Sales Data Enrichment Examples and Use Cases

Data enrichment can do amazing things. After all, raw data is pretty limited in the value it brings to your business. By enhancing it with a top-quality data enrichment platform, you make your data more meaningful and useful. In other words: when you understand your customers better, you can better cater to their needs –  and that benefits your whole go-to-market team.

Why use data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process that “fills in the blanks” of business intelligence by adding the important and relevant details. At times, you might be working with data that is incomplete or is out of date. Data enrichment providers will gather information from various sources and use their database to fill in the missing data fields. Enrichment can also replace old data with the latest available updates.

This provides an extremely valuable asset for sales teams:

• If you are using an inbound marketing strategy, B2B data enrichment will give you more information about the leads that come in.
• If you are part of an outbound sales effort, data enrichment provides details about prospects that can be used for qualification and to craft more effective cold calling and/or email messaging.

Lead generation

Closing sales through lead generation is based on the idea of “if you build it, they will come”. The goal of lead generation is to motivate a person who is visiting one of your digital properties to leave their contact details to start the MQL and SQL process. Once sales gets involved, it’s important for them to have as much information as possible about the person they’re about to contact. That’s where data enrichment comes in handy.

In addition, lead generation data is useful for generating insights. Analyzing information about incoming leads can help you to see who is visiting your properties. This makes it crystal clear if you are attracting people with high conversion potential–and if you need to make changes to your marketing communication strategy.

1. Web form completion

Unfortunately, there are many gaps between the data you get and the data you need. One common lead capture tool is the web form, which a visitor fills out when they want –  for example –  access to some of your marketing material like an ebook. You can assume that they probably don’t feel like typing in the many details that the sales team needs to have (and the form might not even have fields for all the information that could be helpful, like company size or funding). With a data enrichment tool, you can minimize the number of “must have” fields in the online form and have the rest completed automatically.

2. Lead scoring

There are many ways to segment leads to decide which ones to contact first. This is part of lead scoring, where leads are evaluated and sorted according to their level of purchasing intent. Obviously, data enrichment provides valuable information that can help with this.

But it’s over time when enrichment really comes in handy. As you learn more about what types of people and organizations make your best customers, you’ll probably come up with a list of characteristics as part of an ideal customer profile (ICP). This could include various dimensions of firmographic, technographic, and demographic data. A high-quality data enrichment platform will provide the details that are simply impossible to get through a lead capture device.

3. Trend research

Not every person who engages with one of your digital assets will qualify for a conversation with sales. However, by looking at the kinds of leads you generate, you might get a sense of how effective your branding and messaging is. But only if you have the data to recognize patterns. For instance, if you want to target large organizations, but data enrichment tells you that the website is mostly attracting SMBs, then you’ll need to reconsider some aspect of your marketing strategy.

Sales prospecting

In contrast to lead generation, the “motto” of sales prospecting could be considered “reach out and touch someone.” In sales prospecting, you create a list of contacts by collecting and analyzing certain kinds of data like job title and intent data. Then a scoring method is applied so that your outbound team can focus on contacting prospects with a high potential for conversion.

4. Account-Based Marketing

When you’re using an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, you will absolutely need data enrichment. ABM involves looking at data to decide what prospects best fit your ICP and focusing on them. Enrichment is even more essential here because a prospect, by definition, has not engaged with your marketing assets. Without data enrichment, you might only have the name and HQ phone number for  the company. The chances of reaching a decision-maker with that level of information are quite low. Plus, data enrichment can help you better identify which companies fit your ICP by giving you more information about them.

5. Personalized pitching

Once you’ve reached that decision-maker, what do you do? Surveys show that leveraging personalized messaging during a cold outreach call makes a huge positive difference. With a quality data enrichment provider, you’ll have data about the person you’re calling and the pain points of their organization so you can create a customized, knowledgeable approach.

6. Customer profile enrichment

Prospecting in particular relies on an ICP, but it’s also useful for lead generation, product design, sales forecasting, and many other functions. A data enrichment platform can help in customer profile enrichment so that you get a sense of all the different factors that might drive their purchase. And, as you sell to more people, a data insights platform will automatically update the ICP so that you can track even more customer characteristics.

Sales management

There are dozens of uses for data enrichment when it comes to improving the overall performance of your sales team. Two general categories here are organization and customer relationship management.

7. Organization

Some members of your sales team might have a knack for approaching prospects in a certain industry, geographical location, hierarchical level, etc. Data enrichment will provide you with a full set of customer characteristics so that you can see patterns in where individual team members are succeeding and come up with more effective . Then, enrichment will help you assign incoming leads to the sales person who’s best able to help them.

8. Relationship management

The move from personalization to hyper-personalization is reliant on extensive customer data. Data enrichment is becoming a competitive tool for sales teams that want to leverage every bit of customer information to establish tighter relationships. This is especially apparent in upsell and cross-sell opportunities, where data enrichment can be used to identify additional ways to generate revenue from existing clients. For example, let’s say that data enrichment indicates that a current customer has received more funding. This could show that they are expanding and might just want an upgrade to the software that you sold to them.

Key takeaways

• Data enrichment adds information to records related to sales leads, prospects, and existing customers.
• By using a data enrichment platform, sales teams can engage in more effective lead generation through enhancing web form completion, lead scoring, and trend analysis.
• For sales prospecting, data enrichment helps with ABM, personalized pitching, and customer profiling, while it is also an advantage for general customer relationship and sales team management.