How fast does a B2B CRM go stale?

About 13% of decision makers change company or title within a year. For a 10,000-contact CRM of managers, directors, VPs, C-level leaders and founders, that is about 117 accurate contacts lost every month, or 1.2% of the list.

We followed 355,160 decision makers from 1 October 2023 to 1 October 2024 and checked who was still at the same company with the same title. 13.2% were not. The 95% interval runs from 10.8% to 15.6%, which puts the monthly loss between 95 and 140 contacts per 10,000.

What we measured

The data is the people and company records Ken uses for sales and outreach: public professional profiles, work histories and company records for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. We took a 1% sample, 2,679,597 profiles, and found everyone who held a manager-level or more senior role on 1 October 2023.

For each of them we asked one question about 1 October 2024: is this person still at the same company, with the same title?

• 9.6% had changed company.
• 3.6% were at the same company with a new title.
• 86.8% were unchanged.

A year of 13.2% loss works out to 1.17% a month if people leave at a steady pace. After two years, about 75% of the list would still be accurate.

Why 13.2% is a floor

Two things push the real figure up.

Promotions often go unrecorded. People who move up inside a company frequently edit their current role instead of adding a new one, or don't update at all. So the 3.6% title-change figure is a lower bound.

Profiles are updated late. Run the same test from later start dates and the rate falls: 13.4% from April 2023, 13.2% from October 2023, 13.0% from April 2024 and 12.3% from October 2024. The most recent year only looks calmer because some of its changes haven't been entered yet.

There is also a large group of quiet profiles. 122,316 people in the cohort (34%) listed a role with no linked company record, and only 5.7% of them changed in the year. For the 232,844 people whose role is linked to a company record, which is closer to what a B2B sales team keeps in its CRM, 17.1% changed. That is about 155 contacts a month per 10,000.

Who moves, and who stays

Seniority matters more than anything else we looked at.

Managers, directors and VPs all change at about the same rate, roughly one in six a year. C-level leaders change half as often, and founders and owners hardly change at all. A list built on VPs of Sales decays about twice as fast as a list of CEOs.

By function, marketing leaders were among the most mobile, with 23.7% changing in a year. Sales leaders were at 18.1% and general managers at 10.0%.

By company size, people at companies with 51 to 200 employees changed most (20.4%). At companies with more than 10,000 employees the rate was 16.1%, with more of it internal title changes and less of it people leaving. At companies with 1 to 10 employees it was 10.5%.

By country, the rates were close: 12.8% in the United States, 14.7% in the United Kingdom, 14.9% in Australia, 13.4% in Canada, 14.7% in Ireland and 12.4% in New Zealand.

What this means for a sales team

• Budget for 1% to 1.4% of a decision-maker list going stale every month. For a 10,000-contact CRM that is 95 to 140 contacts a month, or about 1,320 a year (95% interval 1,080 to 1,560).
• Re-verify the middle of the org chart first. Managers, directors and VPs go stale twice as fast as C-level leaders and four times as fast as founders.
• Don't wait a year. After 12 months more than one contact in eight is wrong, and the profiles behind these numbers are still catching up.

What we expected

Before pulling any data, we wrote down a guess: 18% to 28% of decision makers would change company or title within a year. The data came in lower, at 13.2%. The 20% to 30% yearly decay figures often quoted for B2B data usually count more than job changes, such as bounced emails, changed phone numbers and closed companies, so they are not directly comparable. Measured on job and title changes alone, decision makers are steadier than we assumed.

Three other predictions held. C-level leaders change company less often than managers (6.6% against 11.4%). People at companies under 50 employees change company more often than people at companies with more than 10,000 (12.2% against 9.4%). And later start dates show fewer changes.

Method in brief

A decision maker is anyone whose title reads as manager, director, VP, C-level or founder. We counted a company change when no role at the same company covered the follow-up date, and a title change when the person was still there under a different title. The sample is 20 evenly spaced slices of the profile index, and the 95% interval leaves out one slice at a time and recomputes (a jackknife), because some slices change much more than others. A second, independent analysis recomputed the headline counts from the raw extract with its own code, and every compared count matched. This is a descriptive cohort study: differences between groups are associations, not causes.