B2B databases give sales, marketing, and recruiting teams access to business contact information they can actually use. Sales teams pull these to find decision makers at target companies, while marketers use them to build prospect lists for campaigns. A typical workflow might involve searching for VP of Engineering contacts at Series B startups in Austin, then pulling their direct emails and phone numbers for outreach.
The technology works by crawling millions of web sources like company websites, LinkedIn profiles, news articles, and public filings. The platforms clean up this raw data, remove duplicates, and verify contact details through email and phone validation systems. Most lead generation database providers use multiple data sources to cross check information accuracy. They'll flag when someone changes jobs, when a company gets new funding, or when contact details go stale.
These tools serve a different purpose than your CRM system. Your CRM tracks people you already know and existing deals in progress. Sales intelligence software helps you discover new prospects and companies to add to your pipeline. Basic web scrapers just grab whatever contact info they can find on a webpage. These platforms dig deeper to find direct dial phone numbers, verify email addresses work, and add context like what technologies a company uses or recent news about them.
Sales development reps use these to build target lists filtered by company size, industry, location, and job titles. They can find the VP of Sales at companies using Salesforce with 100 to 500 employees in the northeast. Marketing teams pull company data enrichment to segment accounts for personalized campaigns. Recruiters search for software engineers at competitors or candidates with specific skills. The data quality varies between providers, but the better ones save hours of manual research and cold calling dead numbers.