What Is Lead Enrichment and How It Boosts Sales in 2024?

To start your sales prospecting, you need accurate contact information and relevant details about your potential customers.

The issue that we run into is this: How do you know if the target audience information at hand is up-to-date and verified?

More often than not, the lead data you have is stale, redundant, and incomplete. With this, you might never be able to actually find those who are best fit for your solution. Even if you do reach out to your leads with the available information, you can’t personalize your outreach because you don’t know enough about them. 

The outcome? Plummeting email response rates and a stoop in pickup call rates. And your prospecting ends up to be a disaster.

How do you avoid this catastrophe? Well, here’s the secret sauce: lead enrichment. 

Lead enrichment enhances your contact records with a few clicks so that you can focus on getting leads who fit your solution best. The process will make sure your contact lists are always updated and you can reach out to active prospects without any hassle.

Keep reading to find out how lead enrichment services can help you build targeted lists for prioritized prospecting all while keeping your database squeaky clean. 

What’s Lead Enrichment?

Lead enrichment involves collecting and analyzing information on prospective customers who might be interested in the services offered by your business. The process of lead enrichment aims to fill missing data that will lower your speed-to-lead duration, accelerate qualification and routing process. 

Picture this: you have a list of potential prospects who have filled out a form on your company website. The information you have managed to collect include name and email lists of your customer base and you want to run a marketing campaign. Suffice to say, this information is not enough for you to run marketing campaigns with personalized messaging.

To launch a successful marketing campaign or any lead campaign for that matter, you will need lead data that will give you actionable insights on their company size, company hierarchy, revenue slab, challenges, among others. And lead enrichment efforts are crucial to fill the gaps in missing contact information from your incomplete records. 

Why Is B2B Lead Enrichment Important for Sales?

More often than not, business databases lack adequate verified information of qualified leads. Every sales and market team knows that reliable data is essential for prospecting, but contact databases are often congested with incomplete and inaccurate data of potential leads. According to a study by Dun & Bradstreet, 91% of CRM data is incomplete and 70% of that data decays annually.

Clearly, bad data persists, and businesses continue to struggle with data accuracy across platforms. So, it is essential to maintain data consistency so that you can capture more promising leads and marketing teams can drive revenue predictably. 

Let’s take a look at how lead enrichment can overcome the hurdles of missing data.

Qualify and Segment Your Leads With Ease

To grow, every business requires their pipeline to be filled to brim with leads. And to ensure your business grows faster, you need your promising leads to be moved through the sales funnel with less friction and this begins by identifying who your high-value customers are. 

Not all leads are created equal. To determine which lead is worth pursuing and make informed decisions, it is imperative that you find potential buyers who fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) closely. This can be done by assessing details such as company size, B2B industry and role seniority.

Once you are done gauging the uniqueness of each lead, you will need to segment them into smaller lists based on attributes that are closest to your ICP. The list of leads can be segmented based on job descriptions, company size, company hierarchy, tech stack, revenue slab, etc. from generation forms and external sources to gain a better understanding of leads.

Accelerate Lead Routing

Once you hone in on a lead who showcases intent to buy and engage, you have to optimize your time and respond to them as soon as possible. But, how do you figure out which rep is best fit to engage with the lead? Lead routing.

Lead routing is the process of automatically assigning leads to the right sales representative. Every rep has their own strengths which need to be taken into account while assigning leads to them. Some of the factors that are taken into account while delegating leads include experience, expertise and availability of the reps.

While lead routing sounds fine in theory, it is anything but. According to Sales Insights Lab, sales reps confess that only half of the prospects they pursued are a good fit for their solution. That is an alarming number.

Suffice to say, if you don’t have adequate information at hand, you will struggle with responding and assigning your sales reps the right lead.

With enriched leads, you can have accurate and consistent data, so that you can process lead qualification swiftly and assign the right lead to the right rep and your teams can carry out effective marketing strategies.

Improve Speed To Lead

Responding to leads within the first minute increases conversion rates by 391%.

The words “strike the iron while it’s hot” have never rung truer. Any business will tell you how invaluable time is. Every second counts— from the moment someone begins filling out an online form, they have displayed purchase intent and are ready to engage. And the quicker you get to them, the better. After all, the likelihood of conversion is 8x greater in the first five minutes.

But, if you don’t have the required contact information, you can’t engage with your lead. Subsequently, if you are unable to respond to your lead quickly, it will become harder to reconnect and carry out your sales strategy. And the chances of conversion will dwindle.

Here’s where lead enrichment comes in— you can process leads automatically and lessen the time it takes to respond to your leads. Lead enrichment will help you fill the gaps in profile data quickly so that you can accelerate the sales pipeline and annual revenue generation process.

Minimize Manual Tasks

Here’s a situation: You have received a prospect list containing name and email lists. However, to run personalized email campaigns and increase the chances of conversion, you need further contact information such as industry, company, job title, etc.

How much time and productivity do you think is compromised while trying to research and find relevant B2B sales data manually?

Attempting to manually update each profile with accurate information at scale is extremely time-consuming and leads to drastic drop in productivity. Your sales team has to research and gain a deeper understanding of new leads, determine the value their attributes hold, qualify them and assign them to the qualified reps.

This approach is as tedious as it sounds and by the time the reps reach the prospect, they may no longer be interested. Invariably, conversion rates are going to remain stagnant.

Instead, by taking a data driven approach, the lead enrichment process will help you prioritize your targets and help expedite lead-to-customer conversions. Automating this process helps rev up the sales process at scale while reducing sales costs.

Moreover, automating lead enrichment will minimize human error and provide you with accurate and updated lead data in real-time. 

Replace Stale Data

Lead enrichment adds data points to your contact database to help you have a full background on your prospect. Moreover, managing your company database can protect your precious contact details from data losses, theft and breaches with authentication and encryption tools.

Lead enrichment ensures that your data is watertight and that you have all the information you need to carry out your sales prospecting. Even if you don’t use all of the information for each promising prospect, those background data points can be helpful when you try to build rapport with your potential prospect.

This way, your sales reps can avoid getting bogged down unnecessarily. Any outdated and insignificant contact information including basic contact details that might impact your sales and marketing efforts is discarded. And you can avoid running into stale data.

Personalize Your Outreach

Buyers prefer opening messages that resonate with their wants and needs. A staggering 71% of potential prospects stated that they expect interactions tailored to their specific use case and preferences.

With consistent lead enrichment efforts, you can offer your prospects personalized customer experience while gaining a bird’s eye view on all your leads. You can keep track of every lead interaction, from customer enquiry to filling forms and move them up the sales funnel as required.

Your sales teams can make use of this augmented data and gain granular, accurate information on your leads such as job titles, domain, revenue slab and additional lead insights on buying behavior.

With lead enriched data, you can craft emails and script your call such that they focus on leads’s interests, challenges and pain points to maximize your sales efforts. You can personalize emails and provide your buyers with legible information on how your product will solve their business problem.

What Are the Types of Lead Enrichment Data?

Lead enrichment equips marketers with additional context required to deliver tailored solutions. This results in retaining buyer interest and turning leads into paying customers faster while analyzing market trends. But, what are the kinds of customer data sets that you should enrich your records with? 

Here are 8 types of lead enrichment data that you can use to segment your leads better, run targeted campaigns, and maximize your lead generation efforts:

1. Firmographic Data 

Firmographic data refers to data that gives you details regarding the organization or company associated with potential buyers.

Firmographic data includes:

• Geographic area
• Number of clients 
• Company domain
• Revenue slab
• Company structure 

Firmographic enrichment is essential for boosting B2B marketing lead enrichment. Marketing Teams can segment and target leads based on specific attributes. For instance, you can personalize your email marketing outreach based on company size.

2. Demographic Data

Demographic data enrichment is the type of data that will give you detailed insights into the personal attributes of a prospect. Using this data, you can outline an ICP for your enrichment established on. 

Demographic data includes:

• Age 
• Job title 
• Gender
• Income 
• Education 
• Job role 

Demographic enrichment empowers you to create messaging that is more relevant and concise by better understanding your prospect’s specific preferences and needs.

3. Technographic Data 

This type of data gives additional insights on the technology stack of an organization.

Technographic data includes:

• Software invested in
• Hardware invested in
• Applications used 
• Account’s IT infrastructure 

Once armed with the knowledge of your prospect’s technographic enrichment, you can qualify your leads better and personalize your campaign by pitching how your solution can integrate with your prospect’s tech stack or is a better alternative to their existing solution.

4. Intent Data

Intent data helps you track your lead’s online activity and analyze their buying behavior to identify their interests and challenges. You can also prioritize your engagement by analyzing intent data and customer interactions.

Intent data includes: 

• Web searches 
• Websites visited 
• Online interactions 
• Content consumption

With intent data, you can prioritize your buyer engagement based on their intent signals and personalize messaging based on where your prospects are in the customer journey. Several B2B data providers will help your businesses grow and enrich leads using intent data. 

5. Social Media Data

Social media data refers to the data collected from social media that demonstrates how leads share, view and engage with online content. This data also gives deeper insights on profiles of your competitors.

Social media data includes:

• Activities 
• Interests 
• Connections/networking circles
• Engagement patterns

With social media data, you can carry out account-based prospecting by engaging key stakeholders of your target accounts on social media platforms with personalized content.

6. Geographic Data

Geographic data provides you valuable insights on location-based information on your customer base including trends in the region so that you can run localized campaigns and provide customized experience.

Geographic data includes:

• Town/city 
• State 
• Country 

Geographic enrichment facilitate targeting leads based on their geographic location and personalize your content to make your prospecting more effective.

7. Account Data

This data will help you gather comprehensive company details for an entire account instead of a single buyer. This enrichment is especially useful to B2B companies as it will help your team identify potential cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Account data includes:

• Hierarchy level within a specific vertical or company
• Price lists 
• Subsidiaries 
• Parent companies 

With account data, you can gauge which leads fit your ICP best and even identify any cross-selling and upselling opportunities and make informed decisions. 

8. Behavioral Data

Behavioral data takes a look at your lead’s interactions, past actions and engagement patterns across their online journey.

Behavioral data includes:

• Click-throughs
• Email opens
• Page views 
• Site navigation
• Purchase histories 
• Content downloads 
• Registrations 
• Information requests
• Subscriptions

Armed with behavioral enrichment, you can identify your lead’s interests, preferences and engagement level and gain deeper insights.

What Are the 2 Models of Lead Enrichment?

To widen their contact information, most companies purchase external data from third-party data sources such as B2B data providers who collect contact information to get accurate data in the least amount of time.

But how do these enrichment providers and third-party sources collect the contact information? 

This is where we delve into the 2 types of lead enrichment models:

Traditional Lead Enrichment

Traditional automated lead enrichment models often source their contact information from a single data source. This means the lone data vendor is accountable for the accuracy of information on millions of contacts.

The problem? There's no way to verify data quality or back-fill missing data because the third-party source provider is entirely dependent on the single data source to provide the required aspect of customer data.

Waterfall Lead Enrichment

Waterfall lead enrichment refers to the method of enriching lead data by gathering information from multiple data vendors instead of one. This model grants you a series of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Reliable, accurate data. Every profile information is checked against multiple data sources. By doing this, you can be rest assured that the contact information that your sales teams received has been truly enriched and can be optimized for outreach.
• Maximize coverage. APAC, LATAM, EMEA or NAM? Why pick one when you have them all? Since the contact information is procured from vendors across the globe, you will have access to profiles from different regions, including niche ones.
• Multiple touchpoints. While single data sources often offer either email address or phone numbers, the waterfall model covers multiple touch points so that you have access to several viable ways to reach your prospect. You can also execute multi-channel outreach strategically.

With the waterfall model automating lead enrichment and streamlining your sales process, you can ensure that the value of your contact list is of the highest quality and savvy customer segmentation. You needn’t worry about duplication with lead enrichment prioritizing database hygiene and make informed decisions.

With enriched data, you can reach your leads’s inbox with a personalized approach that pushes engagement. See better open rates and boost your revenue. Wondering which platform uses waterfall lead enrichment model to give you reliable contact data? Read on to find out.

How Does Prospect IQ Help Automate Lead Enrichment and Qualify Leads?

Most B2B contact databases provide you with data from a single data source. Which means, you will have to restrict yourself to prospecting within a specific region or industry. Not the best way to carry out outreach at scale.

As databases don’t come cheap, it wouldn’t be wise to invest in several databases just to enrich data. Moreover, you will have to manually toggle between multiple database platforms and reset filters every time. 

But, we do have an enrichment tool that can combine data from multiple providers and give you verified, reliable data. Behold, Prospect IQ by Klenty. 

Prospect IQ is a prospecting data platform that uses the waterfall lead enrichment model. The platform appends data collected from multiple data sources and carries out enrichment on top of each other to bring you 700% more emails and numbers. This way you can effortlessly enrich your contact list with highly verified email addresses and phone numbers with a single click. 

With reliable and verified prospect profiles, you can carry out account-based prospecting with ease. Identify the ICP accounts within your target market and engage with the right stakeholders and decision-makers. 

Here are some more of Prospect IQ’s lead enrichment features that make it a hard-to-miss investment:

• Complete account insights. Just add the domain name of the account you’re targeting to the enrichment solution to obtain a comprehensive contact profile with all the relevant information that you need.
• Email finder. Get the necessary email, technographic, and title information instantly and optimize your prospect outreach. And Prospect IQ will automate the process of updating your CRM.
• Phone finder. You can gather accurate phone numbers for prospects with just their email addresses or LinkedIn URLs in a single click. Prospect IQ enables enhanced prospect contactability for calling resulting in direct dials. Moreover, the platform comes with seamless CRM integration to ensure your data never goes stale.
• LinkedIn Prospector. Prospect IQ’s LinkedIn plugin enables you to obtain accurate email and phone numbers of your contacts with just their LinkedIn URLs. And you can do this in a single click. Moreover, you can seamlessly import LinkedIn URLs for target leads into your CRM or sales engagement platform.
• Wide contact database: Prospect IQ offers over 440 million accurate email addresses and verified phone numbers worldwide and 26+ data filters that cover a wide range to help you find accounts that fit your ICP via multiple configurations. This way you can build airtight lists of accounts and prospects. 

To find out more about how Prospect IQ will help you take your lead enrichment to the next level and target your ideal buyers with precision, book a demo now!

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