What is Lead Enrichment?

Lead enrichment is the process of data enrichment that gives your sales team enhanced insight into a prospective customer. With this data, sales reps can better understand how qualified prospects are and what's the best way to interact with them so they can close the deal.

Lead enrichment is often presented in a profile that gives sales reps an overview of the prospect.

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Types of lead enrichment data points can include:

• Identifying info about individuals, such as job title, email address, contact information, and social media profiles

• Firmographic info, like a company’s industry, location, and size

• Lead behavior, like how often a lead visits your company’s website or engages with your email marketing

• Lead personality info, which can give you guidance on how to engage with an individual

Basic Steps in Gathering Lead Enrichment Data

Lead enrichment process is closely tied to lead generation and demand generation marketing. When you generate a new lead in the funnel, you should also have systems in place that gather additional data to help you qualify and understand that lead in detail.

There are a few ways to generate and enrich new leads.

1. Capture with a form

With this method, prospective customers learn about your company through email, social media, or blog posts. Prospects then give some of their personal information in exchange for a special offer, such as a white paper, demo, or free trial of your product.

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When a lead fills out a form in exchange for an offer, enrichment really begins to happen.

Take a look at this lead generation form from Salesforce. Visitors who want to start a free trial of Salesforce’s product first have to answer a series of questions:

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Once submitted, this info is sent to the marketing and sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, where it’s turned into a lead profile that’s already populated with several data points about the individual and the company he or she represents.

2. Search social media

Another way to find and learn more about leads is through social media. LinkedIn is often considered as an excellent source of B2B leads. There are several free and paid strategies for finding leads and enrich your leads.The most basic way to find and enrich leads with LinkedIn is to first create a list of companies that fit your ideal customer profile, also search LinkedIn for those companies. Their profiles often include many relevant data points, such as company size and location. You can also zero in on the employees that most likely have the authority to buy your product. Hence improving your conversion rates.

After finding all this info, you’ll need to manually input the data into the lead’s profile within your CRM.

How to Automate Lead Enrichment

There are several tools available that automatically gather lead enrichment data and sync it with your CRM or other software. Determining which one is best for your business depends on the kind of data you want. Here are just a few to get you started.

LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer makes it possible to identify and enrich leads without capturing their data through a form. With LeadBoxer, you can identify visitors to your website who would otherwise remain anonymous, and then populate their profile with contact info.

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LeadBoxer also records lead's online behavior, such as how much time they spent on a certain webpage or what resources they’ve downloaded. This gives your team insight into what topics or pain points are most relevant to individual prospects.

To give your team even more of an edge, LeadBoxer scores leads so sales reps know exactly who is most likely to close. With a tool like LeadBoxer, your team will spend more time pursuing the most promising prospects and none of it chasing dead ends.

VisitorTrack

VisitorTrack is similar to LeadBoxer in that it can identify and track website visitors that would otherwise remain anonymous.

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VisitorTrack further enriches leads with intent data. Intent data tells you whether or not a lead is in the market to buy a product like the one you offer. It works by tracking and analyzing certain context clues, like what kind of topics a lead has been searching for around the web.

Crystal

Crystal is an app that tells you how to communicate with and pitch to a prospect. It works by gathering data about a prospect from their LinkedIn profile and around the web and then crafting clear dos and don’ts that are unique to that person.

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If you want to walk into any conversation with a lead feeling confident about your communication style, Crystal is worth checking out.

CRMs and Lead Enrichment

It’s usually possible to integrate a separate lead enrichment software with your main CRM so that both tools automatically work together.

However, if you prefer having an all-in-one system, consider using a CRM that comes equipped with needed features. Also most of these CRM helps you with lead routing where you can automatically assign your leads across the sales team.

These are just a few of the most popular choices.

HubSpot Sales

HubSpot Sales is a CRM that lets you track and accelerate everyone in your sales pipeline. There are also several helpful features that uncover new leads and enrich the ones you have.

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HubSpot can show you who is visiting your site, how often they visit, and what pages they’re most interested in. It also logs which emails they open and what links they click on. Predictive lead scoring then prioritizes the prospects that are most likely to become customers. Hence marketers and sales teams can focus right kind of leads for lead nurturing and right kind of leads for sales.

Sugar Sell

Sugar Sell is a sales CRM solution from SugarCRM. The platform includes a feature called Sugar Hint, which automates lead enrichment.

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Sugar Hint gathers data from social media, news, and business sources, and then automatically offers insight and intelligence within the platform. Sugar Hint can also give you actionable intel so you know to act when prospects are most engaged, open to upsell or cross-sell opportunities, or at risk of churning.

Freshsales

Freshsales is a CRM offered by Freshdesk. The platform comes with AI-based lead scoring and automatic profile enrichment.

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With Freshsales, you no longer have to spend hours combing through LinkedIn for info or doing manual data entry. Their lead enrichment helps you dig into leads social media accounts and publicly-listed info, then saves the data for you.

Benefits of Automated Lead Enrichment

Automated lead enrichment increases the efficiency of your sales process in a few ways:

• It reduces the time sales reps spend manually mining lead data on social media platforms or around the web

• Lead scoring tells reps which leads to focus their time and energy on converting

• Insights guide reps on when and how to interact with leads so they’re more likely to make the sale

All of these factors work together to increase your team’s productivity, and ultimately, your revenue.

Automated lead enrichment can also help improve your lead generation efforts. Without automated it, you may find yourself relying on lengthy lead generation forms like the Salesforce example shown earlier in this article. However, the longer the form, the more likely that some prospects will lose interest and leave the page before completing it.

If you’re using the right lead enrichment tool, you can shorten or in some cases forgo the form. LeadBoxer, for example, only requires an email before you can start a free trial.

Prospective customers can start using the product for less effort, and since they only have to submit their email, they’re less likely to become distracted or navigate away before submitting their info.

By attracting more leads and enriching their data later, you can further optimize your lead-to-conversion rate.

Start Using Lead Enrichment Today

There’s no doubt about it: lead enrichment can massively improve the efficiency of your sales process. The goal of lead enrichment is to help with lead conversion, close more deals faster, and increase your revenue with less effort.However, manual lead enrichment can be a time-consuming and inefficient process. The key to getting the most out of it is to use a tool that automatically mines as much data as possible, then gives you actionable insight into each prospect. The same goes for sales intelligence tools.LeadBoxer can help. With LeadBoxer, you can identify anonymous website visitors or enrich profiles of existing leads with contact info, company details, and their online behavior. LeadBoxer then creates a score that tells you whether or not a lead is worth pursuing. Take it for a spin and try LeadBoxer for free today.