Database Services

The quality of your contact list determines the success of your sales/marketing effort. A good database allows you to get to work immediately, selling. A bad one, requires making up for the data’s shortcomings (bad fits, missing/wrong contact information, duplicate records, etc.), which translates to significant more cost and time before you can be productive.

Meta has more than 25 years experience researching, acquiring, compiling and manipulating sales databases for 100s of sales operations, each with their own unique needs and issues. In addition, we’ve built dozens of tools to assist us in this endeavor, handling nearly every conceivable manipulation you can perform on a sales database or multiple databases, simultaneously. Our sales database (DB) services span the gambit and are described below.

Meta’s database manipulation services include:

DB Research & Acquisition

Sales databases are dime a dozen. Finding one that aligns with your target market and will perform for you is another matter. Since our prospecting clients judge our performance by the quality and quantity of what we produce, then we know the importance of a good database to start with. We can apply this same understanding and experience to help you find the right database for your sales/marketing program.

DB Building/Compilation

Sometimes no database is available that aligns with your target market or the quality of what exists is available is poor. We discovered this for several clients that were pursuing new markets, markets that aren’t represented by a SIC or NAICS code (standard industry classification method) and where little/no industry contact data existed on the market. In these cases, we built a custom sales database for our clients that was of much higher quality than they could have pieced together and generated sales appointments for them while we did it.

Duplicate Removal/Reconciliation

We know what occurs when we accidentlly contact the same person or organization we called recently. The result is embarrassment, tarnishing the “brand”, or worse, being viewed as harassment. We all try to avoid this whenever possible. Duplicate removal or flagging is the answer, but doing it right is key. Meta uses a multi-dimensional “deduping” engine that considers numerous factors to identify ALL the duplicate records. In addition, questionable “near” duplicates, such as slightly different spellings of an organization, are flagged for further scrutiny and reconciliation. Our deduping tool is rules-based, so we can adjust how records are considered and prioritized. We can remove the duplicates from your database or flag the records we identified as duplicates so you can review them before removal.

DB Record Consolidation

There is little worse than throwing away valuable information in a sales database because it “duplicate”, but it occurs every day for many reasons. Duplicate records inevitably exists in all databases and is prevalent when merging multiple databases together. The waste occurs when duplicate records are removed from a database by selecting the first or best record of an organization and eliminating the rest. What is lost are other contact names, titles, phone numbers, etc. Worse, when multiple databases are merged, the “new” database fields must be standardized to align with the host database fields and the exceptions are left behind. In both cases, valuable company and/or contact information is lost. We developed a sophisticated tool to capture this information and place it in the related host/parent record so it is not lost and can be leveraged.

DB Filtering/Prioritization & Target Contact Identification

When you have a hodgepodge of data or a large sales database to work, it makes sense to identify the higher-priority records to pursue first. The question is how to identify the records and how easy it is to do. Meta has experience prioritizing databases to work. We do this on a daily basis and have developed an advanced tool we use internally that considers up to 60 factors when doing so. We can leverage this expertise and help you flag or prioritize your database so you can pursue the most important records first.