B2B data provider

What a B2B data provider sells

A provider sells some mix of three kinds of record.

• Company data, also called firmographics: industry, headcount, location, revenue band and, from some providers, the software a company runs.
• Contact data: a person's name, title, seniority and department, with a work email and sometimes a direct phone.
• Change data: job changes, funding rounds and open roles, sold as reasons to write now.

It comes as a database you search and export, an API, or enrichment: you send the records you have and get the missing fields back.

Where the data comes from, and the law

• Public pages. Company websites, press releases, job posts and company registers.
• Contributed data. Some providers trade free access for a user's contacts or the email signatures in their inbox.
• Licensed data. Providers buy from and resell to each other, so two vendors can hold the same wrong record.
• Checks. An email address can be tested against its mail server before it is sold. A catch-all domain accepts every address, so a test there proves little.

A named person's work email is personal data. Under the EU GDPR, whoever gets it from anyone but the person must tell them who holds it, why and where it came from, within a month at the latest and by the first message if it is used to contact them, with a few exceptions.1 In California, a business that sells personal information about people who never dealt with it is a data broker. It registers every January, and since 1 August 2026 it must process the deletion requests residents send to all brokers at once through the state's DROP platform.2

How to choose and test one

1. Test on records you can check. Run a few hundred people whose details you already hold through it, and count the emails that come back and the ones that bounce.
2. Check coverage where you sell. Coverage moves with country, industry and company size, so ask for counts in your segment and test them.
3. Ask where each field comes from and how often it is checked again. A provider that has to tell the person should be able to tell you.
4. Price the usable record. Divide what you pay by the records that verify and turn out to be right.
5. Plan for more than one. Providers have gaps in different places, so teams ask several in turn and stop at the first good answer: waterfall enrichment.

In GetSales, the Find work email column asks one finder at a time, in the order you set, and stops at the first address that passes the verifier you pick, or at the first one found when you pick none. It costs 1 credit per address delivered, and a miss costs nothing.

Related

• Sales tools directory: what each tool does and costs.
• Data enrichment: work emails and company data in your table.
• Email finder: a name and a company in, a work email out.
• Compare tools: GetSales beside other outreach tools.

Sources

1. European Parliament and Council of the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), Articles 4(1) and 14, 27 April 2016. Read 28 October 2026.
2. California Privacy Protection Agency (CalPrivacy), Data Broker Registry, last updated 29 July 2026. Read 28 October 2026.