What is B2B data?

• Firmographics: legal name, industry code, headcount band, revenue band, locations, ownership.
• Technographics: the software, hardware or services a company is known to use.
• Contact data: named people, job titles, work emails and direct dials.
• Intent and engagement signals: evidence that a company is researching a topic or product category.
• Transactional and operational records: what businesses actually ordered, installed or shipped, held by the firms that served them.

When people search this phrase, they are usually looking for contact lists to fill a sales pipeline. That is one corner of the field. The less crowded corner, and the one most relevant to brokering, is the last item: records a company built up while serving other businesses, which can reveal who uses what, where and how much.

Data about a company is not personal data. The European Commission notes that the GDPR governs information about individuals, not companies or other legal entities. The trouble is that much B2B data is about people: a named procurement manager with a work email is an identifiable person. In the UK, the ICO's guidance separates corporate subscribers, such as limited companies, from individual subscribers, such as sole traders and some partnerships, for electronic marketing rules. In California, the temporary exemption for business contact information in the state privacy law expired on 1 January 2023, so those records now carry the same rights as other personal information there.

Here is an illustrative scenario, not a real deal. An industrial equipment distributor has supplied compressors and pumps to factories in several states for two decades. Its service records show which model sits in which plant, when it was installed and when it was last repaired. A maintenance software company wants exactly that picture to decide which factories to approach first.

The broker separates the records into two layers. The first is company-level: plant location, industry, equipment models and install years. That is B2B data with no individual in it. The second layer is the named plant engineers and their phone numbers. The broker advises leaving that layer out, both because the engineers gave their details to get service from the distributor and because the buyer can make its own approaches using public company information.

The distributor also checks its supply agreements: some customers' contracts treat equipment configurations as confidential. Those sites are removed. The final licence covers company-level install-base data, refreshed quarterly, for the buyer's internal sales planning only. The distributor earns from records it already held, and the buyer gets a view no contact-list provider could give it.

• Whether customer contracts name any of the records as confidential information.
• Which fields identify individuals, and whether the buyer truly needs them.
• How current the records are. Companies move, merge and close, and stale firmographics mislead.
• Whether the dataset could reveal a customer's commercial secrets, such as volumes or prices paid.
• Where the people named are based, since UK, EU and several US state rules differ.