Much like with dairy products and Princes of Bel Air, freshness is one of the most important attributes of B2B data. People Data Labs’ co-founder and CTO, Henry Nevue, recently joined host Rick Holmes, founder of Every Market Media and host of The Corporate Data Show, to discuss data decay, new developments in the DaaS space, and how PDL keeps its data fresh. 

Here's a couple of intriguing highlights from the episode:

Data Holds a Lot of Value, But Decays Quickly

Today, every company is on the path to becoming a data company, but data alone isn’t enough to make the leap. Data, especially data about people’s professional lives, can change quickly, and datasets that lose accuracy also lose value. 

Holmes mentioned up to 5% of B2B emails in a typical dataset decay every month. So, if a dataset isn’t constantly updated, it’s possible that as much as 60% of its records may decay into inaccuracy in just one year. This is increased when complexity is added with practices such as random ingest and consolidation periods. 

This creates a “soup” of data that needs a touch of the right ingredients and a little preparation to make it not just edible, but delicious for effective business operations. This is where the concept of DaaS (Data as a Service) comes into play. DaaS companies play a dual role by providing those missing ingredients to enrich existing records and knit them together in a standardized format.

For example, PDL curates nearly 3 billion records within our dataset.

A Pokemon Approach to Gathering Data

People are always changing and the way we use data is always evolving. Data companies should take a page from Pokemon and adapt a nondiscriminatory approach to data ingestion. In other words, “Gotta catch ‘em all!” This includes the good, bad, and ugly records to ensure important information is not overlooked and preparation for future trends. 

Once data is indexed and analyzed, more insights can be drawn. Additionally, PDL is interested in creating robust datasets that facilitate visualization of both historical and current information on people and companies. 

Listen to the full episode below or click here to see The Corporate Data Show main page.

If you’d like to get started with PDL ASAP, contact us or interact with our data with a free API key.

Like what you read? Scroll down and subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly updates with our latest content.