Lead enrichment is an important part of the lead management process, which also includes lead uploads, lead-to-account matching, lead routing and lead follow-up. After a campaign or collecting leads at a conference, for example, you will have undoubtedly seen the telltale signs of gaps in lead details — their first or last name, phone number, company size, email address or any other applicable field that needs to be identified before uploading a lead template to the marketing/CRM/sales engagement or enrichment tool of your choosing.
However, to ignore incomplete or unenriched leads is costly. After your business has invested in appropriate technologies to capture leads, you’ll want to identify if any of them lead to high-value opportunities.
But, you can’t do that if the information is incomplete. On top of this, nearly a quarter of your contacts will decay each year, as some of those people may have moved, changed jobs or any other number of circumstances. Not having complete lead data can slow, if not halt your ability to follow up with hot leads — part of the reason why bad data has cost U.S. companies $3.1 trillion each year.
Related: 5 lead automations that can help your reps be more productive
What Are Your Options?
To attempt to manually enrich leads yourself could take hours. It’s a meticulous process that would require your team to scour the web, killing precious time needed for prompt outreach. The following tools can help:
- Lead enrichment software: Tools like Clearbit and DiscoverOrg allow you to match leads based on email domain, company name and other information. According to research firm TOPO, 90% of companies use at least two sources of contact data to fulfill the needs of sales development.
- Outsourced lead enrichment: Another option marketers pursue is to hire a lead enrichment firm, driven by human researchers to fill in any gaps you may have missed.
However, there is another challenge that lead enrichment poses.
How to Flow Enriched Leads Into Your Tech Stack
To glean any value of your enriched data, you need to flow that information into your marketing automation platform (MAP) for follow-up campaigns, to your CRM for record-keeping, to your messaging platform to ensure that customer conversations are up-to-date, etc., all while keeping all of these values in sync.
Traditionally, this could be done in two ways:
- OOB integrations: Most enrichment tools come with pre-built, out-of-the-box (OOB) connections to popular hub apps like Salesforce or Marketo. While they can be useful, they often lack the customization needed for tasks specific to your business, like mapping data to custom fields. As there likely won’t be OOB integrations for every app in your tech stack, you’ll likely have to support this with…
- Manual work: If your app doesn’t have an OOB connector, you’ll likely be supporting it with manual work which often entails importing spreadsheets one at a time — a time-consuming, error-prone task, which can start making some of your hot leads go cold.
There is, however, an alternative: You can automate lead enrichment instead.
Flow Enriched Leads Into Your Tech Stack With an Integration and Automation Platform
Both hypergrowth companies and established enterprises are adopting intelligent integration and automation platforms, which provide the following:
- Integrates cloud-based apps (including data enrichment services) at the API level: Though 70% of organizations have adopted cloud-based apps, the biggest concern amongst marketers remains siloed data which they can’t access because it’s buried in certain apps or departments. An integration platform removes these barriers, allowing data to flow freely amongst all your apps.
- Automates processes among cloud apps: An integration platform also gives users the ability to automate workflows – processes that are automatically carried out at the touch of a button or at set intervals. With triggers and if/then logic, you can create sophisticated workflows that allow you to eliminate manual, repetitive work and enable value-added human tasks.
- Can be used by business users and IT: Given its user-friendly UI of drag-and-drop features and search capabilities, most integration platforms can be used by any user — lines of business or business systems/IT, yet provide enough sophistication to offer the customization of scripting and coding without actually requiring you to write a line of code. All of this can be done within minutes, which is the perfect reason why companies looking to automate lead enrichment should consider an integration platform.
Related: A closer look at intent data and how you can use it
Assign and Enrich Leads in Salesforce From Slack With LeadBot
At Workato, one of the ways we revolutionized our lead management process is through LeadBot, a set of automations that allows us to get back to leads in under 5 minutes. The bot itself connects Marketo (our MAP), Salesforce (our CRM), Slack (our internal collaboration tool), and our data enrichment tools and presents SDRs with all the data they need in one place to conduct insanely fast follow-ups. We based LeadBot on a survey released by Harvard Business Review in 2011, which states that companies who don’t respond to leads within 5 minutes risk losing them forever.
Previously, Sales had to pull each lead and qualify them manually by collecting data across apps, conducting research between tools like Clearbit and DiscoverOrg, and aligning availability before making a call. This caused leads to sit in the queue for up to 12 hours and resulted in many leads going cold, duplicate follow-ups and low team morale.
Now, reps interact with LeadBot via a DM in Slack, where they can set their status as “Accepting Leads” or “Not Accepting Leads.” When they are ready to start contacting leads, they can click “Accepting Leads,” and LeadBot will deliver new inbound leads to them. If they go to lunch or are finished working, they can select “Not Accepting Leads,” and no new leads will be assigned to them.
With this workflow, companies can automate lead enrichment and forward SDRs enriched lead data with profiles, demographics, and activity data directly in Slack within seconds — from resources like Clearbit, Salesforce, Intercom, Outreach, personal or company LinkedIn pages, and campaign details. LeadBot intelligently qualifies leads based on company industry, geography and size, and routes them to the appropriate SDR based on their availability, geolocation and time zone.
With the ability to automate lead enrichment in LeadBot, our SDRs doubled the amount of meetings booked and have longer, meaningful conversations with prospects, leading to an increase in SQLs. They are no longer largely inhibited by lead management, which has led them to landing more opportunities.
