What is outdated contact data costing your sales team?

In brief: Outdated contact data costs your sales team through wasted outreach, manual corrections and lost working time. Before renewing your contact data subscription, distinguish between outdated data, incorrect roles and missing information, then use your own records to calculate the extra work they cause.

Compare your current list: describe your target audience in plain language and see how many companies and contacts match the same criteria. You only need an account when you want to download the data.

Where do the costs of poor contact data come from?

The invoice for your contact data service appears in your accounts. The cost of poor data, however, is spread across sales calendars, marketing research and CRM correction queues. That’s why a seemingly affordable subscription can become expensive, even when downloading the data is easy.

Throughout this article, we’ll use a fictional example: a 50-person financial management software company targeting CFOs and finance managers at industrial companies operating in Finland with 20–100 employees. The company already uses a contact data service, and its contract is coming up for renewal.

It should classify the problems it finds into three groups:

For more on identifying roles, see the guide to decision-makers.

Agree on acceptance criteria before reviewing the data. Otherwise, marketing may consider a record acceptable while sales finds it unusable.

How do you turn wasted effort into a euro figure?

Start with a simple calculation. Separate data errors from a lack of response: failing to reach someone does not, on its own, mean their contact details are outdated.

Suppose the example company has a list of 1,000 contacts. Of these, 15% turn out to be unusable, and each receives three wasted outreach attempts. Each attempt takes five minutes, including preparation and logging the activity.

The formula is: number of contacts × proportion of unusable contacts × number of wasted attempts × minutes per attempt. Divide the result by 60, then multiply it by your organisation’s hourly cost.

These figures are examples: replace them with your own observations. The €1,875 in this example represents only the time spent on wasted attempts, not the cost of finding replacement contacts, correcting the CRM or lost deals.

Which costs are easily left out of reports?

• Bounced emails and sender reputation. Bounces create work investigating addresses, processing removals and finding new contacts. Sending to invalid addresses can also damage your sender reputation. Distinguish between bounce reasons: a full mailbox and a non-existent address are different problems.
• CRM errors. An outdated employer, incorrect job title or duplicate contact can route outreach to the wrong salesperson. Check which field identifies a person and which fields are updated during import. The CRM import guide helps you review this step.
• Misleading campaign results. A low response rate from messages sent to the wrong people may be interpreted as a problem with the offer. Report audience fit, contact data validity and campaign results separately so you address the right issue.

What should you ask your current contact data provider?

Ask for written answers before renewing. A general description of database updates does not tell you the status of an individual contact.

• When was the data checked? Ask separately about email addresses, phone numbers, employers and roles. Find out whether the date refers to a check or simply an edit to the record.
• How are areas of responsibility and organisational levels defined? Is the search based only on job titles, or can you filter by finance responsibilities and management level, for example? Ask to see how these filters work for your target audience.
• Can you choose your contact data requirements? Can you request contacts with an email address, a phone number, at least one of the two, or both?
• How do you find new and updated data? Can you track changes to a previous search, and how do you distinguish a new person from a corrected record?
• How are errors handled? Establish how to report an error, how corrections are processed and how the change appears in your next export.

NordicContacts’ exportable email addresses have been checked within the past 91 days. You can find a description of the checks in the data quality results. Every delivered contact has a work email address, a phone number or both, and you can require email, phone, either or both. You can filter searches by area of responsibility and organisational level, and search for new and updated data within a selected period, including automatically: weekly target account monitoring.

How do you make a fair side-by-side comparison?

First, define the same criteria for both services: country, industry, company size, area of responsibility, organisational level and required contact channel. This ensures you compare lists built for the same need.

The example company uses the same Finnish industrial companies and the same finance roles in both searches. Record company and contact counts separately: a large number of contacts alone tells you neither how many companies are covered nor how much decision-making authority a person has.

Then carry out the comparison:

1. Select a sample from each source using the same method, rather than choosing only people you already know.
2. Assess each person’s current company, role fit and whether the required contact channel is included.
3. Mark uncertain cases separately so assumptions do not accidentally become observations.
4. Record the time spent correcting and completing the data.
5. Calculate the cost of usable contacts, including both service fees and the work involved in processing the data.

Keep use of the comparison data limited, and address the basis for processing personal data, privacy notices and the handling of objections.

When is switching services worthwhile?

Switching is worthwhile if the same targeting criteria give you contact data that better meets your needs, and the total cost falls enough to justify the work of switching. Compare not just subscription fees, but also correction work, import preparation and the time your team needs to learn the new service.

If your current service works well but your filters are wrong, fix the search first. If you repeatedly find the same outdated details and role errors, and the correction process is unclear, a side-by-side test provides a better basis for a decision than a sales presentation.

Also agree on who will make the decision and when you will review the results before renewing the contract.

Run a side-by-side test before deciding whether to renew: describe your current target audience in plain language and see the company and contact counts for free, without an account. Then use the free trial’s one-time download of up to 50 contacts with the same criteria and compare them with your current list.