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Modern go-to-market teams are swimming in data – firmographics, technographics, intent signals, engagement scores, and countless enrichment sources.

But here’s the truth: more data doesn’t automatically make your business smarter. It often just makes it messier.

When multiple data vendors, enrichment tools, and APIs are all trying to update the same record, the result is chaos – inconsistent fields, conflicting values, duplicates, and manual clean-up that never ends.

That’s where waterfall logic becomes a game-changer.

Keeping B2B buyer profiles up-to-date is essential for maintaining effective sales and marketing strategies. Unfortunately, keeping profiles up-to-date is tedious and often neglected. Failing to update our customer or buyer profiles does your sales and marketing teams a tremendous disservice. Your teams could spend thousands of dollars and weeks of focus trying to get in touch with a great lead from last year, completely unaware that the person changed jobs three months ago – all because their profile within your CRM and marketing automation systems wasn’t up-to-date. People change jobs and companies go throughM&A all the time – and your sales and marketing teams need to stay informed. That’s just one of the many ways your teams will lose with outdated buyer profiles. Having accurate, up-to-date data seems like a no-brainer, right? Let’s consider why many sales and marketing teams don’t always have the data they need.

It takes a lot of buying signals to build the buyer profiles that our sales and marketing teams need to win business. Firmographics, demographics, technographics, intent, 1st-party data, predictive and engagement. Generally speaking, we can’t get all of those signals from one place. Instead, we’re forced to buy numerous sets of static data from several vendors, then blend it all together. Buying multiple sets of data from multiple sources is inherently expensive, and manually combining that data with our first-party data is time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone. We might jump through those hurdles at first, but the problem arises when we need to update it. 

A static data set is just a snapshot in time, and there’s no way to tell when data has changed to the point where you need a new snapshot. This means that in order to ensure our buyer profiles are up-to-date, we need to regularly buy all of our data over and over again, continuously blending it all together with the old data. That’s going to be very expensive, and it’s going to require a lot of time and effort dedicated to data unification. In many cases, by the time you’ve enriched your new data with the old data, that new data has already become old data. Naturally, many companies will decide that their slightly old data is good enough because they can’t justify the cost of constant data purchases or the time spent unifying it.

Not updating your buyer profiles is a huge mistake in a world of data-driven decision making, where all of the decisions you make depend on having accurate, complete and up-to-date data. Even the best predictive AI models will point you in the wrong direction if the data being analyzed isn’t correct. Simply put, if you want your sales and marketing teams to have the tools they need to reach out and close business, you need to give them buyer profiles that are dynamically updated.

Let’s look at 10 common strategies for ensuring that your buyer profiles are current and accurate, then consider a more realistic solution for automating the entire process.

It’s always that time of year – in sales and marketing we’re always starting a new quarter, ending a new quarter, trying to create demand for the following year or just planning. We always want to start strong and grow better. Let’s assume you start strong. But how do you grow better? How do you outsmart the competition? How do you create sales and marketing systems that help identify the leads that matter? We need to create a system to identify these closeable leads so that sales teams can understand which deals that they can count on for revenue going forward. 

I hosted a webinar where we explored how to up the odds of your marketing and sales campaigns’ success. Closeable revenue is all about the math. Whether that revenue is from demand generation, new opportunities, leads, etc. These days it’s easy (or should be easy) to use systems to determine those opportunities and leads that will convert into closeable business. 

We dove into the 6 steps to increase the odds of building closeable demand and closeable business. It boils down to creating the right profile so you can target the right audience and then building models to understand and categorize which are the right accounts/people to go after. Figuring out which are the best models to identify and categorize leads. Building campaigns using AI to optimize and go after the right kinds of companies and people. Testing the models to identify and evaluate the right results. And finally, do this across both sales and marketing to ensure both teams are fully aligned. So what are the right questions to ask as you go through these steps?

Step #1: Build Better Buyer Profiles – How do you build Buyer Profiles? Do you have a customer data project? Customer Data Platform? How often is it updated? Is it shared across GTM? What’s the breadth of data sources?

Step #2: Target Your Ideal Buyer & TAM – Targeting is easy once you have models. Have you created a model, or is it at least in your head? What are the buying signals that matter? How many lookalikes in the world? Which territory is your next best place?

Step #3: Create Your Buyer Model – Better campaigns are all about “lift” – propensity, persona and intent. How does industry, persona, tech install, engagement or company specialty fit in?

Step #4: Optimize Your Campaigns – Campaign to Buyers and Buying Team combinations by propensity, persona and intent. Do you understand which regions convert with which products or personas?

Step #5: Put Your Buyer Model to the Test – Increase lead flow by removing friction. Are you using A/B testing to formulate GTM campaigns and how much engagement is needed? Are you doing territory and ABM investment tiering based on GTM science?

Step #6: Align Marketing & Sales with Your Buyer Data Platform – Are both sales and marketing aligned together on the same customers and prospects to deliver the outcomes?  Are both teams together leveraging the profiles and funnel optimization techniques to deliver better growth?  Is there an aligned measurement system to track what you manage?

These are the six steps that I use in building scalable and closeable demand. Explore what we found really works and what is delivering today with results for sales and marketing professionals worldwide with respect to each of these 6 steps by watching last month’s webinar, Taking the Guesswork out of Sales & Marketing.