Easily Increase Sales with B2B Data Enrichment

B2B data enrichment is a power tool that’s a must-have for any sales dream team. Data enrichment literally gives you the information you need to qualify leads and prospects, personalize your approach, and close more deals. But it doesn’t happen by itself. Knowing how to handle this quality data efficiently is up to you–and we’ve outlined our best practices and tips below.

What is data enrichment in B2B?

Let’s say you’re part of an outbound campaign. To make the most of every call, you want to go straight for the person who makes purchasing decisions. Of course, you’d love to break the ice on a cold call by mentioning something that makes your pitch interesting to the person on the other end of the line. If you sell a technology product, knowing about the contact’s purchasing cycle, revenue, and technology stack would really help. So right there, we’re looking at a need for:

• Full contact name
• Direct contact phone number
• Title (e.g. VP Product Development)
• Tech stack insights
• Purchase cycle
• Company revenue

But wait, didn’t you just get this information from a data enrichment provider last year? Well, one-time enrichment is not enough. Data becomes obsolete at a rate of approximately 20% per year and that’s the chance that your old data has flaws in it that will get in the way of making an effective pitch – or even reaching out to the right person in the first place.

The solution is data enrichment, which is an automated process that delivers this information straight to your database and keeps it up to date. Starting with something as basic as the name of the contact and where they work, a B2B data enrichment service will provide the details that you define.

And it goes even further: it will review existing records and correct them. One of the benefits here is that it automatically updates and enriches the ideal customer profile (ICP) that is guiding your outreach in the first place.

The value of high-quality data in B2B

So we’ve seen one essential data enrichment example for outbound sales teams. Now let’s look at another one for inbound B2B sales.

A lead generation campaign begins with leads who connect with one of your company’s marketing assets, such as a piece of gated content on your website. Lead capture methods tend to have a limited number of fields because people are more likely to fill in a shorter form. But that also means that salespeople don’t get all the data they want. Luckily, data enrichment makes up for it. Here’s how:

Segmentation

Efficient sales teams don’t jump at every lead they receive. Instead, they prefer to understand more about each person who contacts them before reaching out. To accomplish this, they segment each lead according to an ICP.

An ICP is composed of multiple characteristics such as (for example) the industry they work for, their company’s revenue level, and where they are located. The segmentation process involves categorizing each lead according to if and how it fits these characteristics. If the lead capture form doesn’t include this information, enrichment will complete the data for you so you can accurately segment your leads.

Lead scoring

From there, a salesperson will look at close ICP matches first. The extra information you get from an enrichment platform can help you score leads based on the personas and ICPs who are most likely to convert.

This can be done manually, but some B2B data enrichment platforms go above and beyond to show which leads are the best matches. Furthermore, they can add information to indicate how likely it is that a specific lead will convert. Technographics and purchasing history are valuable data points for this purpose.

Personalization

Finally, once the leads have been qualified, it’s time for outreach. By this stage, data enrichment has enabled you to understand a lot about (for instance) the lead’s organization, technology setup, revenue, and so on. Plus, you might even know which piece of content originally attracted the lead. This information allows a salesperson to have some talking points in mind when they make that first call or send the first email. Speaking of which, a good enrichment platform can verify emails in real time so that your message actually gets to the right person.

How to implement the B2B data enrichment process

It’s surprisingly easy to use a data enrichment platform, especially Lusha’s. Let’s look at three major types of contact databases and how Lusha applies enrichment to each.

CRM

If you are using a Salesforce CRM, the first step is to enable “Salesforce Enrichment” for your account. You can then have a look at Lusha’s wide range of segments, such as contact job title, seniority, and department, as well as a company’s industry, headcount, and revenue. If you’re not sure of the segments that you want, Lusha provides templates to guide your choices. On the other hand, if you have specific requirements, perhaps based on an ICP, Lusha will build custom audiences and enrich only the leads, prospects, or customers that you want to know more about.

API

Lusha offers APIs for data enrichment, which means that no matter what CRM you use, we can connect our enrichment platform with it.  We work with you to choose the most suitable API connection. After that, it’s basically plug and play as Lusha collects information on both companies and individuals according to the ICP filters that you set. You can change these filters at any time or leave your settings as is when you have a solid arrangement for your customer profile.

CSV

If your lists are in a spreadsheet instead of a CRM, don’t sweat it. We can seamlessly enrich a CSV file, too. All it needs to contain is a target’s LinkedIn profile, their full name and email, or their full name and company name. Then you simply match Lusha’s data fields with the fields on your CSV file.

Key takeaways

Data enrichment supplies extensive information about prospects so that a sales team can analyze their potential before making contact.
For lead generation, data enrichment allows sales teams to segment and score leads and then personalize their pitches.
Using Lusha’s data enrichment feature is simple, whether you need to enrich a CSV document, your Salesforce CRM, or any other software that can connect with an API.