If there’s one area of sales that has undergone drastic change in the past few years, that would be lead enrichment.
Lead enrichment is a process of improving your sales data by adding, checking and correcting the information you have on any given lead.
While even five years ago, lead enrichment was done predominantly by hand, manually verifying and looking up information, today, various data enrichment tools, often supercharged by artificial intelligence, are there to ensure the accuracy of all details on any lead.
Why Implement Lead Enrichment?
Lead enrichment (a subset of data enrichment) is the best way to make sure all your lead data is current, accurate, and available to you at any moment.
Consider that the average lead-to-conversion ratio is 143:1. However, for companies with top data management practices, the ratio improves to 68:1 — a 152% increase in efficiency.
So what kind of data would allow your organization to move away from 143:1 and closer to that 68:1 ratio?
Here are just a few categories to pay close attention to.
Company Overview Data
If you know where your lead is working, you should have a good general understanding of their company. Data points like industry, approximate annual revenue, number of employees, and location could reveal a lot.
Historically, a lot of company data was provided manually by leads themselves, when they would fill out forms to contact you or download some content. Now, you can make those forms significantly shorter (thus improving conversions) and rely on lead enrichment tools instead.
Lead Contact Information
It’s not unusual for leads to leave correct emails on your forms but fill the rest of the fields with random keystrokes just to get past the gated content (e.g. to access a webinar).
In a situation like that, your salesperson is at a significant disadvantage because there’s no opportunity to customize their initial message properly.
Lead enrichment tools can then fill the gap by scanning the web for missing content based on email or any other information you do have. No need to waste hours on Google anymore.
Web Presence
It’s always useful to know how active any particular lead is online, including their company activity as well.
Lead enrichment tools can instantly show you approximate web traffic, bounce rates, marketing campaigns, social media engagement, etc.
Having this information lets your team think through the exact value propositions that would be unique and lead-specific.
Tech Stack
If you’re selling a SaaS product, knowing all the software a lead is already using is critical. It’s much easier to sell a Salesforce plugin to companies already using Salesforce.
Lead enrichment tools are able to scan all your lead’s digital properties and find the exact tools that comprise their stack. This would also allow for more refined lead scoring and segmentation.
So, once you use lead enrichment tools to find out all of the above, how would your sales process change?
Lead-Enriched Sales Process
With lead enrichment in place, your sales team can start working on any lead knowing that all available information is complete and up-to-date.
In other words, instead of spending time scrambling to find someone’s contact details and verify their information, they can focus all their efforts on selling.
Your salespeople will also know at a glance which leads are more likely to convert into clients and can dedicate more of their time and energy working with them. By leveraging the information provided, they would also be able to craft personalized messages with a higher chance of conversion.
Even when you know that a given lead is not ready to be contacted, you could consider nurturing it with actionable information and insights specifically relevant to them.
Lead-Enriched Routing and Segmentation
If you’re servicing a few unrelated industries or the same industry but with accounts on a different scale, specialization within your sales team is critical. Why have a senior salesperson pursue a sub-10K opportunity when they usually work on 1M+ ones?
This is where lead routing comes in — deciding which team should get a certain lead based on predefined criteria (e.g. industry, marketing spend, location). Lead routing saves time by automatically assigning leads to appropriate teams and, more importantly, ensures that high-value opportunities get everything they need to close.
Similarly to lead routing, segmentation allows to categorize leads but for use within the same sales team. The best use of lead segmentation is the ability to write a personal message or present a demo covering topics that are relevant to your lead’s industry.
Lead-Enriched Scoring
Finally, lead scoring is a critical part of your conversion funnel and the one that could be enhanced by lead enrichment tools the most.
The way everyone used to score leads is assigning a value to an incoming lead based on their conversion probability, which was in turn judged against requirements like being from a relevant industry or of a certain size, or even just being a decision-maker within the company.
The more requirements a given lead would cover, the higher their score would be, along with their priority to your BDRs.
Lead enrichment tools allow you to change the game completely, evaluating hundreds or thousands of leads at once. The best tools don’t even ask you to input your criteria or your ideal customer profile — they know exactly who is more likely to buy based on the millions of data points used to train their machine-learning models. One example of this is Lift AI.
Lift AI is an anonymous buyer intent solution utilizing a unique machine-learning model that has processed millions of real-world visitor interactions. As a result, it’s able to enrich your lead scoring process by instantly segmenting leads based on their likelihood of purchasing your product, even if they have never visited your website before.
Since up to 98% of your website visitors are anonymous, there’s no real way to figure out who they are without asking them first. Lift AI is designed to identify anonymous buyer intent with over 85% accuracy, with no human involvement required.
Once you have Lift AI installed, it would integrate with your chat platform and assign each visitor a buyer intent score. The highest-scoring leads (around 9% of the overall traffic) can be connected directly to your BDRs. Lower-scoring ones can be served with a nurturing bot or a self-help solution.
As soon as you let Lift AI identify anonymous buyer intent, your chat conversion rate will start growing and increase by two to 10 times within the first 90 days — all because your salespeople are spending their time only with the best incoming leads.
You can try Lift AI free for 30 days. All you need to do is set up a small JavaScript snippet on your website.
Now you know how easily AI-powered lead enrichment tools can save every member of your sales team hours every day and significantly improve your conversion rates. All that’s needed is to let both the cutting-edge technology and your salespeople do what they do best.
