Lead Quality vs. Quantity: How to Increase Bookings with Data Enrichment

In the B2B world, the paradigm shift to data-driven and AI-driven marketing has led marketing and sales operations leaders to seek out scalable methods for enriching, validating, and cleansing their contact and customer databases. Modern B2B lead generation professionals are prioritizing lead quality over lead volume and care more about the conversion rate of MQLs into sales opportunities, rather than the quantity of the MQLs. As a result, with each passing month, the demand for customer data validation, database cleaning, and data enrichment tools grows rapidly. In the core of all of these technologies lies data enrichment (also known as lead enrichment), as it involves adding the new data points to your new and existing leads and customers, thereby giving you broader targeting options and giving more valuable context to your sales team.

Unless your website visitors are ready to buy, there's always a chance that they won't give your the correct information

Now, let’s take a closer look at how data enrichment (lead enrichment) can positively impact the lead quality, speed sales velocity, and increase bookings. According to the MARCOM Robot annual data quality research, where we’ve surveyed more than 490 B2B sales, and marketing professionals, a 10 percent increase in lead quality can result in over 50% percent increase in sales productivity. Continuous data enrichment provides a faster and more accurate alternative to completing contact records than progressive profiling and extended lead capture forms.

Data Enrichment Gives You More Info Than Any Form Can Give

Data enrichment provides marketing and sales operations teams with data points that would be difficult to obtain on a form due to the nature of the information. Also, we always have to take into account that people tend not to provide valid information to the vendors simply because they don’t want to be exposing themselves to more marketing campaigns and receiving even more sales calls. Here are a few examples of the fields that your team will be getting from the data enrichment tools:

• Year of foundation
• Annual revenue
• Industry
• Company Size
• HQ Location
• Corporate Profiles on SMM channel
• And more!
  

Data Enrichment Supplements Your Lead Scoring Model

Every properly designed lead scoring model comprises of at least two parameters – action scoring and lead grading. Action scoring examines the behavior of leads as they browse your website and respond to your marketing campaigns, while lead grading examines the firmographic aspects of each contact and assigns a grade based on how well it fits your ideal customer profile. Factors such as company size, industry, annual revenue, location have tremendous influence over whether a lead will meet the standards sales needs to close a deal.

Data Enrichment Improves the Accuracy of Lead Routing

The bigger your sales team is, the more likely it is that you’ve got lead routing rules In place, which in a nutshell, are automated rules established in your CRM to deliver leads to specific salespeople according to some criteria. The majority of B2B organizations use HQ location as the key criteria for lead routing, so unless you’ve got an automated way of enriching this information for all of your leads, you will frequently be facing situations when leads get misrouted. Simply asking for this information on the lead capture forms won’t help you since your website visitors don't have a reason to give you the correct information unless they’re ready to buy.

Given the fast rate at which data quality has become ingrained in the marketing and sales process, using data enrichment tools to add the business-critical information to your lead and customer database is a worthwhile undertaking. By investing in a proper data enrichment software, you are increasing the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts, your campaigns start bringing more pipeline, and your sales team converts your leads into the opportunities faster.