Lead Enrichment: What is it and How is it Crucial for the Sales Team?

 Do you spend a great deal of time looking for new leads, learn about them, craft a fantastic personalised email for them only to find out that it bounced back? If this scenario sounds extremely familiar to you as a sales rep, then you need to read on.

What if we told you that there is a way to not only know which leads are most likely to convert but also what you need to do to make that sale?

The answer is lead enrichment.

In this guide, we’ll cover what lead enrichment is, why it’s important for your sales team, and how to make it a part of your process.

What is Lead Enrichment?

Lead enrichment is the process of collecting and organising sales supportive data around your leads from your database. Verified data provides your sales team with enhanced perspective into a prospective customer.

The goal of lead enrichment is to create insights on how to increase the effectiveness of sales strategies to help you analyse the sales pipeline and lead generation to close deals better.

Lead enrichment gathers data such as company size, role or job description, industry, email address, and phone number; essentially, any data that helps your team enhance their outreach process.

This can be done either manually (by entering it into your system) or you can leverage software intelligence tools such as Salesken to do that work for you whenever a lead comes in.

Why is Lead Enrichment Crucial for your Sales Team?

Without verified leads, businesses will lack a valuable database of sales and customer base needed to grow exponentially.

Organisations cannot rely on intuition alone; they need established strategies and tools to attract the right kind of customers they want.

Without such a strategy, targeting the right target audience, identifying the right metrics for conversion, and analysing the sales pipeline quality becomes extremely difficult.

Here are seven advantages to switching to lead enrichment for your sales team:

#1 Reduce Sales Cost

If the sales rep had access to accurate lead data, the amount of time saved and, in turn, the cost of sales incurred would be much less.

Bad data is highly expensive for organisations – sales reps spending their time chasing incorrect leads is both time-consuming and expensive.

Lead enrichment tools tackle precisely this. Switching to AI-driven, smart lead enrichment tools can not only help you identify the right leads but also ramp up your e1fforts with intuitive call tracking metrics to understand where exactly you stand.  

#2 Enhance the lead generation process

89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel for lead generation. With email marketing being the primary source for procuring leads, having an inaccurate database makes it an extremely tedious task, and having quality leads becomes a high priority.

To see this in action in your business, you need to align your B2B lead gen process and create a clear framework for the buyer with an appropriate lead enrichment tool. Key tasks include:

1. Setting clear demarcations between MQLs, SQLs, and PQLs
2. Defining a “sales-ready” lead correctly
3. Automating incoming leads to ensure their quality

#3 Adopt A Data-Driven Approach

With automatic incoming leads from your automation tool, your sales team may find that the quality of the leads is better than relying on manual methods. As a part of your automation, follow a data-driven approach. Use only the data your tool suggests to help you prioritise leads that will convert instead of leads that are unlikely to convert.

#4 Improve Customer Retention

One of the most dreaded tasks of relying on a manual database for leads is that the sales rep and the potential customer will have to fill in the information repeatedly, resulting in low retention rates. Additionally, according to sources, if the sales rep does not respond within 30 mins, the opportunity is lost.  Asking for excess information to find the perfect lead only slows reps down.

With lead enrichment tools, you can ask for minimal data such as their name, company, and the role and then discover the rest of the data to help you target them and have a conversation with them.

In this way, lead enrichment helps reduce lead abandonment, produce more relevant leads with supporting data, and improve retention.

#5 Easy Lead Segmentation for Better Sales Nurturing

With lead enrichment, your sales team can correctly classify and route the leads to get the process started or begin the process of sales nurturing.

#6 Improved Sales Process

Lead enrichment helps your team improve their sales process by:

• Ensuring that the correct information is received in order to begin warming up a lead.
• Allowing teams to prioritise leads based on their likelihood of converting.
• Guaranteeing that the is lead routed to the correct team/salesperson
• Providing deep insight on the needs and pain points of the prospect.
  

#7 Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of establishing meaningful relationships with prospects throughout their journey via the sales funnel.  By understanding the prospective lead better with lead enrichment tools, you can create highly personalised communication scripts to nurture leads directly by answering their questions, dissipating their doubts, and walking them through the benefits of your product.

How to Automate Lead Enrichment

A manual approach to leads is tedious and requires your sales reps to spend hours scouting on the internet for leads, verifying it, and killing precious time for prompt outreach. Automating lead enrichment is the smart thing to do.

Let’s learn the different ways of automating lead enrichment:

#1 Sync Lead Data from your CRM and Sales Automation Tool

As your marketing and sales team works tirelessly to score potential leads, they will want to ensure that they meet certain criteria and are made visible to sales. To make this process quicker, integrate your CRM software such as HubSpot, Zoho, or Freshdesk with a sales automation tool such as Salesken and implement a data flow that syncs the data between the two seamlessly.

The accrued data can go well beyond contact information and include specific data to help your reps engage with leads effectively.

#2 Connect Enriched Data to the Rest of your Sales Stack with an Automation Tool

Fast-growing organisations worldwide are leaving behind hours of manual work for smart automation tools to get the struggle out of their way.

By switching to an automation tool, you can:

1. Deeply integrate cloud-based apps at the API level to avoid silos within individual teams, tools, and departments.
2. Automate processes among cloud apps to ease the flow of data and give your sales reps the ability to create automated workflows.
3. Make it effortless to build an easy plug-and-play interface to automate leads within minutes. Automation tools are sophisticated and easy enough for anyone to use without much interference from the tech team.
   

#3 Nurture Leads with Smart Email Automation

The most preferred method for direct follow-ups is email marketing for converting and nurturing leads.

Email marketing offers the highest return on investment for most businesses, especially small ones. It helps nurture prospects and active customers, build brand awareness, deliver personalised messages for specific user segments, run A/B tests for sales messages and share the company’s achievements and latest offerings.

However, email marketing is not always the easiest as people change jobs, roles, and email addresses go cold. By switching to tools like Salesken, you can nurture leads with smart email automation to automatically run these processes regularly. You can also connect your CRM software with Salesken to sync everything at all times!

Lead Enrichment Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s:

1. Map out internal sales processes before automating
2. Automate manual and low-stake processes first
3. Increase the number of automation processes as and when you get comfortable with the tool
4. Aim to build a highly cross-functional team by involving your entire sales team in your automation process

Don’ts:  

1. Building personal relationships is a people skill; automation can’t help you with that
2. Don’t rely heavily on the tool. A/B test all the features to get the maximum out of it, but never marry the tool
3. Don’t automate and leave it entirely. Review the process every once in a while

How Does AI Enrich Leads?

Here are some of the ways that AI enables leads for your team:

1. Profile enrichment
2. Identifying high-quality leads
3. Tackling duplicate databases
4. Assisting you with the best time to contact the leads
5. Documenting recommendations
6. Real-time cues to make that personal connection
7. Deal alerts and task recommendations
8. Action items from emails and meetings
9. Supercharging sales teams with optimised training

Overall, highly optimised sales processes backed by AI are already here. Lead enrichment, especially for B2B businesses is a boon for sales reps and managers on the whole. AI-enabled sales can improve productivity, decision making, and overall effectiveness to supercharge the customer experience.

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