What Is Lead Enrichment? Your Ultimate Guide

Your business may devote a good deal of effort to lead generation, in the hope of conducting new sales to whole swathes of new customers. However, lead generation isn’t everything. It’s important, but it’s not the whole shooting match. 

What we’re talking about is lead enrichment, and we’re going to discuss what this means. Get ready to discover something that can transform your business performance at a stroke. Deep breath, and in we go. 

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment is a way of making sales leads more likely to give you conversions by gathering additional information and adding it to your initial lead data. 

Simple as that. OK, nothing’s as simple as that. There’s quite a lot to it. 

Leads can take all kinds of forms. The simplest might be an “unenriched list” of potentially interested parties that you’ve purchased. These are people who perhaps are just engaged in relevant B2B activity, so might not actually be interested in doing business specifically with you.

Similarly, you may have names of people who signed up for more info at a promo event you attended. This is a little more useful, in the sense that these people have opted into discovering more about your specific product or service. That’s a better start. 

Even better would be a list of people with pressing needs to access what you’re selling, together with accurate information on contact details and business type. This is a more enriched list altogether.

Lead enrichment is the process of turning lists like the first example into something more like the last example. This can happen as a result of a manual procedure (laborious and to be avoided if possible) or with the use of automated lead enrichment services (much better).

Types of lead enrichment data

The data that can enrich leads takes several forms. Generally speaking, the following are five of the most common categories of lead enrichment data:

Contact data

This is what you’d want from your list, at the very least. After all, you may have a collection of leads that are red hot to buy from you, absolutely itching to get on board with your business. But wait, how do you actually reach out to set this relationship on course? Yes, contact data is what’s needed. 

Without a phone number, an email address, or some other means of getting hold of the potential customer, you’ve just got some morale-boosting vague notion of support among the customer community out there. 

Demographic data

This is where you start to apply some details concerning the individual lead or prospect, including their role in a business. A business might be involved in some highly pertinent activity and may be ideally placed as a potential customer for your growth marketing business. It probably won’t do you much good, though, to be put through to the canteen supervisor.

Demographic data enrichment enables you to assemble a picture of the person who does the buying. Demographic information includes things like:

• Age

• Gender

• Education level

• Job role

Dealfront’s lead enrichment services include tools like Target, which helps you to identify the key decision-makers in a given company and start on your journey to enriching your lead with demographic data about them. This saves time and gets you places, fast. 

Firmographic data

It helps further if you know something about the business this individual works for. Not just its area of activity—although this is of course massively important. We’re looking here also at business size and revenue. In addition, we’re considering brand identity and the business’ target customer. Using Dealfront’s Datacare, you can clean and enrich firmographic data in your CRM.  

Data like this can be enormously useful as it tells you how likely a particular business is to make the decision to buy from you. That’s not to say that businesses that seem less likely to buy should be completely discounted. It just means you may need to get more persuasive and/or creative in your efforts. 

Technographic data

This is an area of lead enrichment that is concerned with the kinds of tech that the business in the frame is using. Why is this important? Because, if you know that your business leads are using a particular product in their work, you know how they complete certain processes. 

You can then sell your product as a tool that can work with what they have already, meshing to produce something beyond the sum of its parts. 

Or, you can sell it as an upgrade from what they’ve got. Indicating precisely where the shortcomings of their existing tech are hindering their performance, and where your product will overhaul things wholesale.

Behavioral data

When you have information about who a customer is, what position they occupy in a business, what that business delivers, and with what tools, it’s possible to get a pretty-rounded idea of that lead.

However, to get into even more detail, it’s good to know how the lead behaves. 

In this context, we’re talking about how they might engage with your website. Do they seem to be interested in any particular aspects of your business? Do they sign up for more information? Do they register for any demos? Do they attend any events (virtually or, come to that, in person)?

You can use the website visitor identification feature of Dealfront’s Leadfeeder to help you easily keep tabs on who’s doing what on your site. This can lead data enrichment in a hugely profitable direction due to the amount of information a site visitor discloses by what they choose to click on, or not. Using these kinds of insights, you can uncover hidden customers effortlessly.

The importance of lead enrichment: Tangible benefits for your sales and marketing teams

So, lead enrichment can involve bolstering your leads with several forms of data. Now, let’s look at exactly why you’ll want to do it.

More consistent, standardized lead data

When you have lead information from all manner of sources, you can end up with messy data. 

You know how things get, you have several different lists of potentials, as well as some scribbled-down notes from a phone call, not to mention some crumpled business cards you have stuffed in your pockets. 

This kind of data smorgasbord can have some priceless nuggets within it, but things can get all too easily overlooked when random data management is allowed to dominate. 

What’s needed in this case is a process that gives order and clarity to the data you have. This is where lead enrichment can really help. 

It does this by putting all your lead data through the same rigor, which then results in everything being stored in a consistent fashion, with continuity across your datasets. The same fields are applied, so you can be sure that whatever the lead, the database will contain the same types of information. 

Consequently, you can easily and quickly pull up a comparison list of whatever aspects of your leads you want to analyze, from phone numbers to sales records to engagement on your site.

Improved lead qualification

This is central to what we’re trying to achieve. Through lead enrichment, it’s possible to assist your sales team in a hugely important fashion. 

Lead enrichment helps you assemble more information about your lead. You can understand them better, both in terms of their background and what they’re likely to want from you. 

Once you possess information about a lead’s identity and motivation, you can work with your sales team to accurately qualify and prioritize the lead in your sales process. 

If a business seems to be interested in what you’re selling, and is engaged in finding out about your product, then your sales team can rate this very much as a qualified lead, and go after them before the customer goes elsewhere. 

Conversely, this aspect of lead enrichment can help you weed out those customers who appear less qualified, so they don’t get in the way of more productive possibilities. These can be put in the list marked long-term potentials.

Better focused campaigns and sales efforts

One of the great things about lead enrichment is that it bestows advantages in all kinds of ways. Here’s an aspect that you might not have been expecting, but it’s a fundamental result of your lead enrichment efforts. 

By going beyond B2B lead generation and really finding out about your customers—both potential and actual—and their behavior, you’re in a great position to begin understanding overall trends. The wise businessperson recognizes that the commercial landscape is never static, so a huge amount depends on the ability to spot developments and leap on them before your competitors do. 

Marketing campaigns and sales activities can be shaped to take advantage of the insights thrown up by lead enrichment. These can be applied to certain leads displaying particular characteristics or more widely if a general trend is observed. 

Shorter sales cycles and more conversions

Finally, when you have more detailed data, you can close sales more quickly. 

It’s like if you know all about a particular fish—where they like to spend their afternoons, what they like to eat, how strong a rod you’re going to need. You’re going to be reeling that fish in a lot sooner than if you just plop your hook in at a random spot with no idea about what you’re fishing for. 

Of course, if you land that fish in short order, you’ll be in a position to follow up with more catches swiftly thereafter. In other words, if you can complete your sales cycles nice and quickly, you’ll be able to have your sales team moving nimbly on to the next interaction with more conversions accruing. 

What to look for from automated lead enrichment tools

Lead enrichment can be a game changer. However, if you’re not careful, it can be time-consuming. That’s why using automated lead enrichment tools such as Dealfront’s Connect is an absolute must. The benefits that can follow from using these tools are significant, but what should any such solution offer?   

Deep data and insights

The best lead enrichment automation tools should provide ready access to insights that can be hugely significant to your sales endeavors. 

Dealfront’s Connect, for instance, can not only give you deep data that reveals all you need to know about a business and the relevant personnel within, it will also give you what’s known as trigger events. 

These are events such as changes in management, expansion, and alterations in company direction. They can be hugely consequential in terms of a business’ qualification as a lead. 

Compliance and transparency

Like it or not, we’re in an age of stringent compliance requirements. You should of course, like it: When it comes to data protection, such requirements are there to protect us all. 

However, things can feel onerous for the beleaguered business just trying to make the most of its leads and stay afloat. 

Not only should automated lead enrichment tools be simple to use, they must also take compliance and transparency seriously. 

Dealfront’s applications take data on over 56 million companies from places such as official trade registers and public web data. In other words, nothing a regulating body will have the slightest issue with.

This means that when you use automated lead enrichment tools like those from Dealfront, you can proudly point to their legitimacy and transparency.

Seamless integration with your tech stack

A lead enrichment API or other kinds of pre-built integrations can enable enrichment tools to work in harness with a company’s existing array of tech. That’s crucial, as even though lead enrichment is important in its own right, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. 

You can hit the ground running with your Dealfront tools because they work straight from the box with your favorite sales, marketing, and CRM tools. 

No fiddly customizations, no forcing incompatible packages together, no having to do without the features you’ve grown to rely on. Using tools like Dealfront’s Leadfeeder, you can assimilate easily with popular packages such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot.

B2B lead enrichment use cases

So, that’s the theory. Now the practical. Let’s look at how you can use lead enrichment to upscale your sales and muscle up your marketing. 

Personalized follow-up after an event

Imagine you’ve just organized an event, and it’s a great success. There are numerous requests for more information from a whole bunch of names and contact details you’ve now got on your list. Well done! Let’s put them to good use. 

You could send out an all-encompassing communication to everyone on the list and hope that hits home. However, what you’re perhaps ignoring is that you’ve got a collection of people with separate and unique personalities and needs. How much better it would be if you’re able to treat each as such. 

This is the bread-and-butter of lead enrichment. You can turn those amorphous conglomerations into congregations of individuals by adding layers of information. 

So, your lead enrichment tools can capture some interesting factors that immediately add color to your lead data. You can pick up information about interests and pastimes, reference to which in your communication will certainly help with engagement. Why? Because it adds the human touch, and gives the effect of personal selling. 

You can also derive geographical information about your potential customer that can help with conversions, sometimes as an aside from the initial contact. If the client is based in Death Valley, you may find that it’s worth dropping in some mentions of your sunglasses side hustle.

Tailored campaigns

Leaving aside your list of event attendees, lead enrichment tools can help in all kinds of other business examples. 

Say, for instance, you want to run a lead enrichment sales campaign aimed at potential customers who have come into contact with your business but as yet haven’t committed to buy. 

You can get insights into their online behavior and see what it is that appears to get them interested. Explore that aspect of their needs, and offer what your business can provide to satisfy them. 

Or, you might want to look at customers who have bought from you before, and see about getting them to conduct further business with you. You can use lead enrichment tools to gather up previous transactions and interactions, in order to give your sales teams as complete a picture as possible of your customer’s future interests. 

You can also use lead enrichment tools to tell you exactly when the time is right to make an approach. Lead enrichment can look at online behavior and business developments to give you great insights into questions of timing. 

Warmer cold emails

Finally, let’s turn to what lead enrichment can do to your emails. We’ve all seen cold emails. Some of us have used them. They’re about as exciting as the word cold makes them sound. 

You’re limited by the simplicity of your lead data to perhaps an email address and a name. Using this, you have to fashion something compelling, something that can connect with the potential customer, despite not knowing much about them. 

It’s even worse because the same email is used for a whole bunch of leads, all of whom will have slightly different priorities, preferences, and needs. 

No wonder most of these bland, generic emails don’t do much beyond staying unopened. Those that do get opened tend to be deleted or forgotten about pretty much instantly. 

Now, instead of this one-size-fits-all approach, think about what’s possible with a little enrichment. 

You can start by working into the email something about the recipient’s business. “How are things in the world of sales intelligence tools?” immediately sounds more friendly and personal than a uniform “How are things?”.

You can enter these enriched pieces of data as automatically applied variables so that your emailing operation is an automated delight. You can even enter whatever trigger event data you think appropriate. Something like “I gather your company is going through some changes right now, which can make things a little challenging but can also throw up some great opportunities. Here’s one.”

Get lead enrichment right to close more deals and build better relationships

“Getting to know you, getting to know all about you” sang Deborah Kerr in The King and I. If only she’d known about the lead enrichment services offered by companies such as Dealfront, it would have saved her a big song and dance. 

Dealfront solutions make it so much easier to get the information you need to make your sales efforts really perform. With a range of tools, including Target to identify prospects, Connect to find out more, and Datacare to help keep your data up to scratch, Dealfront helps you really get to know your leads.

People love it when they’re the object of someone’s interest. It’s flattering, and it offers them the chance to talk a little about themselves, which, for a lot of us, is our favorite subject. An enriched lead is a nurtured lead. In effect, an enriched lead is a loved lead.

“Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me” Ms K continued. She could have been singing about lead enrichment.