B2B Data Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the terms sales and marketing teams encounter when working with B2B data.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate in email refers to the percentage of sent emails that could not be delivered to the recipient's mailbox, categorized as either hard bounces (permanent failures) or soft bounces (temporary issues).
Catch-All Email
A catch-all email domain is configured to accept all incoming messages regardless of the specific address, making it impossible to verify whether a particular mailbox exists.
CRM Data Hygiene
CRM data hygiene is the ongoing practice of maintaining clean, accurate, and complete data in your CRM system through regular validation, deduplication, enrichment, and standardization.
Data Decay
Data decay is the gradual degradation of data accuracy over time as contact details, job titles, company information, and other B2B data points become outdated.
Data Enrichment
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data records with additional information from external sources, improving accuracy, completeness, and usefulness for sales and marketing teams.
Data Normalization
Data normalization is the process of standardizing data formats, values, and structures across a dataset so that records from different sources are consistent and comparable.
Deliverability Score
A deliverability score is a rating that predicts how likely an email is to successfully reach the recipient's inbox rather than being filtered to spam or bounced.
Email Validation
Email validation checks whether an email address is correctly formatted and associated with a real, active mailbox - encompassing both syntax rules and deliverability testing.
Email Verification
Email verification is the process of confirming that an email address is valid, properly formatted, and capable of receiving messages, without actually sending an email.
Firmographic Data
Firmographic data describes the characteristics of a business organization, including industry, revenue, employee count, location, and company structure - the B2B equivalent of demographic data.
Golden Record
A golden record is the single, most accurate and complete version of a data entity created by merging and deduplicating information from multiple sources.
ICP Scoring
ICP scoring is a lead qualification method that rates prospects based on how closely they match your Ideal Customer Profile, using firmographic, technographic, and behavioral attributes.
Lead Enrichment
Lead enrichment is the process of automatically appending additional data to incoming leads - such as company details, contact information, and firmographics - to enable faster qualification and more personalized outreach.
Multi-Provider Enrichment
Multi-provider enrichment uses multiple data vendors simultaneously or sequentially to enrich records, maximizing coverage and accuracy by combining the strengths of different data sources.
Waterfall Enrichment
Waterfall enrichment is a data enrichment strategy that routes each record through a sequence of data providers, moving to the next source only when the previous one fails to return a match.