B2B contact data validation: what to check, and how to run it in Salesforce

A B2B record can go bad without anyone making a mistake. Your contact takes a new job, the office moves two floors, the company closes a location, and the record in your CRM looks as clean as the day it went in.

You find out later, when a campaign bounces or a rep spends a morning calling people who left. Most of what gets written about contact data, including a fair amount of what I've written, is about consumers and parcels. B2B lists break in different places, so this post covers what to check on a company record, what to do with the results that mostly come up on business data, and how to run it on a Salesforce export.

How fast does B2B contact data go stale?

There's no single honest number. You'll see B2B data decay quoted as a tidy percentage a year, and I haven't found a primary source behind one. What the Bureau of Labor Statistics does count all points the same way:

• People leave. US employers recorded 5.1 million job separations in August 2026 alone, equal to 3.2% of employment in one month. In professional and business services the rate was 4.1%.
• Tenure is short. In January 2026, half the workers in professional and business services had been with their employer for less than 3.8 years.
• Companies close and open. BLS counted 310,000 private-sector business locations shutting down in the second quarter of 2025, the latest quarter with closure data, and 323,000 new ones starting up in the first quarter of 2026.

None of that tells you how much of your own file is bad. It does tell you that a list from a few years ago needs checking before you trust it.

The cost shows up first in your sending limits. Amazon SES asks senders to keep bounces below 2% and puts accounts under review at 5%, and HubSpot lists a 5% hard bounce rate as a reason for suspending email. Our bounce rate guide has the full list. Then it shows up on the shipping side, because FedEx charges $25.50 and UPS $25.25 to correct an address, whether the box holds a holiday gift or a customer's replacement part.

What should you check on a B2B record?

Each field fails in its own way, so check each one separately.

Work email

A proper check looks up the domain's mail servers and asks the receiving server whether that mailbox exists, without sending a message. It also flags typos, disposable addresses, role addresses like info@ and known spam traps. On a B2B list, "address not found" is the result to watch, because it's often what a departed employee looks like.

Business phone

The check tells you whether the number is valid, whether it's mobile, landline or VoIP, which carrier it's on and whether it was ported. Line type matters here because a main office line and a rep's cell can sit in the same field. A landline usually can't receive a text as a text, so it belongs in a call list. Our phone guide goes through the routing.

A phone check can't tell you who picks up. A valid direct line may now belong to whoever replaced your contact.

Company address

The usual B2B miss is the suite. An address can point to the right building and still be missing the unit that gets the package to the right office, and USPS requires the unit number wherever the address has one. A postal check corrects the ZIP+4, confirms with USPS Delivery Point Validation (DPV) that USPS delivers there, and flags the missing unit.

The company itself

A valid email at a company that closed last year is still a dead account. Matching accounts to company data like legal name, status, industry and size answers a different question from contact validation. Coverage depends on the country and the data source, so test it on a sample of your accounts before you rely on it.

What should you do with catch-all and role-based emails?

These results mostly come up on company domains, and neither is a simple yes or no.

A catch-all domain accepts mail for any name at the server and may bounce it later, so a validator can confirm the domain and can't confirm the mailbox. Deleting all of them would cost you real people. Put them in their own segment, send to it in smaller batches after your main send, and remove whatever bounces.

Role addresses like info@, sales@ and accounts@ go to a shared inbox. They're fine for invoices and service notices, where you want whoever's on duty to read the message. Leave them out of marketing campaigns.

"Address not found" is simpler: stop sending. Then treat it as news. If that was your main contact at the account, your rep needs to know before the renewal comes up.

How do you check B2B data in Salesforce?

The first pass needs nothing installed. Here's the flow with DQVerify, and any tool that takes a CSV works about the same way.

1. Export a report. Run a Contacts or Leads report with the record ID, email, phone and address columns. Company addresses and main numbers often live on the Account, so run an Accounts report too. Save each as a CSV (the upload format is here).
2. Run the checks. Upload the file and pick address, email, phone or all three. Results come back with your own columns unchanged and a result on every row.
3. Bring the results back. Add a field such as Email Status, then update the records with the Data Import Wizard (up to 50,000 records, matched on Salesforce ID) or Data Loader for bigger files. Export a backup first.

Writing results to their own field, instead of overwriting the original, lets you filter your sends and review what changed. Our 15-minute Salesforce audit has the report recipes if you want to size the problem first.

Once the backlog is clean, check new records as they come in, on your web forms through the API, or with a native Salesforce connector that checks leads and contacts as they're entered.

What about duplicate accounts?

Validation tells you whether a detail works. It won't tell you that Acme Inc. and ACME Incorporated are the same customer. Merging duplicates is a separate job, and in a B2B org it's often the bigger one, because every rep and every list import can create another version of the same company.

What results have teams seen?

These come from teams using DQE's validation technology, which DQVerify is built on:

• A media advertising group in France, on Salesforce, checks incoming B2B data. Its campaign deliverability went from 91% to 98.9% in 2022.
• A software group serving wealth managers, also on Salesforce, removed duplicates on almost 20% of the company records in its CRM.
• A foodservice wholesaler in France checks B2B customer data as it's entered, which helps protect its wholesaler status and keeps the data ready for e-billing.
• A technology company took email deliverability from 75% to 98%. In the words of its head of marketing, C. Renaud: "We've doubled the open rate of our emails, thanks in part to better personalised messages."

Treat these as examples. They use DQE directly, three of them in France, and your results depend on your file and sources.

Where DQVerify fits

DQVerify checks address, email and phone with one account and one API key, by CSV upload or API. One credit checks one field on one record, so all three on a record take 3 credits. Credits come in packs per check type, from $275 for 20,000 credits, with no subscription.

US addresses are processed with USPS CASS Certified software supplied by a USPS licensee: the check corrects and returns the ZIP+4 and confirms deliverability with USPS DPV. Email, phone and international address checks run on DQE Software SAS infrastructure in France, and we don't store your validation data.

DQVerify is listed on Salesforce AppExchange, and DQE, our parent company, is a Salesforce ISV Partner. The native Salesforce connector and Unify, which merges duplicates, come with Enterprise plans. Company data matching is set up with our team at sales@dqverify.com, so ask what's covered for your accounts.

You can start with 100 free credits (1,000 if you sign up by November 30, 2026) for 14 days, no credit card, business email required. Run your oldest segment first, since that's where you'll see the most.

How old is the oldest contact your reps are calling this week?