In B2B marketing, particularly within mature demand programs and account-based marketing (ABM) frameworks, contact expansion is crucial for unlocking additional opportunities within existing target accounts. Too often, programs rely on a narrow set of known contacts—typically acquired during early engagement phases or inherited from legacy campaigns. This limits reach, risks fatigue, and reduces potential pipeline velocity.
According to Forrester's 2024 report, The State Of Business Buying, the average B2B purchase decision involves 13 individuals within an organization, and 89% of these purchases engage two or more departments.
The opportunity lies in expanding engagement with relevant new stakeholders across buying groups and functions, while also improving the quality and contactability of data in-market. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Data Health Audit & Contact Gap Analysis
Before pursuing contact acquisition, begin with a structured audit of your existing database to assess its marketability, completeness, and strategic coverage. Many organizations already have a sizable proportion of the right personas, but the data is often outdated, unstandardized, or missing critical fields, such as email addresses, job titles, or company names. That makes it difficult to activate effectively.
When auditing your database, focus on three key areas to guide your contact expansion strategy:
- Data health: Assess structure, completeness, and recency of existing records to determine which contacts are usable and which require cleansing or enrichment.
- Gap by buying group: Identify underrepresented job functions across target accounts.
- Gap by role/level and region: Highlight missing senior influencers or operational decision-makers and uncover geographic blind spots.
Taking a diagnostic approach ensures that contact expansion efforts are grounded in data quality, first enabling us to prioritize cleansing, enriching, and only then acquiring new records. Simply adding contacts to a flawed database is not best practice. Addressing foundational issues upfront improves overall program effectiveness and ensures cleaner integration into marketing and sales workflows.
Defining Target Personas with Sales Buy-In
Before acquiring new contacts, ensure you have a clear and agreed-upon view of who you’re targeting. Work with Sales to co-create a persona brief that defines:
- The job titles, functions, levels, and geographies you need
- Any industry-specific nuances that matter for your market
- How the problems your proposition fixes manifest for those job titles
- The buying group roles that should be prioritized
Review and sign off on this brief with Sales before sourcing any new contacts, ensuring alignment with the outreach strategy. That way, both teams are on the same page, and Sales gets contacts they can actually use.
Data Enrichment and Acquisition
To build high-quality, net-new contact lists tailored to each account, it’s important to use the right mix of sources for the right reasons:
- 3rd-party vendors provide scale, quickly delivering large volumes of contacts across target personas.
- Content syndication programs attract engaged prospects while excluding those already in your database to avoid duplication.
- Network mapping tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Commsor, Connect the Dots, Swarm, and My Most Trusted help build warm paths into accounts by identifying mutual connections and existing relationships and surfacing niche or specialist job titles.
Sales Collaboration & Mutual Contact Mapping
Contact expansion is most effective when sales plays an active role.
Sales teams can help identify warm paths into target accounts using tools like Sales Navigator or internal CRM notes. Marketing supports this by creating content and tools that contacts are likely to share internally, for example:
- Peer-led roundtables
- Reports or frameworks that appeal to multiple roles across the buying groups
- Email templates or social content for internal referrals
- Buyer enablement technologies to improve internal buying group stakeholder education and collaboration
This creates a multiplier effect, where one engaged contact can introduce several more.
Database Ingestion & Ongoing Data Stewardship
Effective contact expansion isn’t just about adding new names to your systems, it’s about ensuring they stay marketable, relevant, and actionable over time. Once you’ve acquired new contacts, they should be seamlessly ingested into your CRM and MAP with clean formatting and accurate segmentation. But don’t stop there.
Contact data decays fast, by at least 30% per year, with some sources like Gartner putting it closer to 70%. People change jobs, switch companies, or update their preferences. Without ongoing management, your investment in enrichment and acquisition will quickly lose value.
To protect that investment, build in ongoing data stewardship practices:
- Run quarterly database health audits to flag outdated, duplicate, or unmarketable records.
- Set up always-on enrichment workflows to maintain accuracy across key personas and buying groups.
- Develop master data management strategies that evolve with your segmentation, targeting, and go-to-market needs.
Taking a long-term approach turns contact expansion from a one-off effort into a strategic data operation that fuels sustained pipeline performance.
Best Practices in Contact Expansion
- Start with data: Audit what you have before acquiring more
- Sales alignment is essential: Ensure buy-in on target personas
- Invest in shareable content: The best content generates organic reach within accounts
- Measure by buying group penetration, not just lead volume
Contact expansion is not just about more names in a database. It’s about intentionally growing influence across the buying group within key accounts, supporting multi-threaded engagement, and setting the stage for higher conversion rates and stronger pipeline momentum.
