What Is Lead Enrichment And Why It’s Crucial For Your Team

What Is Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment is when you verify, correct, and include additional information to a lead in order to enhance your data.

In many sales organizations, this process is done using a combination of manual work, and third party data to ensure information is up-to-date and accurate.

Why is lead enrichment important?

Lead enrichment tools allow your sales organization to ensure its data is complete, of high quality, and up-to-date.

These three conditions mean you have data accuracy, which is crucial for companies.

Studies show average lead-to-customer conversion is 143:1.

But companies with best-in-class data management practices require only 68 leads to secure each new customer.

Let that sink in… data accuracy can increase your closing rates by 152%.

Lead Accuracy can be achieved through certain lead enrichment practices, which as we all know are hard (like sometimes, really hard).

In this blog post, we’re going to explore how lead enrichment affects the process of lead classification, routing, and conversion. Let’s get started.

You can also download our report below to see why lead enrichment can increase your business opportunities.

Step 1. Lead Classification: Lead Scoring & Segmentation

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is when you attribute a value to an incoming lead based on the probability that it will convert.

Usually, you can divide leads into three categories: hot, warm or cold.

When leads are hot it means they meet all the requirements to close – they have a budget, an authority figure is leading the purchase, they have a need, and a timeframe.

Warm leads are usually missing one requirement, and cold leads are usually missing a few.

Lead scoring is a way to help sales teams prioritize which leads they must work on first.

There are multiple metrics that can be included in lead scoring.

Engagement and user behavior is one way, but you can also score leads based on how well they match your ideal customer profile (which are the shared characteristics in your best customers).

You can learn more about the ideal customer profile in this report.

Leads with higher scores (most likely to close) will be contacted sooner than those who scored lower (least likely to close), allowing your sales team to prioritize their time accordingly.

Let’s review a simplified example of how you could score leads: In it, we’ll check website traffic, geographies, and worldwide website ranking.

Website traffic indicates how well a business is going, measured in site visits.

Comparing geographies allows you to see whether a company is global or local.

And worldwide ranking tells you how they compare with their industry in terms of overall site quality (visits and engagement).

Let’s say we need to score two leads. boohoo.com & gymshark.com.

Let’s explore how we’d do that:

Total Site Visits boohoo.com & gymshark.com

boohoo.com (top) has more visitors than gymshark.com (bottom), so in this case, they get a higher score.

Top 5 Countries boohoo.com & gymshark.com

We see that both boohoo.com (top), and gymshark.com (bottom) have a broad geographical distribution, so they both receive the same score because we see they’re both global companies.

Global Rank boohoo.com & gymshark.com

boohoo.com ranks higher in the global rank than gymshark.com, so it scores higher.

For the final calculation, we know that boohoo.com scored higher on two occasions, so we will give them a higher lead score than gymshark.com.

This means that we will prioritize boohoo.com when contacting leads.

In our simplified example, we used lead enrichment to add important digital metrics so that we could easily score these leads.

Once you’ve implemented a lead scoring system, you can read our tips to take your lead scoring to the next level.

Lead Segmentation

Lead segmentation is when you group leads into distinct buckets to differentiate prospects.

This will determine how your sales team interacts with them, and the type of messaging they will use to engage with them.

An example of this can be by industry.

Let’s say you are selling a team management tool and have prospects coming in from all industry types.

Segmenting by industry allows you to create a tailored sales pitch and demo to prospects who have different use cases for your service or product.

A great example of lead segmentation is shown in this Monday.com video, where they explain how one person working in real estate might use their platform vs. how a startup would use it.

Lead enrichment will allow you to collect information that enables you to personalize the way you engage with different leads.

Step 2. Lead Routing

Once we’ve scored and segmented our leads, we move on to the next step: routing.

We need to decide which sales team should be the one receiving a certain lead.

This is called routing.

Sometimes a lead is routed based on industry, headquarters location, or company size.

This will depend on the go-to-market strategy of your company, and the way your sales teams are structured.

For example, here at Similarweb, we have three dedicated sales teams.

Strategic accounts deal with multinational corporations.

Enterprise handles companies of 1k employees or more, and Inside Sales manages companies of 1k employees or less.

By enriching the contact information with company size, our leads can automatically be routed to the correct team.

Step 3. Lead Conversion: Lead Nurturing & Sales Process

Once you’ve correctly classified and routed your leads, you can either have your sales team get started with their sales process or begin a process of nurturing.

Let’s explore how lead enrichment affects them both.

Sales Process

Lead enrichment improves your sales process in several ways:

1. • Ensures sales teams receive all the information they require in order to begin working a lead.
     This allows them to spend their time doing what they do best.
     Selling.
     Not scrambling to find people’s contact details or other information they need in order to make a sale.
   • Allows teams to prioritize leads based on how likely they are to become clients.
     This is important because it ensures they’re making the best use of their time, and not chasing prospects that might take up a lot of time and energy, but not end up closing.
   • Guarantees leads get routed to the correct team and/or salesperson.
     When leads are correctly routed, it saves time for the teams but also ensures they’re being worked by the person with the best experience, and knowledge to handle that specific prospect.
   • Gives insight into what the needs and pain points of each prospect are.
     This allows your sales team to reach out with personalized, relevant and timely messages that will increase engagement.
     When you are able to provide value for your prospects and communicate it clearly, the sales process becomes more effective.

Lead Nurturing

If your lead isn’t ready yet to be contacted by sales yet, you might want to consider further nurturing it.

Lead nurturing refers to the process of cultivating meaningful relationships with prospects throughout their journey through the sales funnel.

By creating personalized communication efforts, you can nurture leads by directly answering their questions, dissipating their doubts, and clearly showing the value you can create for them.

A good example of this might be a company interested in selling its payment solution to eCommerce sites.

By understanding changes to the site’s traffic and engagement, the payment company can tailor their content efforts to make every touchpoint is relevant to them.

If more users are visiting the site and staying for longer, it means the website is probably converting more.

In this case, the payment company might offer a better deal for high conversion volumes.

Instead, if the eCommerce site is suddenly getting more traffic from multiple countries, the payment solution might offer great fees for payments from those countries.

Useful Data For Lead Enrichment

Company Data (Firmographics)

Firmographics refers to information such as company size (number of employees), headquarters location, annual revenue, and industry.

It’s generally accepted that the shorter a form is, the higher the conversion rate.

This is why many companies choose to forgo asking those metrics and enrich them instead.

For example, some companies enrich these metrics, not just by aggregating them but also by creating content through government and other web sources.

This is valuable information when you are routing, or segmenting your leads.

For example, if a company is headquartered in Texas, you’d want to have a representative reach out in English.

As opposed to a company headquartered in Santiago, where you’d want a representative to reach out in Spanish.

Or if you have a sales team specialized in companies in the travel industry, you’d want to make sure that lead is routed to them and not to the team specialized in fashion.

Contact Information

Usually, lead generation begins when prospects leave their contact information on your company site.

Generally, it’s because they’re interested in being contacted by a salesperson, or because they want access to gated content such as reports, or webinars.

Lead enrichment comes to fill in the gaps when people leave incorrect or incomplete information.

A good example of this might be someone who is interested in quickly downloading a report would write their email, and then gibberish instead of filling the information out correctly.

Enriching that lead would provide the missing contact information for that person.

This way your sales team doesn’t need to waste time trying to confirm this information.

Digital Activity

Digital activity refers to information such as website traffic, engagement, marketing mix, bounce rate, and GEOs.

This information is important because it provides a full view of your prospects’ online assets, and helps you create value for your prospects when reaching out.

An example is that of a website personalization company, whose ideal client profile is an eCommerce site with low engagement.

This company will use web metrics to qualify and target prospects based on bounce rate.

Later they can use this information to personalize their message and increase response rates.

Having this information provides priceless insights for your prospects, and will increase your engagement rates.

Similarweb has a dedicated enriching tool that automatically fills this information directly into your Salesforce.

Technology

Technographics refers to information related to the type of technology your prospect is using.

Enriching this data allows you to profile a company based on the type of technology they are (or aren’t) currently using on their site.

For example, the online payments company PayPal can use this information to target leads who are working with complementary solutions such as Shopify.

This allows them to reach out to prospects who represent a proper use case for their solution.

In Summary

Lead enrichment is key in allowing your sales team to work efficiently and creating immediate and positive connections with your prospects.

Using technology to make this task easier, ensure accuracy, and maintain updated information will have an immensely positive effect on your sales team and business.

Employee number, monthly website visits, and bounce rate are not typically enriched metrics, but they bring an enormous amount of value to your sales organization.

Similarweb is committed to creating that type of value, not just by automatically enriching up to 22 different lead parameters, but also by helping you manage them.

Using our insight will also allow you to create value for your prospects and give you signals that will help you time your outreach for better prospect engagement.

To leverage our market intelligence data and increase your sales revenue, start your free trial today.