March 20, 2020

What is Lead Enrichment?

As a sales rep, your days revolve around sorting through leads and trying to decide which ones to reach out to.

You may even be familiar with a situation like this one: You get a notification for a new lead in your CRM that seems like a perfect fit. You do your due diligence and check out their company website, look up that individual on LinkedIn and spend 30 minutes crafting the perfect introductory email.

But, instead of going through, the email bounces immediately as undelivered. That email address that you found online wasn’t accurate and now you aren’t sure how you are going to get in touch with them.

You can try to call the company directly, but the odds of actually getting put through to the person you are trying to call from a front desk are slim  — now what? 

That is a scenario most sales reps know all too well, but it can be avoided

What is Lead Enrichment?

By definition, lead enrichment is the process of gathering and structuring supportive data around the leads in your database. 

Lead enrichment allows you to be sure the leads in your system are as updated and accurate as possible with the most data that is available.

Typically, lead enrichment is referring to properties like company size, industry, job description or role, phone number and email. But, lead enrichment can be any information that gets added to a record to help your sales team in their qualification and outreach process. 

There are essentially two ways that lead enrichment can happen. It can be done manually by someone on your team doing research and entering it into your system, or you can use a third-party software to fill out that information for you automatically when a lead comes in. 

Which method you choose will depend on what industry you are in and the type of information you are seeking out as well as budget and individual rep’s capacity. 

If your sales team is spending a lot of time trying to fill in that information themselves on contact records like industry, company size and firmographic information, you may want to consider using a third-party system. This will allow your reps to focus on outreach instead of researching and qualifying those leads. 

Lead enrichment helps sales do their job more efficiently. When a rep knows right from the start what their tech stack looks like or what that individual’s role is, they can serve much more customized and helpful outreach — which means your prospects have a better experience too. 

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Why Use Lead Enrichment?

A big part of the reason to do lead enrichment is to help qualify the leads in your system, but it also will help your reps be more productive and successful during their interaction with prospects. Having all of that information on a contact record right away will help them form better tailored outreach from the get-go. There will be fewer surprises during that discovery phase because the more your reps know upfront, the better. 

At New Breed, we use the company size and industry to make a decision as to whether the lead in our system is a good fit for our company or not. We use a third-party platform, called Everstring, to fill that information for us in our CRM. This saves our reps time and lets us ensure the data we get is valid. 

We can also automate things in our CRM based on that information coming in. When a BoFu (bottom-of-the-funnel) lead comes in, if that lead’s industry and company size aligns with our ideal customer profile, we can route that lead directly to a sales rep or have our CRM automatically mark them as qualified. 

We also look at what a company’s tech stack looks like and whether they are B2B or B2C. Separate from the company, we also look at the role of the specific individual that has become a lead in our system. Knowing whether they are a member of the C-suite, a marketer or a sales person helps us offer better resources and help to them. 

If we didn’t use that sales intelligence tool to enrich our leads, one of our Business Development Representatives (BDRs) would have to go into each contact record and do their own research to determine whether that lead was a fit or not using their company websites or LinkedIn profiles. 

Having your BDRs do that research for you is a fine option if you aren’t ready to purchase software to do it for you, but even your BDR’s could be doing more in that allotted time. Equipping them with a tool like Everstring may be a good option to make that team more productive and efficient in the long run.

How to Choose a Data Enrichment Software 

When deciding if you should use a software or not, there will be a lot of weight put on cost. 

Keep in mind that even if your team is doing the enrichment by hand, it is still costing you money. Your sales team is spending their time searching for the data instead of spending their time doing outreach and making sales. 

To decide if you should use a third-party software to do your lead enrichment, you should consider how many of your reps are currently spending time enriching leads and how long they spend each day doing so.

From there, you can determine how much time per day and week your team would be saving if that process were to be automated for them using a third-party software. 

Before reviewing any companies, you need to know the information that your reps require for leads, as well as what your ideal customer profile looks like. This will help you be sure you choose the company that can offer you the best data for your business, as well as ensure you aren’t paying for features and information that won’t actually be useful to your reps. 

For instance, if you work primarily with B2B software companies, you would want to find a data provider that specializes in those types of contacts and profiles. 

The two most important pieces of information when evaluating what data provider to choose are emails and phone numbers. While there will be other important information to your business, it all comes down to being able to actually contact and connect with those leads so that your sales team doesn’t spend time going down rabbit holes. 

Keep in mind that a lot of the data enrichment software companies will also offer prospecting as an add on or feature. With this, your sales reps would be able to go into the platform and find companies or contacts on their own to try to sell too that fit your ideal customer profile. 

If you have decided to use a third-party software to enrich your leads for you, you can start by assessing Everstring, Clearbit, ZoomInfo and SalesIntel

If you are already on Hubspot, you will have some automatic enrichment being done for you with the CRM. Hubspot’s lead enrichment is called Insights and it focuses on populating fields like company size, location as well as some other company information when a lead comes in. 

The Takeaway 

Lead enrichment can make your sales rep’s lives easier and increases their productivity. When it comes to deciding whether you are going to have someone on your team manually enrich your leads or purchase a software like Clearbit, Everstring or SalesIntel, be sure you know exactly what you need. 

Overall, trust is everything — even in the software your reps are using. Your team needs to be confident that the data being brought into your system is reliable so that they can truly utilize and leverage that data in their outreach process.

Download the complete guide to inbound sales

Weslee Clyde

Weslee Clyde is an inbound marketing strategist at New Breed. She is focused on generating results using inbound methods and is driven by the customer experience. When not at the office, you can find her binging a docu-series on true crime or perfecting her gluten-free baking skills.

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