You’ve worked hard to craft a beautiful website, you’ve created thoughtful content pieces for your target audience to interact with, and you finally start seeing a steady stream of inbound leads coming in.
Success! Or is it?
For any team with inbound leads comes challenges related to inbound leads. Whether the lead quality is poor, researching and qualifying the leads takes forever, or there are too many leads to properly act on, it’s likely that your team will need to do something to get the most out of the inbounds they’re receiving.
In business-to-business, one way to improve the process is by enriching your marketing automation platform with fresh and reliable company data. Through automation and better understanding of the companies your leads work for, you can improve conversion rates while saving hours in the process.
In this article, we go through what lead enrichment is, plus we take a look at five lead enrichment examples of how you can use real-time company data to get the most out of your leads.
What is lead enrichment?
Lead enrichment refers to the processes and tools that verify and enhance data on a lead or a target account. For sales and marketing teams, lead enrichment serves to build richer profiles on potential customers with high-quality, up-to-date data.
5 lead enrichment automation examples
Get what you need to reach out as quickly as possible
With inbound leads, quickness is key. According to a study by Drift, the likelihood of making contact with a lead dropped 10x when reaching out after the first five minutes.
And so in order to maximize your conversion rates from inbound leads, you’ll need all relevant information in a hurry. Integrating with your marketing automation tool, a sales intelligence platform will match the email domain (@vainu.com) to a company in its database and enrich the lead with all the key data points: company name, industry, size, key technologies used, you name it. All of this happens in a matter of seconds and means you’ll avoid scrambling to build a proper profile during those critical first minutes.
Route leads to the right reps back in your CRM
Taking automation one step further, the enriched company profiles in your marketing automation platform can be used to route leads back to the right reps in the CRM. For example, a lead in HubSpot could be matched to the owner of that account in Salesforce, and that account owner can get notified on Salesforce’s end about the new conversion.
And if the lead is from a net-new account, you can use the company’s profile information to route the enriched lead to the most fitting sales rep based on your territories or segmentation. For example, a company selling to multiple industries with representatives for each industry could use the data point to automatically route leads to the right reps.
Improve your lead scoring models through more data points
While it’s undoubtedly important what a person has done on your website, it’s only one piece in the whole puzzle. Behind any employee is a company with its own objectives, challenges, existing business ecosystems, and decision-making processes. All of these will likely impact the likelihood of that lead converting into a sale, and should somehow be reflected in your lead scoring models.
Based on your ideal customer profile, use the company data points as additional criteria in your lead scoring models to do an even better job of prioritizing who to focus on.
Personalize nurturing campaigns by understanding the company
Once you move on from the initial contact, nurturing your leads to further help them through your pipeline will become a priority. And when nurturing those leads, reaching out with relevant and impactful messages is crucial to avoid becoming too pushy or just plain annoying.
One way to be relevant is to use the understanding you have of their company to tailor your email workflows. Know what technologies they use? Share content pieces that highlight how your product integrates. Know the company’s only ten employees? Avoid sharing the new enterprise solution you launched.
The more you can use the company profile to your advantage, the more you can engage with your leads without alienating them, and see results down the line.
Shorten forms to increase conversion
Not only will company data help you once the lead comes in—it’ll also help you open the door to new leads. Short forms on landing pages tend to convert better, and one way to remove fields is by using a company data platform to fill in the fields you’d like to know about the company your lead works for.
Just make sure you have a valid email address, and you’ll be good to go.
Data’s only half the battle
At the end of the day, a perfectly oiled data workflow is only as good as its weakest link—the end user. All the data points in the world won’t solve a sales and marketing team out of sync, not pursuing those leads to their best abilities. If sales and marketing alignment is something you’re striving for, we recommend reading this blog on our tips for seamless customer experience.
But once you’re aligned and working to the best of your abilities, company data and automated lead enrichment processes will surely make your life easier.
