The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the heart of any B2B business. It is the single source of truth for all customer and prospect data. Maintaining a clean and updated database is crucial because it ensures that the information used by sales and marketing teams is accurate and relevant.
CRM data enrichment is a process that involves refreshing and enhancing the CRM to ensure that all data remains relevant, accurate, and up-to-date. Data enrichment helps businesses enhance outbound sales, streamline inbound sales and marketing processes, and improve overall sales effectiveness.
The role of AI in data enrichment
The proliferation of AI has had a solid, positive impact on data enrichment. CRM enrichment is typically a cumbersome process, and while data enrichment tools have helped automate certain processes, AI has elevated data enrichment by enabling businesses to enrich their CRMs with real-time data, first-party data, and deep research-driven insights.
Perhaps the biggest role AI has played in data enrichment is in saving time. The data enrichment process involves enhancing or appending several pieces of information about a contact or a company. This requires extensive research across multiple channels, collating data, identifying and filling gaps, and fixing errors. If done manually, enriching each contact could take even an entire day. While basic automation tools help reduce some of the manual effort, AI has made it possible to slash this down to minutes.
The data enrichment process that used to take hours with manual research can now be done in a matter of minutes.
Benefits of AI data enrichment for businesses
With AI, CRM data enrichment is not only faster but is more comprehensive. AI helps businesses enrich their CRM with insights and signals in addition to basic data.
Using AI, businesses can get
- Real-time data that helps maintain a CRM that’s always up-to-data
- Contextual data about accounts and contacts, making outreach more effective
- Buyer intent signals that helps convert and close deals faster
- Accurate and verified data, enabling sales teams to save time
- Comprehensive data and insights about customers, ensuring better relationships
- Intelligence about other busineses to help you gain an edge over competitors
Here’s how using AI-native CRM data enrichment tools can help businesses:
Precise targeting of high-potential leads
AI helps enrich data with comprehensive insights and smartly sort leads based on their likelihood of conversion, ensuring that sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising prospects.
Shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates
AI automates routine tasks like lead scoring and cold outreach, which helps significantly reduce the time spent on prospecting, and reduces the duration of a typical sales cycle. Moreover, precise targeting and outreach helps increase conversion rates and close more deals faster.
Targeted ABM strategies
AI-powered data enrichment tools help get comprehensive insights about every contact, making it easier to segment leads and tailor campaigns for different audience segments.
Personalized outreach
One of the biggest benefits of AI data enrichment is that it helps with personalizing outreach messages. Using AI, you can enrich your CRM with detailed information about a lead. Beyond contact information, you can get data on their education and employment history, certification, topics of interest, etc., and also get insight about a lead’s recent social media activity, website activity, and other such signals. This comprehensive view of the lead will help you craft conversation starters that resonate with the person, leading to higher response rates and better engagement.
Better customer retention
AI data enrichment would mean that your CRM wont just have basic information about customers such as the terms of the contract, products or features they’ve subscribed to, etc. You will be able to gather a lot more insight about the customer, enabling you to have richer conversations and deeper relationships which will help you reduce customer churn and increase retention rates.
Accurate revenue forecasting
With better targeting, personalized outreach, and shorter sales cycles, RevOps teams will be able to forecast revenues more accurately. AI sales intelligence will also be able to provide RevOps leaders with insight on market trends, competitor activity, etc. which can help them strategize better.
Better competitor intelligence
AI data enrichment platforms such as Highperformr can analyze competitor interactions with potential leads, enabling you to reach prospects before competitors do.
Job change tracking
Using AI for CRM data enrichment enables you to update your CRM in real time and ensure that you have a dynamic database rather than a static one. For example, AI tools can track job changes of key contacts and receive alerts about new hires or promotions. You can then instantly act on these signals to explore new sales opportunities, or even just strengthen relationships with existing contacts.
How to implement AI data enrichment in your CRM
It is only smart for businesses to use AI for CRM data enrichment, especially in a market that demands that businesses scale revenues with limited budgets for sales and marketing.
Here’s how you can automate and upgrade your CRM data enrichment with AI:
Step 1: Choose the right AI tools
You’ll have to start with evaluating the many AI data enrichment tools and pick the one most suitable for your business. We have a detailed guide here on what to look for in an AI sales intelligence tool. Shortlist the top 3 products, try the products or get a detailed demo, and buy the one that will work best with your existing CRM.
Step 2: Integrate AI tools with existing CRM
Implementing an AI software is a time-intensive process given the amount of sensitive data involved. Be sure to buy a data enrichment software that integrates with your CRM and can enrich your data without disturbing your existing GTM workflow.
Step 3: Train your team on AI data enrichment
While sales automation tools are now commonplace, not every person in your sales and marketing teams might be familiar with AI data enrichment software. Invest in detailed implementation and onboarding sessions and training programs to help every user make the most of AI for their CRM data enrichment needs.
Step 4: Monitor periodically and iterate as required
While AI data enrichment brings a lot of benefits and advantages to a business, it is not a change that can happen overnight. You will have to take the time to configure the product and put processes or workflows in place to ensure that you make the best use of AI for your CRM enrichment.
Future of AI data enrichment
The B2B sales tools market has almost entirely been taken over by AI-powered tools. And this is only the very beginning. Over the next couple of years, we expect the AI data enrichment space to evolve rapidly, in line with how AI as a technology is growing and evolving by the day.
Here are a few shifts we expect to see:
- AI data enrichment will raise the bar when it comes to CRM data enrichment. Contact and company enrichment will mean enhancing data with signals and AI research, in addition to basic contact information and firmographic information.
- CRM data enrichment will be an ongoing process as there’ll be a rise in demand for real-time updates and dynamic CRM data enrichment.
- AI will enable companies to enrich data from multiple sources and channels, and could even evolve into something that is format-agnostic as AI will be able to analyze and interpret data of all kinds.
- Data enrichment providers will have to amp up security measures to ensure data privacy and adhere to security and compliance requirements.
Uplevel your CRM data enrichment with Highperformr AI
Highperformr is a modern, AI-first platform that helps businesses use AI for their CRM data enrichment and GTM workflows. To get real-time sales intelligence and first-party signals with Highperformr, and learn how Highperformr can assist your sales teams with AI data enrichment, sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo with our team today!
