The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on 25 May 2018.
This new European regulation applies to any company that collects, processes, and stores personal data that you can use to directly or indirectly identify a person.
So what does the GDPR say about business development? Can we still send out emails or make prospecting calls? Is it now illegal to search for email addresses? Should we throw our prospects' business cards in the trash? 🗑️
Does the GDPR impact the rules for B2B prospecting?
Let's look at what the rules say:
In cases where consent is necessary, the controller can demonstrate that the data subject has given his or her consent to the processing of personal data relating to him or her (Article 7(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation).
Let's take an example: a person gives you their business card. You have no proof (Opt-In) of their consent to contact them. If you interpret the GDPR this way, then you cannot reach this prospect.
But if you follow this interpretation, you will never be able to contact a prospect again, neither by mail nor by phone! ⛔️
💡 In reality, you can still send prospecting emails. The GDPR does not change anything on this subject, as confirmed by the CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés) 👇👇 :
The GDPR does not change the rules applicable to prospecting emails, whether B2B or B2C (CNIL).
The CNIL says:
"The subject of the solicitation must be related to the profession of the person solicited (example: message presenting the merits of a software program to paul.toto@company name, IT manager.)."
It's consistent: without prospecting, a company can neither live nor survive!
Enrichment of contact data: a solution in line with the GDPR
To make an approach, you still need to obtain the email addresses of your prospects, as well as information about them and their company.
Dropcontact is a solution that finds and verifies the professional nominative email addresses of your prospects, enriches your contact files...and is compliant with the GDPR👌:
- We don't sell leads. We enrich the files of the leads that you already have (and conform to the GDPR 😉).
- Most solutions on the market find email addresses using their customers' databases, which they have stored and resold. This is by no means the way Dropcontact works. We have developed our own algorithms for searching and verifying business email addresses. According to our clients' feedback, we have the best rates of found and validated addresses on the market 💥.
GDPR: comply with the obligation to erase data
The GDPR indicates that a person can ask your company to delete his or her personal data from the database.
The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure as soon as possible of personal data relating to him or her [...]
(Article 17(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation).
If one of your prospects asks you to delete their data:
You delete the data you have on this person from your emailing solution and/or your CRM.
⚠️ But there is still some data left on the phones, mailboxes, files... of your team, because all these applications are not connected.
Your company cannot comply with the GDPR because it cannot guarantee the total deletion of the data it possesses: it requires too much handling and too much time.
Deleting personal data from all your applications? ...
In practice, it is therefore impossible at the present to be 100% GDPR compliant.
Comply with the GDPR thanks to Dropcontact
Dropcontact will also allow you to connect all your solutions containing contacts (CRM, Outlook, GSuite, iPhone, Android, emailing application...).
You will have a single, unified and synchronized database ✨. Simple
Thus, if a person requests the deletion of their data from your company, there will be only one manipulation in order to erase it from all company files. Straightforward.
Do you want to clean up, enrich your prospects/leads and find the pro nominative emails, while being compliant with the GDPR? Head there now 👉 Dropcontact 💥
Dropcontact also fully integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive CRMs.
