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Lead Database Enrichment 101: What It Is & It’s Value Beyond Prospecting
Lead data has never been easier to source. Now, the question of the quality of the data, depending on the channel in which you have received that data, is one of the main reasons Leadium exists...but that is a subject for another blog (or just have fun looking around our website.)
If you have chosen to source your lead data from a database subscription, purchased a one-time list pull, or have an existing database from a previous endeavor or lead-sourcing effort, there are two key problems that will impact your current prospecting program: the data is raw, and the data has a high chance of being decayed / out-dated.
That’s what database enrichment is for. Enriched data helps you make better decisions, reach better, more targeted prospects, layers in real-time verification, and allows you to get the most return on your database.
Without data enrichment, you’re severely hobbling your lead generation efforts.
Here are the basics of data enrichment, the types of enrichment, and how to get the most value out of your database enrichment efforts.
What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment combines the prospect or customer data that you have - preferably living in a CRM like Outreach.io - with data that you need from a third party (human-sourced vendor or pulled from a database), to form an improved dataset.
Prospect or lead data is a prime use case for data enrichment. Improving your prospect data gives you a complete view of your ideal customer profile. Improving (and adding to) your database gives you the ability to:
- Create more personalized messaging
- Reach prospects through more channels
- Segment your outreach better
There are many types of data enrichment that can be accomplished through a combination of human research and technology support: demographic data, technographic data, psychographic data, event data, and custom-requested data.
Demographic Data Enrichment
Demographic data enrichment involves acquiring new demographic data, such as gender, age, education level, profession, income level, marital status & more. What matters most in demographic enrichment for lead generation and prospecting usually centers on the job title profile you are targeting.
For example, if your product solves problems for social media content managers, gender and age is an important data point knowing that this role tends to skew female, aged early 20s to late 30s.
Technographic Data Enrichment
Technographic data enrichment gives you insight into what technologies a lead or prospect has in their stack. This type of enrichment can reveal what CRM, analytics, email marketing software, advertising platform, hosting sites, ecommerce platform, and more that a company uses. This data reveals which products or services they will benefit from which is most beneficial in B2B software / SaaS space.
Psychographic Data Enrichment
Psychographic data gives you information about a person’s values, attitudes, interests, activities, and personality traits. Adding psychographic data to your database builds an even clearer picture about how each lead views the world, the things that interest them and what triggers motivate them to action (or, in our case, agree to the sell).
Event Data Enrichment
On any given day, there are multiple conferences, meetups, and news-worthy events happening across the country and around the world. Depending on your product or service, it may be valuable to know who in your database is attending particular future events or what events that have attended in the past. This gives you insight into their travel budget or bandwidth, their company’s sponsorship trends, the event topics they are most interested in, and geographically, where they are throughout the course of the year.
Custom-Requested Data Enrichment
We had to include this final category as it is the only one that can be accomplished with a human-sourced vendor like Leadium. Most databases have a set list of the categories of data that they are able to provide, and many have been picked and pulled from other databases creating a stale, set list that you must work within.
But what if, for example, you were in the software business selling specifically to restaurant franchise owners and you had a database of typical owner contact information (name, email, phone number) from a database purchase but wanted to add their current owned restaurant locations, Yelp Reviews, and maybe even their restaurant category focus (QSR / Fast Casual, Premium Casual, Fine Dining, etc.).
These would all be very important data points to know when it came down to writing your personalized messaging for each prospect, segmenting your lists according to restaurant type, and when your outbound campaigns launched, tracking which of these segments respond the best to your value proposition.
With this knowledge in hand, you might alter your prospecting strategy all together!
The Value of Enriched Data Beyond Prospecting
Which leads us into our final point about why data enrichment is important. Not only can it be an integral piece of your outbound sales strategy, but it can also be intel for your overall business strategy as well.
Imagine the scenario:
Your prospecting data is packed full with yummy real-time, enriched data points custom to your product or service, time of year, geographic location, and ideal customer profile segments.
Your outbound sequences have been running smoothly, and highly-optimized through testing and tracking by a Leadium SDR for 4 to 8 weeks.
As a result, you now you have a crystal-clear picture of not only the exact profile of the segment and messaging that is performing the best because of the robust reporting and analytics that a CRM provides, but also, you have had many valuable sales appointment conversations in which you have received initial feedback, questions, and honest objections to your offering.
All of this data and analysis combined being the exact recipe for product-market fit testing.
As a startup or SMB, your goal during the early-growth phase of your business shouldn’t be to immediately “CRUSH sales” or “HIT giant quotas.” While it is definitely good to have defined goals for those on your team responsible for sales activities, if you are starting at the very beginning (zero customers, zero pipeline) one of the best strategies for growth success is to iterate your product and messaging to the feedback of those first rounds of raw, outbound feedback.
And the best feedback will come from a result of using the best possible (enriched) lead data.
The valuable insights that you will receive and use for the life of your product or service from engaged, highly-targeted prospects is priceless compared to the small one-time investment for human-sourced data enrichment.
Enriched data helps you make better decisions, reach better, more targeted prospects, layers in real-time verification, and allows you to get the most return on your database.
