What is Lead Enrichment? An Ultimate Guide for B2B Businesses

What is Lead Enrichment? An Ultimate Guide for B2B

By Binary Demand - Last Updated on January 6, 2023

Data is the lifeline the sales and marketing teams use to devise revenue-generating campaigns. However, according to Gartner reports, sales teams find only 44% of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) useful.

For B2B lead generation companies, generating high-quality leads in more significant numbers is crucial. But how much time does your team spend on qualifying leads?

What if sales staff could identify the most probable leads to convert? The answer here is through B2B lead enrichment, which can assist sales representatives in getting the key to turning a prospect into a customer.

Sounds like magic, isn’t it? This blog will cover lead enrichment and how it can be incorporated into sales.

In this article

What is Lead Enrichment?

A commonly asked question is, what is lead enrichment? B2B Lead enrichment involves finding and adding more information, such as company and contact data and social media profiles, to a lead record. These grease the wheels of lead qualification and routing.

Lead enrichment occurs when you upload details – such as their role, industry, or firm size – about event attendees to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Marketing Automation Platform (MAP). This takes various forms – from manually entering data from LinkedIn into your CRM or MAP to integrating real-time lead enrichment technologies into your MarTech stack.

The most pertinent question is: Which kind of data should be used to enrich the leads?

Demographic and firmographic data are utilized to determine if a lead fits the desired client profile. Your team will find sales qualified leads faster with relevant data.

Lead Enrichment Use Cases

In addition to the primary purpose of lead enrichment, it is crucial to emphasize that lead enrichment has numerous additional applications.

Here are some use cases within lead enrichment:

  • Personalize marketing content (ad campaigns)
  • Update your nurturing cycle for current and potential consumers
  • Integrate ready-to-use contact data and leads from external sources directly into your CRM
  • AI and ML lead scoring models and tactics improve performance and efficiency across acquisition and sales channels

Why Businesses Use Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment is essential for businesses to help qualify the leads in their system, but it also improves the productivity and success of sales representatives during interactions with prospects.

From the outset, this information on a contact record will enable them to conduct more targeted outreach immediately. There will be fewer surprises during the discovery phase if your sales representatives are properly informed beforehand.

Suppose the industry and business size of a BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel) lead coincide with the ideal customer profile. In that case, you may route the lead directly to a sales representative or have CRM automatically identify them as qualified.

How Does Lead Enrichment Work?

Let’s dive deep! Lead enrichment involves four essential steps:

  • Data collecting
  • Lead routing
  • Lead conversion
  • Lead nurturing

It is essential to note that lead conversion and lead nurturing are ongoing processes that only sometimes occur in the order described above.

Collecting data: Before lead enrichment, organizations must collect data. Companies can buy third-party data or collect data from prospective customers in-house and through CRM systems.

Lead routing: It’s the sales team’s lead assignment and distribution. Many companies use B2B lead enrichment tools to automate routing based on industry, deal size, region, and more.

Convert leads A lead converts when it meets a lead score threshold in the marketing and sales funnel. Decision and action stages convert leads. This doesn’t guarantee a deal, but they’ll likely become clients or stay in the decision stage as they nurture.

Nurture leads: Lead nurturing strategies help firms build and sustain client relationships at every level of the sales funnel. Connecting with decision-makers may help sales teams convert and nurture leads.

Which Lead Enrichment Data Types Are Useful?

When you have a comprehensive view of the leads in your CRM and MAP, you can better engage with them.

Data breaks down into two significant buckets:

  • Firmographic data
  • Demographic data

When you have relevant data at your fingertips, your team will spend less time Googling to establish whether a lead is qualified. With lead data enrichment tools, the firmographic and demographic data elements that matter most to your organization may be automatically added to your CRM or MAP.

In recent years, B2B lead enrichment software has evolved to fit the requirements and rapid speed of the modern marketing environment.

Why Use Lead Enrichment Tools?

The primary objective of lead enrichment is to transform a list of potential leads into lucrative and, most importantly, convertible prospects while removing from the outset those that are certain to fail.

Also Read: The Definitive Guide to Converting More Leads

Your sales representatives will spend less time qualifying leads and more time developing them when a third-party service automates the process.

We refer to this as a B2B lead enrichment sales paradigm. Listed below are the advantages of employing lead enrichment tools:

  • Identify the key decision-makers and eliminate the rest
  • Reduce “form abandonment” along the customer’s journey
  • Enhance the whole sales funnel
  • How to Choose a Data Enrichment Software

Cost is a significant factor in choosing lead enrichment software. Even if your team enriches manually, it costs money. Because your sales crew is seeking data instead of selling.

To determine if you should employ a third-party program for B2B lead enrichment, you should assess how many of your sales representatives are enriching leads and how much time they spend each day.

Many lead data enrichment tool companies also provide prospecting as an add-on feature. With this, your sales representatives could access the platform and identify organizations or connections that match your ideal client profile.

Benefits of Lead Enrichment

The primary objective of lead enrichment is to increase the internal and external efficiency and effectiveness of lead creation by marketing and sales teams.

Enriching leads deliver more information and insights on a possible client, which benefits all business elements that rely on leads.

By generating more detailed customer profiles, marketing teams may better qualify, and score leads with additional information about potential customers.

As a result, B2B lead enrichment helps the sales staff engage with decision-makers on a more personal level by creating a more detailed customer profile.

Here are some benefits of lead enrichment:

  • Increased conversion rates
  • Improved customer retention
  • Enhanced lead generation processes
  • More efficient lead-sourcing strategies
  • Focus your funnel
  • Boost your B2B lead generation campaigns
  • Reduce client effort at key stages of their journey

How to Automate Lead Enrichment

A manual approach to leads is cumbersome and requires your sales representatives to spend many hours scouring the internet for leads, validating them, and wasting valuable time that might be used for immediate outreach. Utilizing automated lead enrichment tools is prudent.

Learn the different ways of automating B2B lead enrichment:

  • Synchronize the lead information from your CRM and sales automation tools
  • Utilizing an automated tool, link enhanced data to the remainder of your sales stack
  • Nurture prospects with intelligent email marketing automation

Lead Enrichment Do’s and Don’ts

Successful lead enrichment is no piece of the cake. It takes time, knowledge, and resources to execute it. Here are some do’s and don’ts to consider while planning your B2B lead enrichment strategy.

Do’s:

  • Before automating internal sales processes, map them out
  • Automate manual and low-stakes procedures initially
  • Increase the number of automated tasks as your comfort grows with the tool
  • Aim to construct a strong cross-functional team by integrating the whole sales team into the automation process

Don’ts:  

  • Relationship building is a people talent; don’t seek technology’s assistance in this
  • Do not depend too much on the instrument. A/B test all the features to get the most out of the tool but never commit to it
  • Do not automate and abandon the task. Review the procedure from time to time

Lead Enrichment Automation Benefits & Examples

A lack of clear guidelines and processes between internal teams may lead to unqualified leads due to poor targeting. Automation can come to the rescue here! Here are some benefits of B2B lead enrichment automation.

Get what you need to connect quickly: With incoming leads, promptness is crucial. According to research by Drift, the probability of contacting a lead after five minutes drops by a factor of ten.

To enhance your conversion rates from incoming leads, you will require all pertinent information quickly.

Reach the proper CRM reps: Taking automation one step further, your B2B marketing automation platform’s expanded company profiles may route leads back to the appropriate representatives in the CRM.

Moreover, if the lead is from a brand-new customer. In that case, you may utilize the company’s profile information to route the enhanced lead to the most appropriate sales representative based on your region or segmentation.

More data improves lead scoring: Behind every person lies a corporation with goals, difficulties, business ecosystems, and decision-making processes. Your lead scoring models should account for all these factors, which may affect a lead’s sales potential.

Use corporate data points in lead scoring models to prioritize leads based on your desired customer profile.

Conclusion with Tactical Advice

Lead enrichment may simplify the life of your sales representatives and boost their productivity. Applying an automated lead enrichment solution to any marketing or sales process can ultimately aid a sales team in making better-informed judgments.

Wrong information can do major damage. Therefore, verifying your information is better since it may cause more harm than benefit. Binary Demand can help you reach your goals with the right solutions and customized services.

FAQs:

Q. What is lead enrichment for CRM?

A. Lead enrichment is the process of collecting and organizing supplementary data about your database’s leads. Enhance your CRM with improved lead data and watch your sales income soar to new heights.

Q. How to enrich lead data?

A. Below are a few ways to enrich lead data:

  • Customize marketing content (i.e., Ad campaigns)
  • Maintain an existing and prospective customer nurturing cycle
  • Integrate ready-to-use external contact data and leads into your CRM

Q. What kind of lead enrichment data should you use?

A. Lead enrichment includes firm size, industry, job title, phone number, and email. B2B Lead enrichment is any information added to a record to assist your sales team in qualifying and outreach.

Q. Where can you find this data?

A. Data on lead enrichment may be obtained from several sources. Consider three important factors while deciding which ones to use:

  • Accessibility
  • Reliability
  • Transferability