Data Enrichment: How to Put Your Data to Work on Autopilot

Data is the compass of your business.

It guides you along the unpredictable seas towards your North Star, helping you make key business decisions and (hopefully) avoid a nasty iceberg or two.

It removes gut feelings from your strategy sessions, grounds your decision-making in fact, and lays the foundation for predictive success, not wishful thinking.

There's only one problem.

Your compass won't work without regular data enrichment.

Leaving your data to rot will damage your lead gen funnel and lead you astray.

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing, refining, and improving your first or raw third-party data.

Why would you want to do this?

To create better data accuracy and help your sales team focus on the leads likely to convert into paying customers.

If you're struggling to answer questions like:

Then adding data enrichment to your toolkit is your solution.

Why is data enrichment important?

Data in your CRM data decays FAST, but how do you know what's out of date?

A prospect you're nurturing can start a new job, companies can downsize, or different decision-makers can come into play.

Keeping up to date with what's going on in dozens of different companies is exhausting, time-consuming, and not efficient.

In a nutshell, data enrichment is important because it gives you actionable insights.

It de-silos your data, activates sleuth mode, and helps you find more information about a user without asking.

Let's look at an example.

You attend SaaStr, collect a bunch of business cards, and get back to the office.

...How do you know which potential leads are worth pursuing or aren't a match for your ideal customer profile (ICP)?

With data enrichment.

Plug in a prospect's email or name, and you can pull through valuable qualification information like:

The result? You can effectively score leads and nip the manual workload in the bud.

CRM data enrichment

Now, here's the catch.

To reap the rewards of deeper insights, you must integrate your data enrichment tool with your CRM.

Once the connection is there, your CRM will automatically update any changes to company data, such as firmographic, technographic, and signal data.

With more data points in your CRM, you'll have the full picture to improve your lead scoring and know the right talking points for each customer stage.

And you know what that means?

It's smooth sailing to increase your ARR, and your data is no longer going to Salesforce to die.

4 huge benefits of data enrichment

Data enrichment is no longer a "nice to have."

It's essential.

Your company needs to move away from relying on manual (often outdated) data points.

Using high-quality data that is accurate and relevant to your business will help you understand your customers better and have a one-up on the competition.

As Michael Katz, Founder & CEO of mParticle, puts it:

"Your sales team are the tentacles of your business. They can extract and absorb information back into the business, which allows you to make informed decisions."

But what are the business benefits of more actionable and accurate data?

Improves personalization

A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work anymore.

71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% feel frustrated when it doesn't happen.

To sell to digital customers, you need to use strategies that fit a user's preferences and give someone that "wow, this solution is made for me" feeling.

While tailoring your marketing and sales efforts seems like a lot of work, it pays off.

According to Harvard Business Review, personalization can deliver 5 to 8x the ROI on marketing spend and increase sales by 10%.

But the big question is, how does data enrichment fit in here?

Well, it helps you segment your data and improve your user targeting, which delights customers and leads to higher retention rates.

Increases sales efficiency and customer experience

What's holding your sales team back?

If you're like most SaaS startups, it's:

The solution?

Cleaning your list and getting rid of useless and redundant data.

You'll improve your ROI and sales efficiency when your team has access to the right data and can easily identify hot leads.

Once you have a lead, CRM data enrichment can help you lure them in by:

Advanced lead scoring

One of the biggest mistakes we see SaaS sales teams making is approaching lead scoring as an art rather than a science.

When you only have a little information to go on, it's guesswork at best and sticking a finger in the air at worst.

Enriching your data turns your lead scoring into cold, hard facts and eliminates user friction. With more data points feeding into your CRM, you can easily move user profiles that are "incomplete" to something with more meaning and an accurate score.

How does this look in practice?

It removes the tedious process of manual lead scoring by automatically categorizing a prospect using real-time enrichment data.

Let's look at an example.

Like most SaaS companies, you probably have a form on your website that collects first name, last name, email address, and maybe a few other fields to help qualify the lead.

In the past, using fewer form fields was a catch-22. According to a Marketo study, a short form with five fields has an average conversion rate of 13.4% while a long form with nine fields drops to 10%.

While a shorter form increases conversions, it prolongs the buying cycle because the leads aren't fully qualified.

With a short form and a manual lead scoring system, the prospect will enter your funnel with a low score even if it’s a hot lead.

Why? The system can't rate buying intent or product fit with hardly any information to sink its teeth into.

...But when you have real-time data enrichment batting for your team, your sales intelligence tool can take that name and email address and pull in information from third-party data sources.

Without lifting a finger, you'll have access to more data points to help your CRM accurately prioritize leads and seamlessly pass them along to sales.

You no longer have to walk the thin line between potentially scaring away leads with long forms and asking for enough information to weed out high-value customers.

All you need are your must-have fields, and your data enrichment process takes care of the rest.

More examples of businesses using data enrichment

We've discussed how data enrichment can help with lead qualification, but what else can it do for you, and how has it helped other businesses?

Chatbots

Remember the days before chatbots?

Users would land on your site, click around, and contact your team with the same questions.

Verbatim.

While it's great your sales team is starting rapport with leads...it's time-consuming.

Chatbots eliminate the need for sales professionals to answer repetitive questions, automatically qualifying prospects further down your funnel and reducing the weight on your human resources and budgets.

When you combine chatbots with enrichment datasets, your team can acquire more customer data through these conversations and update your CRM seamlessly.

Upselling and advanced segmentation

Looking to improve your potential to upsell and cross-sell?

Enrich your customer analysis to understand their needs, habits, preferences, and decision-making.

Most companies rely heavily on internal behaviour data like eBook downloads or emails opened. While these data points provide valuable insights, you need to combine it with external data to open the door towards more intelligent selling and a higher level of customer satisfaction.

With an enrichment strategy in place, you enter the realm of advanced segmentation, giving you the ability to predict (and no longer guess) which products to offer at the right time to the right user. You’ll have more data to discover new behavior patterns and a keener eye to spot market opportunities.

Data compliance

Data compliance is the least sexy use of data enrichment but the most important one for any online business.

Over the last couple of years, governments have rolled out laws around data privacy like the EU's GDPR. It limits the type of customer data you can store and how long.

If you don't have enrichment solutions to keep your data above board, you might find yourself paying a hefty fine.

Bonus: You can use this process to keep your do-not-call lists up-to-date and any other internal or external regulatory requirements in check.

How Breyta uses data enrichment

At Breyta, we're passionate about turning the traditional CRM model on its head.

We want you to access real-time user data, give data entry tasks to a machine, and build a collaborative CRM for your SaaS customer lifecycle.

To achieve this, it all comes down to enriching data.

Here's an example.

Let's say you use Clearbit as a cold outreach tool. Breyta integrates with the platform and enriches any leads or existing users from your CRM system.

Data enrichment is the answer to data woes

Sales are the backbone of any business.

Without money coming in, you'll quickly have to close your doors and head back to the ye' ol LinkedIn job board.

How do you avoid that?

By becoming a data-driven organization and using multiple touchpoints to improve your sales output and user retention rates.

This is one of the tenets we built Breyta around.

We wanted to create a successful CRM data enrichment process that helps you hyper-target users, improve your lead scoring process, and become better at predicting when to upsell, cross-sell, and prevent churn.

While getting a process like this sounds like a massive, expensive task, with the right data enrichment tool *cough* Breyta *cough* you can set it up without the headaches and dent to your wallet.

And when it's running?

You'll instantly have access to a data-rich, real-time CRM.