valued B2B data two years ago, maybe even only 2 quarters ago, won’t cut it today.  These changes were well underway pre-COVID but likely will accelerate post-pandemic.

So here’s my list of macro trends and bankable predictions for those of us in the B2B data space:

• Scarcity to Blindness - A decade ago, the problem data vendors were solving was ‘filling white space’ as simply helping companies understand their universe of potential company and person buyers.  Data was hard to come by and simply getting a customer ‘more’ data was a huge win.  Fast-forward to the post-internet, multi-device world of 2020, and the problem has shifted 180-degrees.  Customers are swimming in data, heck, drowning in it and their problem is figuring out the valuable versus the clutter.  More and more data vendors are helping clients with data management rather than data acquisition.
• Activation Bias - As GTM-teams drown in data and their sales-marketing technology stack gets bigger, data vendors that focus on ‘activation’ of their data are gaining prominence.  Squatting on huge caches of data is not as valuable as making your data available ‘just in time’ at the point-of-use of the end-user.  A single email delivered at the time a BDR is cueing up a follow-up note is much more valuable than hundreds of emails within accounts not in any current nurture campaigns.  It’s now about the right data, at the right time, in the right place.  
• Firmo to Quali - The 20th-century data space was ruled by firmographics.  Information such as address, revenue and employees were deemed ‘must-haves’.  Not so much anymore.  The last 10 years have seen the rise of what I call ‘quali-graphics’...qualitative information on businesses and people.  Tech installs, buying trends, companies ‘in market’, intent, hiring trends and staffing changes are all examples of ‘signals’ being valued much more highly than that static firmographics valued in the past.
• Global-First Expectations - Borders no longer exist for most markets.  As software has eaten the world, many companies have built their businesses to be worldwide from their inception.  Consequently, they’ve expected their vendors to be able to address their global GTM needs.  Being North American-centric or English-only is no longer sufficient as a B2B data vendor for customers with clients and employees on multiple continents.
• Expected Data Mobility - Benioff had a monopoly for over a decade, having first created the CRM SaaS space and dominating it.  It’s kinda shocking that he pulled it off as all CRM ever has been is just a relational database.  But his dominance is being threatened as vendors build more robust, function-specific solutions.  Marketing now has Marketing Automation.  Account Managers now have Customer Success software.  BDRs now have Sales Engagement platforms.  For B2B data vendors, this means APIs and integrations and seamlessly moving data into and between multiple systems of record is becoming more critical.  Although I’m not a fan of the hyped CDP space, I do think the concept of data portability is gaining importance.
• Data Shelfware - The gap between data bought and data being used is, unfortunately, growing.  It’s as if buyers are happy to boast of the size of their database without any analytics on what’s being used and how it’s performing.  Kinda reminds me of everything I’ve got squirreled away in my attic and garage ‘just in case’ I need it.  I would estimate that over 70% of all data bought is never used or antiquated by the time it’s use becomes relevant.
• ROI Rules - Attribution is really, really hard with the buyer's journey is no longer linear.  Trying to figure out how any single action contributed to the sales process is almost futile by design.  Nonetheless, buyers are getting more demanding in tracking and trying to cost-justify their B2B data purchases.  Even with lots of ‘down journey’ steps of a buying cycle, data vendors do need to justify the value they are bringing to a multi-touch process.
• Self-Service is Dying - Sign a contract, email a bunch of credentials to your internal users and your data strategy is complete!  Not so much anymore.  The old assumptions that reps know how to find their own data inside BDR tools, action is properly and repeat that process across multiple accounts is being rethought.  Reps just are juggling too much.  This is why the most sophisticated organizations are supplementing, if not eliminating, the self-service model of data for their end-users.  Instead, they are institutionalizing rep best practices via a strategic data strategy that ensures every account, every opportunity, every MQL is infused with the right type of data to allow a rep to effectively move a deal to the next pipeline stage.  Data Operations is becoming a ‘thing’ and a potent strategy for fast-growing entities.
• Oil’s Up - In April as COVID-19 was gaining steam, oil prices went below $0 for the first time in history.  Kind of shocking to think people were willing to pay buyers to take oil off their hands to reduce their storage costs.  Even as many have described data as ‘the new oil of B2B engines’, the value of data has varied wildly - although rarely free.  From valuing quantity to quality, to focusing on people vs. company data, the target on what type of data seems to shift from year to year.  With outreach strategies more focused on ABM and buyer mindshare getting more difficult to capture, data, in general, is becoming more valued as a means of differentiation.
• Vaulted Valuations - Evidence of ‘data as the new oil’ can be found in two recent IPOs of B2B data companies.  Discoverorg, now known as ZoomInfo, had its IPO in June and it’s shares were up over 200% from the original share price target.  And DnB, having been taken private less than two years ago, also went public earlier this summer.  Their market caps are between $10-20 billion with multiples of 20x or more of revenue.  Whether or not this public market enthusiasm can be sustained is yet to be determined, but even with big reductions off their current trading prices, these public valuations are much, much higher than how these companies were being valued privately.
• PII CYA - The B2C data scandal of Cambridge Analytica has set off a new wave (but not the first) of governmental bodies passing data privacy laws.  Most well known are GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California - with dozens of more look-alike laws in the works.  I’m guessing plenty of weekend Tahoe houses have been purchased by the opportunistic lawyers having a field day rewriting contracts, terms of service, and master service agreements to shield their clients liability.  Here’s the bad news from my perspective - I’m consistently disappointed that customers really don’t care about privacy as it relates to their B2B data, other than their personal CYA shield.
• Legal Earthquakes on the Horizon - I sense the pressure building up and fault lines about to shift.  It’s been almost a year since David beat Goliath when the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for HiQ against LinkedIn with regard to the use of data available within search engine output.  And more recently, but lost in the IPO bell ringing of ZoomInfo, Bombora sued ZoomInfo with regard to its data acquisition methods (a method I called consent transference) claiming it violates the CCPA.  Try to follow these happenings as these cases progress over the next year as either could have far-reaching consequences for the B2B data space.
• Consolidation Accelerating - B2B data vendors are being scooped up quickly by strategic buyers or new entrants to the B2B data space.  With the last decade seeing an explosion of high-value specialty data providers, more prominent brands are now picking off the best of breed among data vendors to improve their product offerings.  Consolidation is a double-edged sword for customers.  It benefits buyers in that vendors are offering more comprehensive solutions, but it also leads to price inflation, over the long term, and usually less innovation.

So there you have it - a lucky 13 insights and predictions as to where the B2B data space is headed.  Mark your calendars for a year from now.  Hopefully, we’ll truly be post-COVID and we could meet f2f for you to praise or chide me on my reading of the B2B data space tea leaves.  Even if I’m wrong, hopefully you’ll at least give me some credit for being bold!

_________

Found this post interesting?  Some of my peers at LeadGenius did too and wanted to share their B2B data space predictions.  Be on the lookout for similar articles that delve more deeply into functional-specific tea leaf reading of B2B data, such as Product, GTM and Sales Operations.