What Is Data Decay?

Data decay is one of the biggest challenges in B2B sales and marketing. Research shows that approximately 22.5% of B2B contact data becomes inaccurate each year. This means that a CRM database of 10,000 contacts will have roughly 2,250 outdated records after just one year.

The primary causes of data decay include: employee turnover and job changes (the average tenure in tech is 2-3 years), company mergers and acquisitions, office relocations, domain changes, and email system migrations. Phone numbers change when employees switch companies, and email addresses become invalid when people leave organizations.

The cost of data decay is significant. Sales teams waste an estimated 27% of their time working with bad data - chasing invalid emails, calling disconnected numbers, and reaching out to people who no longer hold their listed positions. This translates to thousands of dollars in lost productivity per sales rep per year.

The solution to data decay is regular data enrichment and validation. Platforms like Enrichabl allow teams to periodically re-enrich their contact databases, identifying outdated records and appending fresh, verified information. Best practice is to re-validate email data quarterly and fully re-enrich contact records every 6 months.