Lead-Centric Apps and Data Challenges

In his almost two decades working on the data front lines, Garth Moulton has seen all the ‘next big things’, all the massive successes and spectacular failures, all the fly-by-night companies, all the data hucksters and charlatans, and all the twists and turns in the evolution of data-driven sales and marketing. Moulton’s had a front row seat in watching countless companies build products and solutions offering everything from lead scoring and qualification to predictive analytics and micro-segmentation, with each striving to deliver actionable intelligence to their sales and marketing clients.

As co-founder of Jigsaw.com (which sold to Salesforce.com in 2010) and Pipl’s SVP of Business Development, Moulton understands as well as anyone, the inherent challenges faced by martech companies offering data-powered products and solutions designed for sales and marketing teams. He’s also all too familiar with the struggles and frustration sales and marketing leaders have with the data they rely on to make smart, strategic decisions.

The modern, hyper-personalized approach to marketing and consultative selling requires teams to have intimate knowledge of their audiences and a pulse on every lead and customer touchpoint. This approach requires clean, actionable, accurate data.

And, if his time with Jigsaw taught Moulton anything, it’s that sales and marketing outreach is only as good as the data informing decisions and actions—and good data can be hard to find.

If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Do It

Data-powered martech companies, like AccuData, GetProfiles, and Lead Genius collect raw data, and enrich and enhance it to create insights into customers and prospects and empower marketing and sales teams to better target their outreach.

Unfortunately, just making data available isn’t enough—to be valuable and actionable, data also needs to be accurate. And it’s not easy—Pipl is creating and collecting data at a scale never seen before.

As the amount of data collection increases, the accuracy of the data decreases. The tools marketers and salespeople used to confirm, update or enhance their data, like credit card and address validation services, no longer suffice.

Not only are we dealing with massive volumes of information, but new types of information—unstructured chat logs, support tickets and social media feeds. How do we gauge its accuracy?

“You may have millions of records, but the profiles are missing key data points or contain incorrect information. Acquiring good data is only half the battle, because it ages at a terrific rate as people change jobs,” Moulton said. “Either way, it’s a huge challenge for these companies and their customers.”

You’re Only as Good as Your Data

Years of being sold data solutions that have failed to live up to their promises have left marketing and sales leaders skeptical of data companies’ claims.

They’re weary of investing in solutions that fail to fuel potential business opportunities or prevent marketing from creating and implementing personalized, account-based marketing (ABM) strategies because the data has erroneous, outdated, or partial information (usually caused by human error, a bad data import, or lack of data hygiene standards).

The unfortunate truth? Martech companies are judged on their ability to deliver complete, accurate, and timely leads, despite these difficulties. The good news? Pipl is uniquely qualified to help martech solve their biggest data problems and give them the edge within their competitive landscapes.

Global Coverage, Exceptional Accuracy

Traditionally, martech companies have had to choose between a) data that was accurate, but lacking the coverage they needed; or b) had high coverage, but data was missing or not available. You shouldn’t have to choose.

“Pipl provides data to the lead gen apps that provide information to the CRMs, marketers, and salespeople,” said Moulton. “We’re accountable to them for the accuracy and cleanliness of our data.”

We have compiled records for 3.5 billion people globally, from millions of publicly available data sources including public records, business listings, marketing lists, phone directories, crowd-sourced data, and more. Pipl provides superior global coverage and exceptionally accurate identity profiles with data from myriad sources, including:

• Data Suppliers: We purchase publicly available information from a wide array of global providers and work with them to thoroughly refine, verify, and test it.
• Crawled Data: This is information that is discovered as our search engine crawls the web. It, too, is data that is available publicly, like information from a LinkedIn or Facebook profile.
• Inferred Data: Information gleaned from our purchased and crawled data. For example, a phone number can allow us to infer the country, state, or city of a prospect or client.
• Like Sources: Determine whether additional information about a person currently in Pipl’s index exists elsewhere on the web and our partner’s APIs. This allows us to more deeply enrich our records with information not previously available.

We aggregate it, clean it, and enrich it to provide the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date account and contact data.

Secret Sauce

“It’s all information that’s publicly available,” Moulton said, “packaged in a way that allows you to have a more complete view of your customers or prospects and make smarter decisions about how you market and sell to them.”

Pipl’s proprietary technology, our secret sauce, uses robust statistical models and data-rich algorithms to accurately match any piece of data about a person — name, email address, phone number, or social media username — to a comprehensive profile which includes professional, social, demographic, and contact information.

“We can deliver a comprehensive profile on someone from a single data point like an email or social media handle,” Moulton said, “even if you transpose a phone number or misspell the name.”

“Our search engine constantly crawls the web and offline data sources so updates to our information are made dynamically,” he said.

All of our people information features email account age and metadata with first and last seen dates. The freshness of our data gives you confidence in knowing your customers are receiving the most up-to-date information available.

How do we do it?

Our developer-friendly People Data API allows you to add a rich layer of people information to your applications. You can choose the level of data you want your query to return—contact, social, and business—so you’re only paying for the data needed for the particular function within your application. For example, you can use the Contact-level API key for queries which only need to return basic contact information – name, gender, age, address & landline. Whereas in situations when you need all the available information about a person, you can use the Business-level API Key to return all the basic contact information PLUS social usernames, images, associates, social profile URLs, work history, educational background, mobile phone, and email address. This gives you full flexibility to mix and match API keys within your applications to get the data you need and optimize your spend.

Integrating the People Data API is quick and simple. You can choose a client library – Python, Ruby, Java, PHP & C#.Net – for implementation in your preferred language. Before you get started, you can run a test query with our Live Demo or run a Data Coverage test. Once you’ve integrated our API into your code you can use demo API keys for further testing. And, all along the way, we offer unmatched customer support from integration to code to troubleshooting.

The Bottom Line

Together, Pipl can help martech companies help their users to:

• Make more informed marketing and sales decisions
• Find and connect with the right people
• Engage in more productive sales conversations
• Create highly targeted, multi-channel campaigns with personalized messages that provide a better experience and higher response rates
• Simplify form fills to increase conversion rates
• Infer data from existing fields such as area code, city, state, and country to create more precise customer segments

Getting to Know You

As Moulton sees it, personalized marketing is continuing to grow and will require sales teams and marketers to know their customers more intimately than ever before. He also knows they need great data to do it.  

“These [martech] companies may offer fantastic solutions for ABM, customer intelligence and market segmentation,” Moulton said. “But, unless you’re working with good, clean data, none of that matters.”

Pipl has the expertise to assist marketing technology companies in solving the biggest data dilemmas and deliver complete, accurate, and up-to-date information to their end-users.

Ready to learn more? Reach out to one of our Pipl people today.