Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Verify & Brief Synopsis Of Database List

Posted by Anonymous on 2/26/2010 at 6:11 PM ET 125 Points
I've seen many companies offering Data Cleansing Services for scrubbing, de-duping, and validating internal company databases. However, are there any companies that will do this and more? I need to have a prospect/leads database verified as well as add more criteria to the list. It will be exported in Excel and in addition to verify the current information, we would like a brief synopsis of each company (years, revenue, # of employees, industry, etc.). It's sort of like having someone research each company in Hoovers to gather the data and enter that information in dedicated columns within the spreadsheet. Only thing is that we do not have the resources to do this for a large list. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 2/26/2010 at 9:37 PM Moderator
    The research is obviously going to be labor intensive. If you are not able to hire a temp to do it (and supervise the work), then you'll have to pay someone else to do it and to supervise.

    If that's the case, you might want to look at outsourcing to the Philippines where labor (and management) rates are lower and the people are very conscientious. If you want a referral, let me know.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 2/28/2010 at 7:15 AM Accepted
    I’m not so sure that the service isn’t available and therefore the job might not be as labour (Spelling Michael – This is English – “ou” got it? OK, sorry the USA is bigger than us and we need you more than you need us and I’d better stop whining about our two nations divided by a common language) intensive as you suspect.

    In the dim and distant past when Fax-Blasts were common, legal and yielded results, I managed to find a service which would go through out basic company data at the company record level – they took 52,000 company records on a disk and checked them against an SIC, Zip-Coded standard list using a quaint form of Fizzy, oops, Fuzzy logic to allow for companies which can be legitimately spelt differently (IBM or International Business Machines¬) or were just misspelt by those sons of toil, the sales team. Then they added another 10,000 records from defined SIC codes and company size filters and returned the lot to me. They also checked for the validity or presence of a Fax number and supplied and alternative if theirs was different or added one when it was not present.

    Where it would get labour intensive is at the contact level, where the only way to get your list cleaned and populated with mobile numbers and email addresses is by phone and that takes time but it is not a challenge beyond a company with strategic vision. I’ve got at least 3 clients whom I persuaded to create the data in their CRM system from basically inadequate base data, such as the last 10 years of purchase records from the accounts system or a 30,000 record legacy database from a system which had no rules, no structure and was of unknown accuracy – you can achieve a lot in 3 months is you all work to a common goal.

    But that was than, before a search engine produced 1M page results for “Data Cleaning” and of the 4 companies I found, 3 were fit for purpose.

    That said, I am inspired to go and look for the modern equivalent of that old service as I am sure that it will still be out there, just buried under a ton of industrial benefit demography and other crap!

    Best wishes



    Steve Alker
    Xspirt
  • Posted on 3/3/2010 at 9:29 AM Author
    Thank you for your responses. Both answers were helpful.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/3/2010 at 10:53 AM Member
    Can we stay in contact as I am interested in researching the availability of this service in the UK and the USA in 2010? So far I’ve found a lot of near-misses!!!

    My email address is in my Biography pages (Click on stevea), so perhaps you would consider sending me your direct email address?

    Best wishes and thanks for the kind comments

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt


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