Hi Alexis,
As usual, Josh is spot on with his suggestions (Hi Josh).
All the vendors he mentions are well regarded in the community, I suggest speaking to at least three of them before you select a vendor.
You are looking for both firmographic data (about companies) and demographic data (about people), yes?
Most of these vendors, for firmographic data at least, get their data from a handful of suppliers.
To some extent the firmographic data is a commodity.
While D&B might have the best data (about big companies, > $500mm), they don't have anywhere near all the data.
For firmographic data, a hybrid approach that uses D&B data, but also data from other vendors is recommended as a best practice.
Like painting a room, enhancing your data is a process where the order of operations matters tremendously.
If you want the optimal outcome you have to prepare the data first, before you enhance it.
Most vendors just want to sell you data and won't discuss the need to prep it first.
Buying data is easy, matching it to the data you already have is very hard.
The key to success for firmographic append is to prepare it by normalizing the data before enhancing it, and then, because company names are so ambiguous, it is essential that you append websites to the Accounts and Leads.
You will find Alexis, that company match rates for firmographic data in the absence of a valid website (url) will be +/- 2% of your website fill rate.
Without a website it is likely you will struggle to match the data you buy to the data you have.
Demographic data has a different set of requirements for optimal success.
The fundamental challenge with buying contact (demographic) data is that contact data ages like fish, not wine.
It gets worse as it get older not better.
Data vendors are not immune from the natural law of data decay, no more than an astronaut is immune from gravity.
A key to success for the demographic append will be to find a vendor who has the freshest data possible.
Before you buy contact data be sure to ascertain the age of the data.
A vendor who can mine the data on demand will likely have higher accuracy than one that sells you data that has been sitting in a data warehouse.
I'd also suggest that you prepare a sample data set of accounts and contacts that you know well and ask the vendors to prepare a sample of their data for your examination before you select a provider.
I hope this helps.
Best,
Gregg
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