The Benefits of Lead Enrichment For Enhancing Lead Conversions

Summary

The key to higher lead conversion lies in identifying leads that align with your business and your ideal client profile (ICP), who are a good fit for your solutions, and can then be nurtured and converted into clients.

Lead enrichment can drive your growth by qualifying leads properly and informing your marketing and sales efforts. More information on leads enables better personalisation strategies, which increases pipeline velocity and the chance of a conversion.

In short, lead enrichment increases the probability of converting leads that will drive a higher return on investment (ROI) and client lifetime value (CLTV).

WHAT IS LEAD ENRICHMENT?

B2B organisations generate leads through different channels, such as social campaigns, sales outreach, and influencer marketing. However, the initial data collected is often restricted to their name, job title, and email address. Enriching this data is essential to craft personalised demand generation campaigns that engage leads throughout their buyer’s journey and effectively address their pain points.

Lead enrichment begins by informing lead profiles with behavioural and intent data, which can include brand interactions across channels. This is possible via lead intelligence tools, as well as through active sales outreach to engage leads timely and assess their response to your content assets.

Marketing segmentation data, which includes demographics and firmographics, can be of great use to pair leads with individual ICP and buyer persona profiles. This type of enrichment allows, for example, to place leads in separate nurturing tracks which are of most relevance for their unique pain points.

guide

Begin your lead enrichment process with
our 5-step lead intelligence playbook

4 BENEFITS OF LEAD ENRICHMENT

A B2B business that works with verified leads gains a competitive advantage. B2B organisations need to prioritise pre-qualifying and selecting leads whose needs align with the company’s products and services as soon as they are generated (this can be done through client relationship management software - CRM). Without lead enrichment, ensuring the quality of the sales pipeline becomes extremely difficult.

Here are seven advantages to adding lead enrichment to your qualification process:

Why is lead enrichment crucial for your sales team?

Source: Salesken

Reduce sales cost

The average cold calling success rate is only 2% (Cognism, 2023). Lead enrichment can help not only determine the most qualified leads for cold outreach, but also help sales determine the best time to engage them with behavioural and intent data.

Enhance the lead generation process

Email is one of the primary channels for lead nurturing and conversion. Even so, ensuring relevance in email campaigns is crucial to avoid unsubscribes and the effective nurturing of leads toward a sales conversation. Lead enrichment allows the fine-tuning of email cadences to ensure emails address the correct pain points and are sent at the right time as leads advance through the buyer’s journey to build trust and interest in your products.

Improve lead engagement

Lead enrichment tools enable you to leverage firmographic and behavioural data for a holistic view of each lead. This can be further enhanced with Account Based Experience (ABX) best practices, which engage all leads at a single account in a highly personalised manner.

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Drive demand outcomes with ABX,
informed by 2024 INFUSE Insights

Enhance sales efficiency

Lead enrichment helps make your sales process more efficient by ensuring that the lead aligns with your ICP before qualifying them as marketing qualified (MQL). It also enables your sales team to prioritise leads based on the likelihood of conversion, as well as routes the leads to the correct salespeople based on their particular industry challenges and pain points.

Types of lead enrichment data

There are ten different types of lead enrichment data that are accessible to your sales and marketing teams:

guide

Read the Definitive Guide to Marketing Segmentation for a detailed breakdown of all data types

LEAD ENRICHMENT TOOLS

The majority of B2B organisations are transitioning to automated lead enrichment instead of relying on manual processes. Automating the enrichment process saves resources and is more efficient as it happens in real-time and at scale.

Utilising lead enrichment tools, however, requires firstly that you integrate your data across the organisation. This can be done with a CRM, which then works in unison with the tools to form rich data profiles of each lead and guide strategies.

Here are two lead enrichment tools you can consider:

Clearbit offers real-time data enrichment of your leads by providing access to demographic, firmographic, buyer intent, and other types of lead data. The platform also offers integration with CRMs and marketing stacks like Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Marketo.

G2 Rating: 4.5/5 for the paid version

InsideView provides B2B intelligence and data to pre-qualify leads in a CRM. The tool automatically enriches every new lead that enters your CRM and includes market segmentation, campaign planning, and sales acceleration.

Captera Rating: 4.5/5 for the paid version

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LEAD ENRICHMENT BEST PRACTICES

Here are two best practices to follow when launching your lead enrichment process:

Establish clear criteria and steps

It is important to define what activities must be accomplished to collect data. For example, you can assign a first step of verifying contact details, then a second step of comparing marketing segmentation criteria of the lead against your ICP profiles. Finally, you should also measure if enrichment is resulting in a higher conversion rate and ROI, as well as track sales funnel progress at every stage.

guide

Read the MOFU to BOFU guide for best
practices to encourage lead progression
toward the bottom of the sales funnel

Integrate and cleanse existing data

Most companies collect data on leads from different touchpoints and sources, which often results in silos. Thus, it is crucial to integrate these different databases to ensure lead enrichment processes form the most complete profile possible of every lead.

Also, when integrating this data, cleansing is essential to avoid duplicates and ensure consistency across data profiles. Small factors, such as different wording to refer to the same attribute (such as 'mobile' vs. 'phone number') can result in errors when aggregating and filtering the data.

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF LEAD ENRICHMENT

To measure the effectiveness of lead enrichment, you should follow these three steps:

Determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

These include conversion rates, length of sales cycles, and client acquisition cost (CAC). Measuring these KPIs will help highlight the impact of lead enrichment on your bottom line.

Glean data-driven insights

Analyse your enriched data by correlating it with your conversion rates over time. Look for trends and patterns that you can use to refine your lead qualification criteria and identify insights to improve your marketing and sales strategies.

Calculate ROI

Track the costs of implementing lead enrichment against the incremental revenue you generate from improved conversion rates. A positive ROI validates the lead enrichment strategy.

ADDRESSING CHALLENGES AND ENSURING DATA PRIVACY

Whilst lead enrichment offers significant benefits, there are also some considerations you need to keep in mind:

Privacy and Data Security

Ensure you are in compliance with data protection regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when collecting and using buyer data. Protecting personal information is crucial for maintaining trust with your leads and avoiding governmental fines.

Generic Automation

Even if automating efforts based on insights from lead enrichment, it is important to ensure outreach is always personalised and relevant for each lead to drive engagement.

CONCLUSION

Lead enrichment helps in providing detailed insights on your B2B leads and ensures that you are nurturing leads adequately and prioritising those that have a higher probability of conversion. Lead enrichment helps you build a rich profile including behavioural characteristics and buyer intent to inform your messaging and strategies. By automating lead enrichment, you can shorten your sales cycles and increase your conversion rates.

With lead enrichment, you can segment your leads at scale and nurture them with customised cadences. This is crucial to build trust among leads in the long term and keep your brand top of mind until they are ready to purchase.

FAQS

How does lead enrichment improve lead quality?

Lead enrichment is the process of enriching lead data by collecting information such as company details, job title, lead behaviour, and buyer intent. This enables you to identify the leads that best align with your ICP and allows marketers and salespeople to custom-tailor their approaches.
What are some popular lead enrichment tools available in the market?

When selecting your lead enrichment tool, ensure that the platform offers features that best align with your needs and budget. Here is a list of two popular lead enrichment tools you can consider:
- · Clearbit
- · InsideView
Can lead enrichment be integrated with existing CRM systems?

Most modern CRMs offer full integration with lead enrichment tools. This enables you to enrich both the new leads that you acquire as well as the ones already existent in your CRM’s database.
How can lead enrichment enhance personalisation in marketing campaigns?

Lead enrichment provides insights like contact details, intent data, and lead behaviour that help identify their interests and pain points. This allows you to craft personalised messaging that helps build trust and engagement.