Automating Lead Enrichment Processes with Tools for B2B Lead Generation

If you ask a B2B lead generation professional about how effective a particular marketing campaign has been, most likely, they’re going to run a quick comparison of the lead numbers between several executions to give you the answer. If you ask a salesperson the same question, they will likely address it from the standpoint of lead quality, not lead quantity. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to automate the lead enrichment process and take advantage of the enriched leads in your sales and marketing processes.

Lead enrichment process is a low-hanging fruit to improve lead data quality

In essence, lead quality comes down to the two main factors – sales readiness and data quality. As far as sales readiness, B2B marketers have already learned how to impact it with the help of lead nurturing, retargeting, and scoring. But when it comes to making an impact on data quality, that’s where historically the B2B marketing team has had very little influence as the sales operations departments have been managing this process through the CRM system of choice (SalesForce, HubSpot, Zendesk and others).

Lead Enrichment – A Simple Process to Improve Your Data Quality

Modern lead scoring models put more emphasis on the severity of the lead action than on the accuracy of the lead information. This causes frustration on the sales side as lead quality and data quality are very closely related in the minds of the salespeople. Challenge yourself with an exercise – take a look at the list of MQLs that were passed over to your sales team last week and see what percentage of your MQLs are missing the essential corporate information, such as company name, company size, annual revenue, HQ location, website and other details. If more than 20% of your leads do not have these details, likely, your team doesn’t have an established lead enrichment process.

Manual Lead Enrichment vs. Automated Lead Enrichment Tools

There’s no right or wrong answer to the question of which process or model you should choose for your organization. It comes down to whether you can achieve your goal of enriching leads as they come in without delaying the disposition of the leads to the sales team or not.

• Manual Lead Enrichment

We’ve seen a few examples of companies that have been successful at establishing a manual lead enrichment process when they’ve either hired or outsourced a small team of data quality specialists, who’s job was to update the lead records manually before passing them over to the sales organization. While real-life examples show that some organizations can establish a robust lead enrichment procedure without any tools, for the majority of the B2B organizations with large volumes of leads, this option will not be feasible due to large lead volumes. Manual lead enrichment seems to only work on a small scale and quickly becomes more expensive than the lead enrichment with lead enrichment solutions.

• Automated Lead Enrichment (using lead enrichment tools)

There are plenty of data enrichment solutions available. Long story short, your top options are EnrichHQ by Marcom Robot Clearbit, and everyone else. EnrichHQ is a lead enrichment tool that we would highly recommend you check out. And it’s not because this tool is probably the most affordable lead enrichment tool out there. It’s not just the cost-effectiveness that you should be striving for. Your lead enrichment needs to be a continuous process, wherein case your lead enrichment solution wasn’t able to enrich the lead right away, it puts it to a particular queue. It performs a re-crawl over and over again to obtain the missing contact and company details from multiple independent sources. That way, your match rate (percentage of successfully enriched leads) grows exponentially. This technological advantage sets MARCOM Robot apart from other vendors.