Data Enrichment Tools and CRM Data Enrichment: What It Is and Why You Need It

When it comes to the amount of the information that B2B sales and marketing teams could collect about any business on Crunchbase, LinkedIn, corporate websites, and other free online sources, the sky is the limit. There’s no shortage of data these days. There’s probably too much data to sift through to get precisely the company information your sales team needs the most in a timely fashion at a scale. That’s the reason why data enrichment and data cleansing have become an essential part of the new B2B sales and marketing process, which are heavily dependent on data quality.

In this article we’ll explain what data enrichment is, why it is a must-have process for any B2B business storing their data in a CRM, list out the top five use cases for CRM data enrichment, and rank and stack the best data enrichment tools available on the market, both free and paid.

‍

Q: What is Data Enrichment or Data Appending?

In B2B world, data enrichment, also known as data appending, or data cleansing, is an automated process of enhancing the raw data collected as the result of marketing campaigns, such as webinars, trade shows, email marketing, etc. The goal of data enrichment is to provide the sales organization with a complete and accurate profile of each potential customer. It is typical for the B2B sales teams to care more about the firmographic data, as they see the most significant value in data points such as company name, corporate website, company size, annual revenue, location of the corporate headquarters.

Q: Do You Need CRM Data Enrichment? Why?

Being a continuous process, data enrichment helps enhance and enrich the profiles of your contacts and accounts in your CRM of choice. More accurate data about your prospects stored in your CRM translates into more precise targeting options thanks to a more precise segmentation of the database, better-performing marketing campaigns, a more significant pipeline, and at the end of the day – more bookings.

Best data enrichment tools pull the missing data points from multiple sources and feed this intelligence into your CRM system, usually through the API integration.

Q: How Data Enrichment Tools Work?

Continuous data enrichment and data cleansing is a multi-step process, where either a small number or a handful of tools can be working together to provide your B2B sales and marketing teams with the most accurate intelligence possible. Although the process consists of a few steps, all of them in total take a split second to run:

• Step I: [Data Collection] – Data enrichment tool crawls various independent data sources to get a full profile of the organization your new or existing contact is coming from.
• Step II: [AI-Enabled Data Cleansing] – Data enrichment and data appending tools analyze the information they’ve been able to collect and analyze thoroughly investigate conflicting data points. Based on the reliability of the data sources and multiple other factors, data enrichment solutions identify the most accurate intelligence.
• Step III: [Adding Missing Data Points] – Data enrichment solutions pass this sales intelligence over to the CRM system through an API integration. The CRM contacts and accounts get appended with the missing data points.

Q: What Is Continuous Data Enrichment?

Much like your marketing campaigns and sales follow-up should never stop, data enrichment should not be considered a one-off initiative unless you’re enriching something like a list of attendees your marketing team has brought from a recent event. A mature data enrichment process is always continuous, the one that never stops. The key reason for this is that the modern business environment is so dynamic, that even the best quality contact and account data can become obsolete in a matter of a few months – companies revenue go up and down, the number of employees keeps changing, corporations are moving their offices to more cost-effective locations.

Continuous data enrichment means that the data enrichment process never stops and ensures that you have the most precise and up-to-date sales intelligence at any point in time.

Q: What Are the Use Cases and Benefits of Data Enrichment?

1. Reduce friction on your lead capture forms

It’s no secret that long and complicated lead capture forms negatively impact the conversion rate of your landing pages. Thanks to data enrichment B2B marketers can reduce the number of fields on the forms without sacrificing the lead quality while increasing the visitor-to-lead conversion rate on the landing pages and providing the intelligence the sales team needs.

2. Segment your CRM database more accurately

With data enrichment tools, you’re getting full visibility into the contacts and accounts you’re storing in your CRM. Be it customers or prospects, sales intelligence, and data enrichment solutions help you create specific segments and deliver an exceptional experience through offering content that is relevant for a particular part of a customer journey.

3. Score your leads based on their firmographics criteria

How often are you getting email-only leads? How much time does your sales team need to spend trying to figure who those leads should belong to, what business they represent, etc.? If you’ve got the CRM enrichment process in place, you’re collecting the key company details right away. You can score and route the leads with a much better precision. Data enrichment can be a great way to remove manual work from the scoring process by automatically categorizing prospect priority based on real-time enrichment data.

4. Provide exceptional customer experience

Real-time CRM data enrichment delivers better data. In return, better data helps make better decisions around the approach your sales team’s taking to qualify your new leads and nurture existing customers. Based on the enriched CRM data, your customer success, sales enablement, and marketing teams can better understand the needs of your prospects and customers, tailor their follow-ups, sales, and marketing cadences taking into account the peculiarities of specific contacts or groups of contacts.

5. Improve sales productivity

As a result of CRM data enrichment, your data becomes more reliable, and you start delivering leads to proper sales teams right away. They no longer need to re-assign those leads after they’ve had an initial conversation and discovered that their HQ location belongs to someone else’s territory.

Q: What Are the Best CRM Data Enrichment Tools / Data Enrichment Services?

There are plenty of CRM data enrichment/data cleansing / real-time data enrichment tools and services available on the market. Here are the market leaders with a quick summary of the critical features of the leading CRM data enrichment tools.

Clearbit

Perhaps, the most expensive of all, Clearbit is a Bay-area based company that is considered a leader in the data enrichment space. They’ve got the most extensive database and the most significant number of out-of-the-box integrations. All of this comes at a hefty price tag.

Enrich HQ by Marcom Robot

Very similar to Clearbit, Marcom Robot is a data enrichment company headquartered in Austin, Texas. MARCOM Robot offerings are more appealing to small business and mid-size organizations. The Marcom Robot pricing model is very affordable compared to Clearbit, yet the size of the database and the match rates are very similar, if not higher.

By getting a successful CRM data enrichment process going, you can reduce the friction on your lead generation forms, segment your CRM database more accurately, score leads based on firmographics criteria, provide exceptional customer experience and improve sales productivity.

If you would like to learn more about other benefits of data enrichment, need CRM data enrichment, or a data enrichment tool in general, you can contact the Marcom Robot team or create a free account and start enriching your contacts and reports today.