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Every B2B company, no matter what industry it is in and how small or large it is, relies on data enrichment to manage its sales and marketing.
If you’re a startup, and you need to make a sales pitch to a prospect or a lead, you will need their contact information and data about them to kickstart sales. You might get this contact data through friends, industry colleagues, or free online databases. This process of supplementing your basic lead information with contact data is data enrichment.
Earlier, data enrichment only meant adding phone numbers and email addresses for every lead in your account book.
But the world of sales has changed.
The new way of outbound selling requires you to enrich your contact data with a lot more information and insight. Some data enrichment examples include real-time updates on a lead’s social media interactions, a contact’s recent website activity, or their job changes.
Data enrichment is essential to enable sales, revops, and marketing teams with their outbound sales efforts to ensure that they have a better understanding of the leads, customers, and target accounts, and market opportunities. Data enrichment is critical in ensuring sharper targeting, personalized outreach, and higher conversion rates.
Most B2B companies use third-party databases and data enrichment tools to augment the lead lists in their CRM. The enrichment involves filling in missing details, updating outdated information, adding new insights, and validating existing data in the CRM.
Data enrichment is a critical part of any sales process. Without it, sales efforts can go all over the place, impacting efficiency and productivity. Here’s why data enrichment is important:
When you enrich your data, you get insight into which prospects are most likely to convert. You’ll be able to spearfish high-intent leads rather than take a spray-and-pray approach. This helps improve conversion rates from qualified leads and save time that sales development representatives (SDRs) might spend on leads that are not ready to buy.
Enriched data enables SDRs to craft messages that speak directly to your prospect's pain points. It helps establish credibility and trust and the outreach messages resonate with the prospect, and this can bring in better open rates and response rates.
Detailed information about a prospect and the account will help sales teams personalize not just the outreach message but even the overall solutioning and sales pitch. Pitch decks, demos, and all other conversations can be customized, this improving conversion rates.
With SDRs spearfishing high-potential leads rather than wasting time on leads that may not immediately be ready to buy, RevOps and SalesOps teams are in a better position to forecast revenues and growth. They will have a clearer understanding of which deals are most likely to convert and can develop strategic plans accordingly.
When sales teams have a fully-enriched and updated CRM to work with, they can be at least three times more productive than they would otherwise. Including data enrichment as a regular task in a sales workflow can help eliminate research time needed to gather basic information every time a lead needs to be contacted. This means SDRs can make more calls or emails a day, directly improving productivity and efficiency.
Technology helps companies quickly catch up with competitors in terms of features and functionalities. In such a market, what really sets a company apart is the customer relationships and top-notch service. With enriched data and an updated CRM, all GTM teams such as implementation, customer support, customer success, etc. can understand your customers better and provide better experiences, which can help gain an edge over competitors. This also helps improve customer retention and stronger customer relationships.
Data enrichment facilitates seamless collaboration between sales and marketing teams by providing a unified view of customer data. This alignment ensures that both teams work toward common goals, enhancing overall business performance.
There are different types of data that can be enriched in a CRM, such as contact information, company data, social activity, intent data, and a lot more.
We can break it down into the following broad categories:
Data enrichment is a multi-step process that involves identifying what kind of enrichment is required, researching and collating data from multiple sources, verifying it for accuracy and recency, and updating the existing database with the latest information.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how data enrichment works in most B2B companies:
The process of data enrichment starts with first assessing and evaluating the existing data in the CRM or other databases. You have to first get an understanding of what your CRM looks like and understand the types of enrichment required to help achieve your company’s goals.
Next up, you identify where the enrichment will come from. Once you know what kind of information you need, you can shortlist the channels or sources you will get the data from, such as company website or regulatory filings or social media platforms.
Once you have the data, it is critical to remove duplicates, fix errors, fill gaps, and check for accuracy, and make sure all the data is formatted correctly. This process is called data cleansing.
The next step in the data enrichment process is combining or integrating the existing data with the new information and insight.
The updated, enriched data is then verified to ensure that all the data is accurate and ready for use by the company. This includes checking for gaps or errors that might have occurred during the integration process, and ensuring that all the data is in the correct format.
Data enrichment works only when it is done regularly and consistently. All the steps we discussed above have to be handled on a continuous basis to ensure that the CRM is always up to data. Data enrichment is not an ad-hoc, one-off task, and requires regular monitoring.
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.
Here are some of the benefits of data enrichment:
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.
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.
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.
Data enrichment helps curate targeted lists that can be used for marketing campaigns and sales outreach.
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 is a process that has multiple moving parts and can be a complex activity. There are several sources that the data is collated from, and several steps that need to be taken to ensure that a CRM or database is updated in real time.
Data often comes from multiple sources, such as public records, social media platforms, newspapers and interviews, etc. and it requires thorough cleansing and verification. This can be time-consuming as it requires a lot of manual effort.
This challenge can be handled by ensuring that all the data comes only from trustworthy sources. Be sure to implement robust data validation protocols, and monitor the database regularly to ensure that it isn’t corrupted.
Collecting, cleansing, and verifying data is hard enough but the bigger challenge is integrating the data to your CRM. Ensure that APIs and other technical requirements are met so there are no issues with syncing and integrating data from multiple sources.
One of the major challenges with data enrichment is ensuring data privacy and security. Since there’s a lot of sensitive people and company information involved, it is critical to be aware of and compliant to all security and regulatory requirements.
Outdated data can be counterproductive for businesses, so it is critical that a CRM is constantly monitored and updated in real time. Using AI-native platforms like Highperformr can give you first-party data in real time and help you maintain a clean and hygienic CRM.
With data breaches and leaks becoming more common, there’s a need to put security measures in place to ensure that data is private and secure. Be sure to set up encryptions and access controls, and have protocols in place to manage security threats.
Data enrichment tools, also referred to as sales intelligence tools, lead enrichment tools, or prospecting 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 name of the CEO, company revenue, current title, email address, etc.
There are dozens of tools in the market today to handle the data enrichment process for businesses. We have companies that source data from different channels, tools that can be used for data cleansing, products for data cleansing, and so on. And now, with AI becoming more accessible, we’re seeing several AI-powered tools popping up to solve specific problems or use cases in the data enrichment process.
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.
Getting your data enrichment right can make or break your go-to-market strategy. Here are some best practices you can follow:
AI-native tools and data enrichment platforms help with real-time first-party enrichment, easy bulk enrichment at scale, and accurate enrichment of contact and company data.
Know exactly why you're enriching data. As we have seen in the data enrichment examples above, some kinds of enrichment help enhance cold outreach, some help with lead prioritization, and certain other types assist with targeting.
Determine exactly what kind of data you need. Is verified contact information critical, do you need competitor insights to put you ahead of others, do you need details on the tech stack, etc.
Each data enrichment source offers a different kind of value. Use data from multiple sources, and also cross-verify information to ensure accuracy and reliability.
Follow data protection regulations (such as GDPR, CCPA) and be transparent about data usage.
Breaking silos and enabling all go-to-market teams access data enrichment tools ensures that the enriched data syncs seamlessly with all sales and marketing tools.
Data enrichment has to happen in real time to ensure that the most recent and relevant signals about a contact are available for the sales teams. Make data enrichment in your organization an ongoing rather than one-off process.
Data enrichment has evolved so much over the years that it is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was a decade ago.
What was once a simple process of appending lead data with phone numbers has evolved into an activity that provides a wealth of insights.
Modern data enrichment incorporates real-time signals, insights, and perspectives from multiple channels, including first-party data. Data enrichment offers dozens of data points about a lead, creating a detailed portrait of a prospect. It gives sales teams a well-rounded, comprehensive understanding of a lead even before initial contact.
This is only the beginning; with technologies such as AI entering the mainstream, we expect data enrichment as a process or function to evolve further. Here are a few changes we expect to see:
Data enrichment will not be limited to factual information such as phone numbers, email ids, or company information. The definition of data enrichment will include signals and intent insight about a lead or account, such as hiring trends, appearance of keywords in their social profiles, social engagement or interaction trends, etc.
Sales and GTM activities are now far more dynamic than ever before. This will render static account books and lead lists irrelevant. Businesses will need real-time signals that they can instantly take action on, and reach buyers before competitors can.
AI-powered features such as crafting conversation starters based on recent and relevant enriched data will be considered essential on all data enrichment platforms.
Highperformr is an AI-native data enrichment and GTM intelligence platform that enables users to enrich their CRM with first-party data in real time. It has been built to provide B2B companies with all the data, signals, and insight required to help them prioritize their account book and target leads most likely to convert. Highperformr stands out from all other tools because it provides real-time data and helps enrich leads and target accounts with recent and relevant intent signals that help businesses go after the right leads at the right time.
To learn more about how Highperformr can help your sales teams with data enrichment, schedule a demo with our team here, or sign up for a free trial to play around with the tool in the meanwhile.
