What is data enrichment
Data enrichment is the process of information about your lead that helps you know or understand the lead better, contact them easily, and engage with context. Data enrichment involves enhancing and contextualizing basic information about the lead, such as name and employer, with social signals, intent data, and other relevant information using AI, first-party data, and information from other databases.
Types of data that can be enriched
In the B2B context, data enrichment refers to the process of supplementing and enhancing existing names, company details, and other information that assist sales teams be more precise with their outreach efforts.
This usually includes updating the CRM with information such as:
- Customer data: name, phone number, email ids, title/designation, education, previous work experience, LinkedIn url, demographic details, firmographic details, etc.
- Company data: name, domain, industry or sector, employee headcount, company location, company contact details, leadership team, funding details, etc.
- Product data: technology type/tech stack, key features or functionality, etc.
- Transaction data: contract details, invoice number, key points of contact, start date, etc.
- Social data: LinkedIn url, recent activity, new connections, licenses and certifications, skill set, language expertise, LinkedIn posts, enriches: LinkedIn last active date, LinkedIn last activity, LinkedIn followers count, LinkedIn connections count
- Signals: Social engagements such as likes and comments, website visits, event participation, etc.
Why data enrichment matters
Data enrichment is what gives life to a lead. A lead or account, however ideal it may seem, will serve no purpose if it isn't enriched with as many details as possible, so the sales teams can take relevant, appropriate action. Data enrichment matters for sales and marketing teams because it is essential to help sales teams prioritize leads and outreach with precision.
How data enrichment helps sales and marketing teams
Personalize outreach messages
Data enrichment provides your sales and marketing teams with insights into your customers’ intent and activity. You can get a deeper, clearer understanding of the contact’s roles and responsibilities, topics of interest, social activity trends, engagement patterns, etc. and craft conversation starters accordingly.
Prioritize leads
Enriched data helps sort leads based on the likelihood of conversion and prioritize outreach on leads that show higher potential. Intent data and social signals help identify high-value prospects and ensure that sales teams reach out to the right leads at the right time.
Save time on contact and company search
Data enrichment in real time helps maintain a clean, up-to-date CRM. This ensures that sales and marketing teams don’t waste time looking up details in an incomplete or outdated CRM.
Enable targeted marketing
Data enrichment helps curate targeted lists that can be used for marketing campaigns and sales outreach.
Scale outbound sales
A fully-updated, clean CRM makes it easy to increase volumes and scale outbound sales by enabling sales teams to focus entirely on outreach and cold calling rather than spending time navigating a lot of messy data in the CRM.
Data enrichment examples
Adding any kind of information or insight to a piece of information can be considered data enrichment. In the B2B world, however, data enrichment refers to enhancing and augmenting basic information about a contact or company with other information that helps understand them better. Here are some examples of data enrichment:
1. Contact information
Data that enhances basic details with identifiers and information such as:
- Job titles and roles within the company
- Direct dial numbers or alternate contact methods
- LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other social profiles
- Professional certifications or affiliations
2. Company details
Comprehensive details about a company that helps in account targeting and segmentation. Examples include:
- Industry type and focus
- Headquarters location and geographic presence
- Company size, including revenue and employee count
- Names of company leaders and members of the C-Suite and Board of Directors
- Technology stack or tools in use
- Recent funding rounds or acquisitions
3. Intent data
Information that indicate a prospect’s buying intent, such as:
- Website visits and specific page interactions
- Content downloads, such as whitepapers or ebooks
- Engagement on review sites or industry forums
- Searches for competitor comparisons or product alternatives
4. Social signals
Activity on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta, etc. such as:
- Engagement (likes, shares, comments) with company or competitor posts
- Participation in LinkedIn discussions or Twitter threads
- Following or connecting with specific influencers in the industry
- Sharing relevant articles or thought leadership content
5. Firmographic data
Specific details that help analyzing and segmenting companies based on attributes like:
- Market position and growth trajectory
- Target customer base or audience segmentation
- Regional or global footprint
- Business model (B2B, B2C, SaaS, etc.)
6. Behavioral or personality intelligence
Information that helps understand a person better, such as:
- Preferred communication channels (email, phone, social)
- Past responsiveness to campaigns or outreach
- Behavioral patterns and engagement habits
- Personality traits or cultural preferences
7. Competitive insight and competitor data
Competitor-related information provides valuable context, such as:
- Interactions between your ICP and your competitor
- Gaps in competitor offerings that your product can fill
- Pricing models or discounts offered by competitors
- Engagement with competitor campaigns or events
8. Customer or usage data
Insights into how customers use your product or service:
- Feature usage patterns or engagement metrics
- Support tickets raised or resolved
- Renewal history and contract timelines
- Satisfaction scores or feedback from surveys
9. Geographic and demographic data
Factual data enhancing information about the company, including:
- Location-specific details, such as time zones or regional preferences
- Demographics like age, gender, or professional experience
- Regional market trends or cultural insights
10. Technographic data
Understanding the technology a company uses:
- Cloud platforms, CRM tools, or ERP systems they rely on
- Software solutions they’ve recently adopted or phased out
- Compatibility between their tech stack and your product
11. Psychographic data
Understanding attitudes, values, and motivations of the person, such as:
- Interests or passions expressed through social media or surveys
- Goals or challenges highlighted in interviews or forums
- Content preferences based on engagement history
Sources for data enrichment
Data enrichment involves supplementing basic information about a contact or company with details that help identify and understand the contact or company better. Data enrichment tools provide users with all this information. But where do they get it from? There are multiple sources, and they can broadly be categorized into:
1. First-party sources
This includes data that is collected directly from the contact or company. Here are some examples:
- Website form fills: Data from signups, free trial registrations, demo requests, or other such form fills on company websites
- Content downloads: Information gathered about people who download content behind a paywall, such as ebooks or whitepapers, case studies, and other such content.
- Social media interactions: Engagement such as likes, shares, and comments.
- Surveys or interviews: Responses to surveys or one-on-one interviews
- Email responses: Metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and replies from email campaigns
2. Publicly available data
This refers to all data in the public domain that is legally accessible to anyone.
- Legal documents: Filings such as business registrations, patents, and trademarks
- Company websites: All information and links provided on a company’s official website and official social media handles, such as investor presentations, SEC filings
- News and media coverage: Press releases, news articles, and and executive interviews
- Public forums and reviews: Content on public forums such as Quora, Reddit, and review sites such as G2
3. Third-party sources
Third-party data comes from other databases and data vendors who specialize in collecting, curating, and selling information.
- Sales intelligence tools: Platforms like Highperformr, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, etc.
- Public databases: Government datasets, census information, and industry-specific repositories
- Online databases: Paid platforms such as Crunchbase or Glassdoor
- B2B events and trade shows: Data collected by organizers of events
4. Internal data sources
This refers to information that exists within a company’s database, such as
- Transaction histories: Contract documents and records of purchases, subscriptions, and renewals
- Customer feedback: Feedback from surveys, reviews, and support tickets
- CRMs: Data stored in CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce
- Employee input: Anecdotal information from sales and customer success teams
Data enrichment best practices (with examples)
Data enrichment is a critical part of every B2B company’s go-to-market strategy. It has a significant impact on the sales and marketing function. However, the process of data enrichment can only add value when it is executed consistently and with the right approach.
Here are some of the best practices that every company should inculcate in their GTM teams so as to ensure that the time and efforts spent on the data enrichment process don’t go to waste and the company gets accurate and relevant data:
✅ Set clear goals for enriched data
Have a detailed, specific list of objectives defining what you want to achieve with the enriched data. Is this for immediate cold outreach, it is for lead scoring, are you enriching data to prioritize your outreach? Clarity on this will help you enrich your data accurately.
✅ Be specific about what you need
Identify the exact type of information that you are looking for. Do you need firmographics and tech stack data? Are you looking for intent signals? Or are you looking for verifiable contact information such as emails and phone numbers? This helps streamline the enrichment process and reduces unnecessary data clutter.
✅ Validate data from multiple reliable sources
Double-check the data you collect by verifying it. Working with multiple providers minimizes the risk of inaccuracies and ensures that the information you rely on is both current and trustworthy.
✅ Protect user privacy and ensure compliance with regulations
Data enrichment involves collecting a lot of information about people. While most of it is publicly available information, it is still essential to maintain privacy and keep the personal data secure. Ensure that your organization adheres to data protection laws such as GDPR, CCPA, or other regional regulations. Be transparent about how data is collected and used.
✅ Integrate data with sales and marketing tools
Data enrichment is only useful when it is accessible by all teams in the organization. While setting up your data enrichment process, ensure that the data can easily be synced with your CRM, marketing automation platforms, and other sales and marketing tools.
✅ Make data enrichment a continuous process
Data is only valuable if it is up-to-date. While emails and phone numbers may not change too often, other signals and intent data can change quite frequently. To keep your CRM accurate and updated, make data enrichment an ongoing activity rather than a one-time effort. Regular updates ensure that your data stays relevant and recent.
✅ Regularly clean your data
Even as you update your CRM regularly, be sure to establish a routine to remove duplicates, outdated records, and irrelevant entries. Fill any gaps in your data to maintain a clean database.
✅ Enrich beyond basic contact details
While data enrichment typically refers to getting contact details like email addresses and phone numbers, it is no longer sufficient to just limit enrichment to basic information. Go deeper by adding insights such as job roles, social signals, intent data, firmographics, and technographics so you get a comprehensive, holistic view of your contacts for more effective personalization and outreach.
✅ Automate data enrichment processes
Use advanced data enrichment tools to enrich data at scale and reduce manual effort. Automation not only saves time but also minimizes human error, allowing teams to focus on deep work rather than spend manual effort on repetitive processes.
Data enrichment: Common use cases
Enriched data about contacts and companies is valuable for teams across an organization. While it is most commonly used by sales teams for outreach, it helps marketing teams, RevOps teams, and several other functions handle their work more efficiently. Here are some of the most common use cases:
1. Increase lead form conversions
Data enrichment helps refine and shorten lead generation forms on websites. If you’re able to collect basic information from other sources, you’d be able to keep the form simple by asking for only specific information that you need from customers. Lengthy forms with too many fields often deter potential leads. Data enrichment allows you to ask for only the essential details while filling in the gaps with enriched data.
2. Enhance lead scoring
The data enrichment process results in a rich, detailed database that helps teams sort and prioritize high-potential leads more effectively. With comprehensive information and insight about every contact, sales teams can focus their efforts on leads most likely to convert, using intent signals, and other insights.
3. Improve customer segmentation
Enriched data enables more effective customer segmentation by categorizing contacts and accounts based on categories such as industry, geographic location, revenue, or behavioral insights. This helps sales and marketing teams tailor their strategies for different groups, and increase the effectiveness of campaigns.
4. Better personalization for higher response rates
With enriched data, teams can craft personalized messages based on a person’s role, preferences, and recent activities. Whether it’s social signals, intent data, or firmographic details, personalization improves personalization which in turn improves engagement and response rates.
5. Sharper competitor analysis and benchmarking
Enriched data offers insights into competitors’ activities, such as their audience engagement, product focus, or sales strategies. This intelligence enables businesses to benchmark their performance, identify gaps, and refine their strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
6. Improve marketing and retargeting effectiveness
Data enrichment is used by marketing teams to gain insights into audience behavior and preferences. This helps with more precise targeting and retargeting efforts for paid ads, email campaigns, or other marketing campaigns.
Data enrichment tools and solutions
A data enrichment tool, also referred to as sales intelligence tools, lead enrichment tools, prospecting tools, lead enrichment tools, or CRM enrichment tools are software products that provide B2B businesses access to databases with information about a person or a company, such as the name of the CEO, company revenue, current title, email address, etc.
These data enrichment solutions gather their information from multiple sources including first-party data, publicly available information, proprietary data, and third-party datasets.
We conducted extensive research into the data enrichment tools available in the market today and curated a list of the top 15 data enrichment tools for B2B companies. Here’s a preview of top players like Zoominfo, Apollo, Clay and more.
Highperformr simplifies and streamlines data enrichment, making it both easy and accurate. It enables businesses to enhance their data with real-time signals and intent insights and also provides precise contact details like email addresses and phone numbers through a reliable waterfall model.
To learn more about how Highperformr helps with data enrichment, schedule a demo with our team today!
