What is lead enrichment? Maximizing your CRM data

To put it simply, lead enrichment is a process of enhancing your existing CRM contacts with more data.

Acquiring new customers is a pretty expensive undertaking. As mentioned by Harvard Business Review, customer acquisition can cost you up to 25 times more than customer retention.

This doesn’t mean that you need to stop doing cold outreach and getting new clients. But it definitely means that you need to be careful with lead qualification.

Lead enrichment is one of the ways to improve your lead qualification process.

This blog post explores lead enrichment and provides practical guidelines on how to make the most out of your CRM data.

In short, lead enrichment is the process of supplementing initial lead data with additional insights.

Raw leads obtained through web scraping often lack the complete details needed for targeted, personalized outreach. Names and emails alone aren’t always enough to understand which prospects represent the best sales opportunities.

Many businesses use lead enrichment tools to automatically cross-reference scraped contacts against thousands of data points. This fills in important missing context.

Types of lead enrichment data

Lead enrichment tools draw from various data sources to create comprehensive prospect profiles.

Here are the main types of lead enrichment data that you can use to enhance your CRM.

1. Firmographic data

This includes details about a prospect’s company such as industry, logo, size, location, technologies used, funding/investment history, and more. This helps you understand the lead’s background and needs better and tailor your approach. By enriching your CRM with this data, you’ll have your lead’s corporate or personal websites.

2. Job-specific data

Demographic data provides information about leads on an individual level. It includes their job title, education level, location, and more. Having this information helps you understand not just the company your lead is working for but also their personal and professional background.

3. Social media handles

By enriching lead profiles with social media handles, you’re not just adding contact points, but gaining insight into your leads’ publicly shared activities. These insights can guide the tone and direction of your outreach. Besides, if your lead doesn’t reply to your emails, you can easily reach out to them via LinkedIn.

4. Contact details

Contact details (emails and phone numbers) offer a direct pathway to your lead but unfortunately, it can be too time-consuming to keep them up-to-date manually. Automatically enriching your CRM with current phone numbers and email addresses can significantly increase your chances of closing that deal.

Three top benefits of lead enrichment

While lead enrichment delivers value to businesses of all sizes, the advantages are especially significant for small and growing companies with limited resources.

Let’s look at some of the three top enrichment benefits tailored to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB):

• Higher quality of CRM data. Lead enrichment complements your sales routine, making it stronger and more effective. With automatically enriched leads, you can identify which prospects are most likely to convert.
• Faster sales cycles. Time is a limited commodity. Lead enrichment tools help you automatically gather lead information. This means less time spent on manual data entry and more time focusing on closing deals.
• Cost savings. Enrichment ensures you invest in outreach to only the most qualified prospects fitting your ideal customer profile. Precise targeting minimizes wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiences.

Lead enrichment best practices

To fully leverage the benefits of lead enrichment, you need a strategic approach.

Simply adding a data enrichment tool to your toolset won’t automatically bring more sales revenue.

Follow these best practices to ensure success:

1. Start with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Lead enrichment is not the same as web scraping or simply extracting contact info from web pages.

To enrich leads in your CRM, you first need to have these leads ready.

That’s why it’s important to have high-quality leads in your database. Correctly identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the foundation of successful lead enrichment. Know who you’re targeting and what characteristics make them a good fit for your product or service.

Before enriching, get laser-focused on filling your CRM with high-quality leads and prospects.

2. Decide what data matters most

The amount of lead data is overwhelming.

But it doesn’t make any sense to have all of it in your CRM.

Decide what data points matter most in each stage of your sales cycle. Chances are that you need different information at the beginning of the sales cycle compared to the very last stages where you are about to seal the deal.

Once you identify what data points you need, find out how lead enrichment tools can help you (and whether they can help you). These tools are time-savers for the early stages of lead qualification but the farther you go with qualifying your leads, the more information you need.

Not all of this information is publicly available so at some point your sharp questioning skills will need to replace automatic lead enrichment tools.

3. Review your approach to data hygiene

As with all good beginnings, lead enrichment should become your habit.

Don’t just enrich leads once. Continuously verify and update lead data as your CRM contacts inevitably move companies and change roles.

Having a regular CRM audit can help you make the most of your lead enrichment process. They are different things but auditing your CRM data and enriching your lead profiles go hand in hand.

By consistently monitoring the quality and accuracy of your lead data, you can make sure that your CRM becomes your sales powerhouse.

Lead enrichment tools and use cases

Lead enrichment tools are the unsung heroes in the realm of sales strategy.

For small and medium-sized businesses that are short on resources, these tools can provide the extra advantage required for closing more deals.

By enriching contact data in just a few clicks, they save your time on manual copy-pasting work and let you focus on other activities instead.

1. Lead Clipper

Lead Clipper is a free browser extension for scraping lead data from publicly available web pages.
But it can also be used for lead enrichment.

Imagine you receive an email from a potential lead.

You can easily select their signature, click on the Lead Clipper extension icon in your browser’s top right corner, and we’ll automatically capture their details and fill them into a contact form that pops up.

But what if you still feel like you’re missing some information?

You can enrich your lead data by going to their Twitter or another social media account, clicking on the Lead Clipper icon again, selecting the missing data, and clicking “Clip & Add Selected Text.”

2. Enhance button

The Enhance button is another free lead-enriching feature of OnePageCRM.

If you have a valid email address for your new lead, we’ll automatically search any data associated with that contact—their social media, profile photo, website URL, and any other publicly available information.

3. Profiles with logos

Gone are the days of wordy interfaces.

To quickly navigate through your CRM, you need a user-friendly experience.

That’s why we made Contact Pages smart. For every contact that has a valid website URL, we automatically fetch the logo.

This means your contact profiles will mirror social media, enhancing your overall experience.

It’s true what they say—a picture paints a thousand words.

Try OnePageCRM for lead enrichment

When strategically combined with web scraping, lead enrichment ensures your database provides the depth of information needed to support revenue growth.

More than just more leads, it delivers leads that convert.

OnePageCRM offers several lead enrichment tools for no additional cost. It also has a 21-day free trial (no credit card required).