How does data validation work?

Data validation can help you improve your prospecting success, but how does data validation work?

Validated data means:

• Every email address has been checked for deliverability (including catchalls)
• Each social profile has been reviewed for accuracy of title and current employment
• The phone number has reached (a) the prospect live (b) the prospect’s voicemail with his or her name or (c) the prospect’s admin who confirms it is their best number (and includes the path information and the admin’s name, if applicable).

If you’ve built a series of prospecting activities in a tool like Outreach or Salesloft, you’re probably dropping leads into those funnels based on their industry or other qualification criteria. One criteria you may not have thought of is the most likely channel to reach them on.

For example:

As you can see, Susan Smith has three validated channels so she’ll fit great into the sequence that covers all three available channels.

Mark Sanders isn’t worth calling until your research team can find you a good phone number to dial, but you can drop him into an email and social sequence.

Finally, Pablo Rodriguez likely isn’t worth reaching out to via LinkedIn, but you can try him over email and phone all day long.

Yes, it adds some complexity to how you build your workflow, but it also eliminates a lot of wasted effort in channels that are dramatically less likely to convert to conversations. It will create more focus for prospecting success and lead to more sales opportunities.

Here at Au Partners, when we stopped making calls on numbers that we couldn’t validate with our research team (our sales reps don’t waste their time on this), we saw our connection rates double overnight.

Through our data validation processes, our team calls every number, documents every path, tests every email, and reviews every LinkedIn profile. You can see how we helped one of our clients achieve 4X their outbound success through our data validation here.