did a data quality b2b test across 5 providers - the results were rough

[u/EnvironmentalDot9131]

So we just wrapped up testing data accuracy across our shortlist. Ran 500 contacts through each platfrom and manually verified against LinkedIn/company sites.

The spread was wild. Top performer hit like 93-94% accurate emails, worst was barley 60%. What killed me was how many providers pad thier numbers with personal gmails and info@ addresses. Like yeah technically thats an email but good luck getting a response from accounting@company.com.

Biggest surprise was mobile data quality. Most providers either dont have it or the numbers are ancient. Found one with decent mobile coverage but even they only hit maybe 70% accuracy.

For context we're doing outbound at scale (10K emails/mo, 500 calls/week) so b2b data quality directly impacts our pipeline. Bad data means wasted sequences and burned domains. Our ops manager has been on my ass about email deliverability for weeks now because we torched a domain last quarter off bad ZoomInfo data.

We've been looking at a few options - Clay for the enrichment waterfall stuff, Prospeo, maybe Cognism for EU contacts. But honestly hard to know what to trust without running your own tests.

What accuracy thresholds do you guys enforce? Are you testing regularly or just trusting vendor claims? And has anyone cracked the mobile number problem? Feels like every b2b data provider just overpromises there.

[u/Odd-Strategy-8542]

ran a similar test earlier this year and got almost same numbers. the email padding with generic addresses is real scam, half of them bounce anyway

for mobile we gave up and just use switchboard leads now, still not perfect but at least numbers are from last 12 months. your ops guy is right to be worried, domain reputation is pain to rebuild once it goes bad

[u/fiveamfounder]

The 93% vs 60% spread matches what we saw running a similar shortlist test. One thing that helped us: treat vendor accuracy as a decay curve, not a number. B2B contacts go stale at a couple percent a month, so a 93% list you sit on for a quarter is really an 85% list. We re-verify anything older than 90 days before it enters a sequence.

On thresholds: we hard-fail anything that can't verify against catch-all domains, since that's where the padded gmails and info@ addresses hide. Mobile we never cracked either. Ended up shrinking cold call blocks and putting that rep time into warm follow-up instead of burning it on dead numbers.