Great Resignation & Data Decay: 4 Strategies

Data decay is the gradual degradation of B2B contact information accuracy — estimated at 70.3% per year by Gartner — and the Great Resignation accelerated this trend as 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021. As the business environment restructures itself in the post-pandemic era, a new symptom is quickly spreading among companies: Millions of workers are still quitting their jobs in 2022. The so-called “Great Resignation” is not only affecting the interaction between employees and employers, but B2B marketers fear that data decay could turn even the most solid data-driven strategies upside down.

Last refreshed: March 2026 — Updated workforce turnover statistics, refreshed data decay benchmarks, and revised outreach strategies for current market conditions.

From Daniel Conn, GTM Strategist, graph8: “The Great Resignation exposed a fundamental flaw in how most B2B teams treat contact data — they treat it as a one-time asset. In reality, even your best lists need validation every 90 days. People move fast, and your outreach intelligence needs to move with them.”

High-quality data is the fuel that makes the sales funnel engines spin. According to the Global Data Management report, which considered responses from 700 data-driven business leaders around the globe, 84% of B2B companies saw a rising demand for data-based insights in their organizations during the COVID-19 breakout.

Data decay is an issue that every company must face at some point. Email marketing databases, for example, naturally degrade by 22.5% approximately every year. The effects derived from the also known as “Great Reshuffle” or “Big Quit” might have accelerated this state of corrosion to levels we do not fully understand yet.

Experts believe that the “job-quitting furor” is still in full force and could maintain its course. Let’s take a closer look at what action plan is best suitable to face the current situation as we dissect what’s so “great” about this movement.

What Is the Great Resignation?

The Great Resignation is an ongoing economic trend considered a direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept was originally proposed by Professor Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University during his study of the exodus of a record number of workers in 2021.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics, stated that over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021.

While the origin of this major breakout is still under study, Harvard Business Review (HBR) research indicates that the organic resignation rate slowed in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic’s uncertainty. Millions of people lost their jobs, and even unsatisfied workers preferred to remain on familiar grounds rather than take unnecessary risks.

However, with the introduction of vaccines and other stimuli through 2021, employees already had the time frame to re-evaluate their goals, careers, lifestyles, and many other aspects of their everyday routine. As a result, an unprecedented mass chose to exit the workforce, reason enough for the economists to sound the alarm.

According to HBR, the most affected industries by the Great Resignation were retail and hospitality, manufacturing, technology, and healthcare.


What Are the Reasons Behind the Great Reshuffle?

Several theories sustain that the phenomenon was not necessarily caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was most likely influenced by it. Even when the first numbers declare that 33% of the total nonfarm workforce quit jobs in 2021, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover report that about 28% of the U.S. workforce quit in 2019.

This doesn’t mean that there is not a serious problem to address. It just confirms that employees have entered and left the workforce on large scale during the last decade. But why?

LinkedIn deployed a recent survey after their Great Resignation statistics threw a 3.5% decline in employee happiness globally from October 2020 to October 2021. The results ratify that present-time professionals are very clear about their priorities:

• 63% of job seekers claim that work-life balance has the greatest impact on their job search.
• 87% of employees wish to remain remote most of the time.
• 65% of global job searches focus on remote-only jobs.


The collective experience lived through the Great Resignation in 2021 left an indelible mark on how employees understand a work’s role in their lives. Data shows that Americans are willing to take harsh decisions to maintain remote work faculties. Fortunately, companies around the world are answering the call.

Well-known enterprises like Atlassian, Dropbox, Quora, and Reddit are adapting to a permanent flexible work model. Flexjobs even created a full list of options for those who are interested.

But what happens when all B2B founders, executives, marketers, and sales reps who do not wish to work for these companies want to work “with” them? How are we supposed to keep on generating reliable leads if so many positions are moving?

Was B2B Data Affected by the Great Resignation?

As we have learned by now, the so-called “Great Reshuffle” is not as extreme as its title suggests. Furthermore, a recent Pew Research Center study found that employees without a four-year college degree are more likely to quit their jobs than those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

The consulted Great Resignation statistics prove that employees quit after analyzing the following: flexibility to choose their working hours (49% of non-college graduates vs. 34% of college graduates), being forced to work too few hours (35% vs. 17%), and employers requiring a COVID-19 vaccines certificate (21% vs. 8%).


Odds may be that a good lot of your high-quality leads are still green. Nevertheless, it’s important not to assume but to confirm through a well-structured research process that these contacts are, in fact, useful for your CRM data strategies.

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Bad data doesn’t just waste budget — it trains your team to accept poor results as normal. Clean intelligence changes everything.

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Here are four ground-based actions that could help you achieve this mission in a practical and effective way for all parties involved.

4 Strategies to Reduce Data Decay During the Great Resignation

A recent Gartner report estimates that, when it comes to B2B contacts, the data decay rate is estimated to be 70.3% per year. With the Great Reshuffle being as active as it is, data decay has the potential to become the next big pandemic for B2B marketers if not addressed properly.

With so many people moving so fast, it is imperative that B2B companies follow some standard practices to avoid severe damage from data decay:

1. Use LinkedIn for outreach.

LinkedIn is the platform par excellence for B2B contact-making, and decision-makers are well aware of it. For this reason, it is more than likely that many users have updated their information about any change in their employment status. This data could become milled gold if used wisely.

Although it would be too time-consuming and complex for an in-house team to write personalized DMs for all your contacts, LinkedIn can help you recover any communication with outdated databases while seeking to find new contacts.

2. Ask customers to update data.

This task is easier said than done. Today, many businesses understand the weight of their data, so they will make your sales and marketing teams work hard for it.

You’ll need to integrate multiple creative strategies to confirm that your leads did not join the Big Quit. The most practical way to get validation is through automated email send-out reminders, pop-ups reminders on the website, engaging marketing content, polls, and even quizzes. Don’t be afraid to be bold if you aim to stand out from the competition.


3. Integrate a customer data platform.

A customer data platform (CDP) is an interactive database that collects relevant sales and behavioral data from your customers, resulting in detailed and ever-changing individual data profiles.

In case you are unfamiliar with such software, it can acquire data from channels including websites, applications, digital assistants, and marketing clouds. It gathers information such as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, firmographic, transactional, and other types of data. Most significantly, all of the data is collected legally and can be updated regularly.

The graph8 data platform provides a 360-degree view of prospects by combining over 300 million accurate records across 250+ industries — updated continuously to stay ahead of turnover-driven decay. Trusted by 2,500+ B2B companies, it’s built specifically to keep your targeting clean even when the market is moving fast.

4. Focus on first-party data strategies.

First-party data is information about the company’s customers collected directly from your audience. It’s the most reliable and trustworthy information you can have, just rich raw material for creating efficient marketing campaigns.

Collecting first-party data may require more time and effort to process, but it has proven worthy, as it will stay fresh for a longer period of time, with less effort to keep engaged. If managed correctly, this type of data can become the cornerstone of any successful lead generation strategy.

Build a Healthy Data Environment

The deterioration of data can occur due to inaccuracy, outdatedness, untrustworthy sources, or the unstoppable effect of aging out. It is still impossible to fully secure that all data will remain fresh without a significant amount of effort, time, and money.

With that in mind, the first step to keep data gardens green is to foment a data-friendly culture in your organization. Your company should understand the importance of data: how, when, and where it is used in the daily workflow; the difference between data-driven decision-making vs. acting on a hunch; and how meaningful it is for clients to have a solid foundation.

With these targeted efforts, it’s entirely possible to maintain strong data quality for B2B sales — even as your market keeps moving. Companies like Okta have used CIENCE data solutions to enrich over 1 million contact records, enabling the kind of outreach scale that a best-in-class enterprise sales team demands. When data is clean, every dollar of outreach spend lands harder.

If your team is ready to stop burning budget on stale lists, explore B2B data solutions built for high-velocity markets or talk to a GTM engineer about a data audit.

Stage 1 Financial used CIENCE to set 190+ appointments with C-suite and founder-level contacts — building a scalable pipeline without adding headcount.

CIENCE + graph8 pricing: $5,000 one-time GTM system setup, $2,499/mo strategic execution, and the graph8 platform at $499/mo. No long-term contracts. See full pricing →

Whether or not you decide to work with us, you’ll walk away with a clear picture of where your pipeline is leaking and what it would take to fix it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast does B2B data decay?

B2B contact data decays at an estimated 70.3% per year according to Gartner. Email marketing databases specifically degrade by approximately 22.5% annually. The Great Resignation accelerated this decay as millions of workers changed jobs, invalidating phone numbers, email addresses, and job titles stored in CRM systems.

What caused the Great Resignation?

The Great Resignation was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave employees time to re-evaluate their careers and priorities. Key drivers include demand for work-life balance (63% of job seekers), desire to remain remote (87% of employees), and focus on remote-only jobs (65% of global searches). Over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit in 2021.

How can B2B companies reduce data decay?

Implement 4 strategies: use LinkedIn to verify and update contact information, send automated reminders asking customers to confirm their data, integrate a customer data platform (CDP) for real-time profile updates, and prioritize first-party data collection from direct interactions. These approaches keep your CRM accurate despite high workforce turnover rates.