I have built the scraping guts behind more "real time business intelligence" products than I would ever admit on a CV. So when a contact data company tells you their database is fresh, I am not impressed, because I know how that word gets made.
Here is the part nobody puts in the sales deck. These companies pull public pages on a schedule, pour the rows into a giant table, and sell you a seat to the table. That table is a photograph. It was true the day it was scraped and it has been aging ever since. You pay every month like it refreshes every month. It does not. A row captured in February is still February sitting in your CRM in June, looking exactly as confident as a row pulled this morning, because nothing on the screen tells you which is which.
And the field that goes bad first is the one you bought the thing for. Where a person works right now. People quit and get promoted and get poached and get pushed out, and the company page is the last place on earth to find out. So "current company," the whole reason the list has any value, is one of the first columns to start lying by the time your rep hits send.
The industry knows this. Of course they know it. They built the pipelines. They just figured out that decay is invisible, and you cannot be angry about a number you never see. So the pitch drifts back to coverage. Millions of contacts. Look how big the table is. Freshness is the expensive part. It makes the table look smaller, and a smaller honest number loses sales calls to a bigger dishonest one.
