Lead Enrichment

What is Lead Enrichment and Why Does Ignoring it Kill Sales?

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Sales reps have two major challenges: choosing the best leads and then selling (and upselling) to them effectively. 

Data helps with both these issues. 

Knowing more about a company helps reps choose the leads with the best product fit. And, once the sale process begins, they can tailor their messaging towards specific challenges. 

But how do they get this data without resorting to lengthy (and off-putting) lead-gen forms?

The simple solution is lead enrichment. 

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment means is gathering and adding additional data to a lead profile. 

This builds a complete picture that you can use to qualify leads and be more informed about the ones you choose. 

The more information you have on your side, the higher your success rate. Combine that with tech like sales dialers. and you’ll also grow the size of the typical sale.

It makes a lot of sense for several reasons:.

#1 Lead enrichment helps qualify leads

The more you know about a lead, the easier it is to decide whether they would be a good fit for your product.

This is crucial information: around half of all prospects turn out to be a bad fit for the vendor’s product.

This can have a significant impact on the sales process. If the lead isn’t a good fit, you are unlikely to sell to them no matter the talent in your sales team. 

Consider using lead enrichment to qualify leads if:

  • You have a large number of leads to process.
  • You have a specialized product or service.
  • You have a low sales success rate. 

#2 Lead enrichment gives reps the information they need to make sales

Lead enrichment helps reps during the sales process. 

The more information your team has about prospects, the better prepared they will be to target their messaging to the prospect’s needs. 

Here are some ways this could work:

  • Reps can send content and case studies that closely relate to the prospect’s challenges.
  • They can tailor messaging in calls and meetings to discuss specific challenges the prospect is struggling with. 
  • They can target decision-makers within the business on the correct channels. 

(Channel choice is key; offering a genuinely omnichannel service has been shown to dramatically increase sales volumes.)

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#3 Lead enrichment also ensures your data is up-to-date. 

Estimates put the rate of B2B business decay at anywhere from  23% to 70% annually. 

Whichever end of the scale your business falls at, that’s a lot of old data sitting around that could negatively affect the success of your sales strategy. 

You reduce your chance of a successful sale every time you:

  • Contact the wrong person due to outdated information. 
  • Get a distorted idea of a company’s readiness to buy due to old revenue numbers.
  • Pitch an unsuitable solution due to not knowing the number of employees at a company. 

Using lead enrichment to keep your information up to date is the easiest way around this. 

Sounds good, but what kind of data should I use?

Key to successful data enrichment is knowing which types of data to choose. 

The data should be directly applicable to your sales process. 

This means you’ll need to look at your current customers to identify trends and patterns that suggest new customers they could be ready to buy. 

Sales teams commonly use factors like:

  • Annual revenue
  • Number of employees
  • Additional contact information
  • Owner or director details
  • Industry
  • Location

But the exact data points you choose will be individual to your sales process. 

Take a SaaS company that sells workforce collaboration software. 

The location of the companies they sell to might not be that important. Anyone in the world can easily download and buy the software. 

But a business’s location is essential for accountancy or recruitment firms. These businesses rarely deal with companies in areas where they don’t have a physical presence. 

Where can you get the data from?

You can get lead enrichment data from many sources. When choosing which ones to use, look at three main criteria. 

These are:

  1. Accessibility: Is it easy for reps to access the information they need?  
  2. Reliability: Do you trust that the source is providing accurate information?
  3. Transferability: Is it easy to move the data to the places you need – usually your CRM?

There are two ways to source data. 

You can do it manually by scouring the web or other databases and adding information to relevant tools. 

Or you can use an automated data source and have these services update fields in your CRM with relevant information.

The latter’s benefits are obvious: you and your reps won’t have to spend any time manually searching for data. 

It also enables advanced sales acceleration techniques. For example, whenever a lead fills out a form, your data provider could automatically complete the profile in your CRM.

You could then automatically schedule a call and auto-assign a rep while providing them with all the information they need to make the sale.

The downside is that this type of system costs money. Whether it’s worth the cost it will depend on how much you value this ease of access.  

If you choose to go manual, there are many services you can use. 

These include:

  • LinkedIn: Use for employee data, company size, contact information, location, etc.
  • CrunchBase: Use for funding data, employee numbers, hiring information, contact details, location. 
  • Google: Use for news, searching for specific data. 
  • Company websites: Dependent on the website but may include location, contact details, industry, financial releases, product updates.
  • Business registries like Companies House (UK): Use for director data, insolvency details, mortgage charges, etc. 

3 Big benefits of lead enrichment

The ultimate goal of any sales enrichment is to increase the efficiency of sales processes.

Use it to:

Find the best people to pitch 

Use lead enrichment to map company hierarchies and establish a route to decision-makers. 

This will show you who the best people are to pitch to. 

When it’s impossible to directly contact key decision-makers, use data to discover the people with the most influence you can reach.

Reduce client effort at key stages of their journey

Lead form abandonment is a real issue. 81% of people have abandoned an online form at some point, and one of the biggest reasons is form length. 

This means that asking for too much information in lead generation forms stops leads in their tracks. 

With data enrichment, you can ask for the bare minimum amount of data – even just a name, email, and company – and then discover the extra data you need from third-party sources. 

You’ll end up with more leads without losing access to the data your team needs to sell successfully. 

Reduce sales costs

Bad data cost U.S organizations $3.1 trillion in 2016. Why? Because accommodating incorrect data is both time-consuming and expensive. 

This is just as much the case in sales as anywhere else. 

Bad data means sales teams will waste time and effort on the wrong prospects. 

(Not to mention you’ll spend far more on outbound calls than necessary.)

If you’re a small business, you might not think this is a big deal. 

But as your business scales and your team makes more calls, the costs soon add up. 

Share your data widely

To get the most from your lead enrichment efforts, you need to share the data widely so anyone who stands to benefit from it can do so. 

While you could manually transfer data from one tool to the other, a better option is to integrate your tools via their APIs and automatically share relevant data whenever an update is made. 

The easiest way to do this is via a No-Code platform. This lets you simply select which tools you want to connect and then add the data you want to share.

 And anyone can do this, even those without coding knowledge. 

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