What is Lead Data Enrichment - how exactly does it improve your bottom margins; how does it help your sales and most importantly how do you take full advantage of it?
In this article you’ll find out:
- Modern Sales Funnel – What are SDR, BDR & AE?
- What is Lead Enrichment?
- What kind of data should you focus on?
- Using third-party Lead Enrichment solutions?
- Why use Lead enrichment tools? - Main benefits
- Main takeaway for B2B Lead Enrichment
There used to be a time when the sales rep’s job was to decide which leads to reach out to and which ones were not worth the effort. Then the same person would contact the inbound lead and start developing it to potentially convert and close it.
Naturally, this process was incredibly slow, from finding new outbound leads, due diligence and consecutive development & closure were fraught with unreliable data or a huge failure percentage.
Not to mention it required a huge staff of sales reps to work over a relatively small number of leads (by today’s standards), so much so that it created the common perception of a typical office “clerk” sales rep, they even made shows for it.
Photograph: Zach Long – The Office set experience in Chicago
Modern B2B Sales Funnel – What are SDR, BDR & AE?
Today the process has been more thoroughly refined with the separation of these duties into multiple roles as well as automated Lead Enrichment tools. These roles are:
SDR – Sales Development Rep. This role analyses the data from your CRM and decides which inbound leads (those brought in by marketing efforts) are worth developing, it then contacts them via email, calling, or other means.
An SDRs job includes developing this client at the top of the funnel, he must convince the client to be interested in their product/service. If the lead is worth pursuing further it becomes a “hot prospect”, for subsequent closing, or even upselling - it’s sent to the AE further down the pipeline.
BDR – Business Development Rep. These people take care of outbound leads, what this means is they are the more commonly known sales reps to the public - the ones that go out into the world and try to develop new leads. This is done by research into the market, lead lists, cold-calling, email campaigns, etc. All in the effort to find a new prospect and convert it into a hot one.
AE – Account Executive. This role is further down the sales funnel, they receive hot prospects from both the BDR and SDR and essentially try to close the deal.
They are the ones that will push the client over to make that ultimate step, they will also maintain the client for a time, both in the interest of upselling and a smooth transition towards the AM – Account manager, or if it’s a product, successful closure.
Of course, these are not the only people taking care of your sales funnel - there are multiple other positions, however, today we’ll focus on these as they are the ones benefiting most from Lead Enrichment.
What is Lead Enrichment?
All sales representatives will keep some sort of data tracking method, be that full-fledged CRMs or simple excel spreadsheets with their prospects. The approach heavily depends on the size of your enterprise. In smaller companies, you will find that all the aforementioned roles will be occupied by one or two people.
Regardless of who does it, due diligence into your prospects is a must when it comes to understanding which leads are worth pursuing, and which ones will be a bust.
In comes Lead Enrichment, it is not enough to have a list of John Does & John Smiths with their emails. That is a barebones lead list that is arguably less efficient than simply looking for prospects via LinkedIn.
Lead Enrichment by definition is the process of gathering and structuring supportive data around your leads & prospects within your CRM or other forms of a client database.
Also known as contact data enrichment, it means - supplying additional data that gives you valuable insights into your client or his intentions even before you try and contact the prospect.
This data can be acquired in two ways, manually gathering the information via googling, market analysis, and surfing LinkedIn-like platforms. This process can take an unresponsible amount of time that could be focused elsewhere.
Another way is using ready-made automatic lead enrichment solutions, a third-party ready-to-use database of contacts, emails, roles, companies, industries, market share, and even the latest news regarding their prospecting leads.
This gives your sales reps a head-start in developing the most efficient outreach approach, thus increasing their efficacy and your lead’s experience as well.
What kind of data should you focus on?
Regardless of whether you want to gather this data manually or use a third-party solution, you need to understand which data truly matters, and which will be superficial for your list of leads.
So, assuming you already have your list of “names/emails/phone numbers”, what other data will enrich your lead development and qualification process?
This data is spread between:
Firmographic – over-encompassing company information telling whether the company is fit for your product/service.
Demographic – all the info about actual people, figure out if you’re talking to the correct person you want to, decision-maker or marketing manager, etc.
Commonly sales teams focus on the following key datasets:
- Industry – knowing precisely which industry your prospect occupies is possibly the most important dataset for your list. This gives you valuable insight into potential business challenges commonly encountered by your possible lead.
- Annual revenue – a clear understanding of what kind of money this company has to play with.
- Growth metric – this tells you whether the company is going through an upturn or downturn.
- Number of employees – the overall size of the company, again, giving you insight into possible challenges this business might encounter on a day-to-day basis.
- Owner or Board of Directors – understanding the overall structure and who is the ultimate owner of the business you’re trying to establish contact with.
- Location – everything from country, region, city, address, etc. this can be particularly important for possible tax or governmental oversight into the industry.
- Credit score – a no less important dataset, the company might show all the signs of a growing and successful enterprise with its profits or growth, but in reality, it could all be a huge smokescreen.
Consider this the minimum data you should look for when generating lead enrichment. An important thing to take note of is that not all B2B industries are created equally, so at the end of the day consult your sales representatives about which data is most important within your market segment.
And where do I get this information?
This information can be acquired by correctly using Google, checking LinkedIn, visiting the company’s website, consulting a solution such as Global Database, and of course official gov business registries.
That is of course if you’ve decided to do the entire process manually, otherwise, there are ready-built lead enrichment services out there.
So, it is incredibly important to enrich your CRM with actionable data to use it to its full potential. When deciding on which third-party solution to employ first make sure it is compatible with your CRM.
