Decay is constant, not occasional
People move roles, companies merge and rebrand, domains change, and titles drift. Industry estimates for annual B2B contact decay generally land somewhere between a fifth and a third of records per year. Whatever the true figure for your segment, the practical consequence is the same: a database left alone for a year is substantially a different database from the one you bought.
Measure your own rate instead of borrowing an average
Take a sample of a hundred records from your existing database and re-verify them. The share that failed is your real decay rate, and it is far more useful than any published figure because it reflects your segment, not a market-wide blend. If more than one record in ten is dead after three months, your current cadence is too slow. Repeat the sample rather than trusting the first result; a single sample from one industry slice can mislead.
Cadence should follow the segment
- Quarterly suits most established B2B segments.
- Monthly to six-weekly suits fast-moving markets: early-stage companies, agencies, high-churn industries, marketplace sellers.
- Six-monthly is usually enough for large, slow-moving institutions.
- Any segment where you are actively sending should be re-verified before a major campaign regardless of the calendar.
The signs that you are already overdue
- Bounce rate climbing across sequences that used to run clean.
- Sales reporting that contacts have left, more than occasionally.
- Duplicate companies appearing under slightly different names.
- Segments that no longer add up because company attributes have changed.
- Anyone on the team maintaining a private spreadsheet because they do not trust the CRM.
Refresh is cheaper than rebuilding
Re-verifying and replacing the records that moved costs a fraction of researching the segment from scratch, and it preserves the segmentation, notes and CRM history already attached to those accounts. The expensive version is doing nothing for a year and then starting over, which throws away the account context along with the stale contacts.
Put it into practice