What is Lead Enrichment? Everything to Know in 2024

Lead enrichment involves gathering, organising, and examining data related to a customer’s interest in a company’s offerings. Lead enrichment aims to gather information to improve the marketing and sales process and increase conversion rates.

Enriching lead data is a complex process that requires data engineering, research, and analysis using advanced algorithms and machine learning models.

In the ever-changing business landscape, it requires collecting, cross-verifying, and cleaning billions of data points from various sources. 

Cognism Enrich does it on autopilot so that sales and marketing can use reliable and compliant data. Let’s look at some of its capabilities. 👇

CRM enrichment

With Cognism Enrich, you can set lead enrichment of a CRM at desired intervals, i.e. every three months, to improve the functionality of an entire organisation’s data asset.

Cognism Scheduled Enrich allows users to maintain a healthy and unpolluted CRM with consistently refreshed data points. It allows businesses to dodge data decay and retain as much accurate and actionable prospecting data as possible. So, when launching new campaigns or refreshing old call lists, reps can rely on the numbers and emails they have.

Lead enrichment automation

Cognism Instant Enrich allows users to set up smart lead enrichment queues based on set criteria that act as soon as new data hits the CRM.

Lead enrichment automation is the foundation for instantly actionable, accurate contacts that deliver results, such as:

• Improved conversion rates.
• Supercharged lead grading.
• No more manual data verification.

Check out one of Cognism Enrich product tours to see how to create new Instant Enrich jobs and sync the Cognism data enrichment platform with Salesforce. 👇

2000+ companies choose Cognism as their lead enrichment provider👇

For example, Drift used ZoomInfo and LeadIQ across their global sales teams but struggled to find actionable contact data, especially leads’ mobile numbers.  They tested a list of 5,000 MQLs in several databases, and Cognism defeated all the providers. 👇

Why is lead enrichment important for your business? 

Lead enrichment is important because it helps keep your B2B lead data up-to-date and accurate.

Adding more information about your leads helps your sales team identify high-priority prospects faster and create messaging that will resonate with them.

They can use enriched lead data to create more personalised outreach sequences and write a powerful follow-up when the right time comes.

When you enrich your data, you not only ensure it’s accurate and current, you can match it with information that helps power your sales strategy.

For example, by following sales triggers to be alerted when a company raises a new funding round.

But there’s much more to it.

Here’s a brief outline of what objectives B2B lead enrichment helps achieve: 

Companies cannot function effectively with legacy data. Sales data deteriorates quickly, and out-of-date information can cause serious harm to your sales or marketing campaigns. 

The biggest clue that your data isn’t right is a rise in bounced emails when you run a campaign. That means the people you thought you were contacting are no longer at the same companies. New people are in their place but are not finding out about your product.

If this is happening, you need to do a data health check. Look at the data in your company CRM – how old is it? If poor, outdated information affects your outbound efforts, it’s time to consider enrichment lead generation.

Types of lead enrichment data

There are at least nine types of lead enrichment data used by B2B sales and marketing teams

1. Contact data

Contact data is the most sought-after type of data for lead enrichment. It's key to grow your business through prospecting and lead generation campaigns. With Cognism, you can enrich historical lead contact data in your CRM and enrich fresh data that enters your systems.

Examples of contact data:

• Leads' cell phone numbers.
• Email addresses.
  
• Direct line phone number.

Since working from home has become a new normal, access to prospects’ mobile phone numbers is more valuable than to direct dials. It lets you reach the prospect directly and avoid company gatekeepers.

2. Firmographic data

Firmographic data provides details regarding the organisation or company associated with the lead. 

Examples of firmographic data: 

• Industry.
• Company size.
• Location.
• Revenue.
• Company structure.

Firmographic data is great for B2B marketing lead enrichment. You can use it to segment and target leads based on specific criteria. For example, you can create segmented campaigns to differentiate your messaging depending on the B2B  industry.

3. Demographic data

Demographic information provides insights into the personal characteristics of a prospect. This type of B2B data can also help you build an ideal customer profile to base your enrichment processes on.

Examples of demographic data: 

• Age.
• Gender.
• Income.
• Education level.
• Job title.
• Role within the organisation.

Using demographic data correctly helps create stronger messaging because you can better understand a lead’s preferences and needs. 

4. Intent data

Intent data tracks a lead’s online behaviour and signals to identify their interest and buying intent. 

Examples of intent data:

• Web searches.
• Content consumption.
• Website visits.
• Interactions.

Once you have this data, you can prioritise your engagement with specific groups in the market looking for your solution. Cognism, a B2B data provider that helps businesses enrich leads, uses intent data from Bombora, one of the most reliable intent data providers. 

What’s more, you can use Cognism for Salesforce lead enrichment, ensuring you always have up-to-date data across all integrations. 

5. Technographic data

Technographic data focuses on the technologies and tools a lead’s organisation uses. 

Examples of technographic data:

• Information about the software.
• Information about the hardware.
• Account’s IT infrastructure.

Knowing what software your active prospects have in their tech stacks helps you qualify leads better and personalise your campaigns.

6. Social media data

Social media enrichment involves gathering information from a prospect’s social media accounts, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. 

Examples of social media data:

• Lead’s interests.
• Activities.
• Connections.
• Engagement patterns.

Social media data is another source of inspiration; it can aid your account-based marketing campaigns and increase B2B sales.

7. Geographic data

Geographic sales lead enrichment provides location-based information about leads.

Examples of geographic data: 

• City.
• State.
• Country.

Geographic data helps to tailor marketing campaigns, localise content, and target leads based on their geographical location or preferences. 

8. Account data

Account data enrichment focuses on gathering and appending company details as a whole rather than as an individual lead. 

Examples of account data: 

• Company hierarchy.
• Subsidiaries.
• Parent companies.

Account data enrichment helps sales representatives understand the bigger picture and identify potential cross-selling or upselling opportunities.

9. Behavioural data

Behavioural data captures a lead’s past actions, interactions, and engagement patterns across various touchpoints. 

Examples of behavioural data:

• Email opens.
• Link clicks.
• Website visits.
• Content downloads.
• Event registrations.

Behavioural data helps B2B companies understand a lead’s interests, preferences, and engagement level.

Examples of lead enrichment

You should know a few good use cases before developing your strategy around sales lead enrichment. Let’s have a look at possible options.

• Learn about personal characteristics — by enriching your data with additional lead insights such as their interests and background, your marketing team can create more personalised campaigns that resonate with your future customers.
• Monitor a lead’s online behaviour — adding intent data lets you learn if a user is actively looking for solutions like yours. It allows you to reach out with an offer at the right moment.
• Capturing past interactions — learn about your lead’s interactions with your company website to put better scoring in place. Outreach to leads after they perform a click or form submission in critical places of your website.
• Identify upselling opportunities — get an outlook on all decision-makers, their changing needs, and pains to upsell more products to different people in the same organisation.
• Tailor location-based offers — by enriching lead profiles with geographical data, you can personalise your messaging and offer solutions specific to different markets.

How does lead enrichment work? 

Sales lead enrichment is a straightforward process consisting of four steps — data collection, lead routing, lead conversion, and lead nurturing. Let’s have a look at each.

1. Data collection

You can gather data to enrich information about your prospects in two ways: manually or with third-party tools to enrich data in-house.

The first scenario usually involves a lot of overhead costs and could be more economically viable. Purchasing data from third-party B2B data providers is often cheaper and faster.

For example, using a lead enrichment tool like Cognism can help update prospect information with phone-verified mobiles.

Once you have collected the necessary information to enrich your lead data, it’s time to score and segment prospects for future campaigns. Let’s review both.

1) Lead scoring — helps you assign a score to leads based on your analysed information. Every criterion includes a specific number of data points that you then assign to your prospects depending on what scale they meet the criteria.

2) Lead segmentation — lets you break prospects into a list of leads based on specific criteria. For example, you might create a separate list for leads representing the travel industry with an employee count exceeding 1,000. Segmentation dictates the strategy and content of your future campaigns.

2. Lead routing

Once your data is ready, it’s time to assign specific leads to your sales reps. This process is called lead routine or lead assignment.

Instead of doing it manually, you can rely on automation that contains specific routing rules. You can usually define how they should work. For example, you can decide that an executive working with enterprise clients receives prospects only from large organisations.

3. Lead conversion

You can introduce better lead scoring and improve lead qualification criteria with high-quality enriched data. For example, by applying intent data enrichment, you can quickly spot who wants to buy your tool so you can reach out immediately. 

Also, lead enrichment lets you personalise your campaigns better. As a result, you can move your leads down the sales funnel faster.

4. Lead nurturing

You can use data from B2B providers to ensure you don’t miss out on leads that haven’t converted right away or haven’t accepted your offer in the past. 

Effective lead nurturing will help you stay in touch with these prospects and continue building relationships. 

Having up-to-date and accurate data on prospects allows you to optimise your nurturing sequences and strategies to find many more touch points. 

Want to learn more about enriching your data? You can do it with Cognism without leaving outreach! Watch this quick video to see how 👇

Lead data enrichment: FAQs

What is lead enrichment for CRM?

Lead enrichment relates to the process of enhancing and enriching the lead data stored within the CRM system. CRM systems are designed to centralise and manage customer and lead information, and lead enrichment serves to augment the existing data with additional details to provide a more comprehensive view of each lead.  

Lead contact enrichment in a CRM involves gathering external data from various sources and appending it to the lead records within the CRM system. This additional data can include firmographic information, demographic details, technographic data, social media profiles, intent signals, geographic information, behavioural insights, and more. 

The purpose is to enhance the quality and depth of the lead data to give you a better understanding of your leads.

How do you automate lead enrichment?

You can use sales automation tools or software platforms specialising in lead enrichment. These tools can automate the data collection process, integrate with your CRM system, and provide enrichment capabilities specific to your business needs.

When working with these tools, you usually start by defining the data fields you want to enrich within your lead records. This may include: 

• Firmographic data.
• Demographic information.
• Technographic details.
• Social media profiles.
• Intent signals. 

To get the process of lead enrichment to run automatically, you should connect the tool with your CRM. Most lead enrichment tools have custom integrations with big CRM providers such as Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive.

After a setup, you can define what actions or activities should trigger automated lead enrichment — for example, when you add a new lead to a CRM or when a lead performs specific actions on your website.

Try Cognism for lead enrichment

With Cognism, you get more accurate data by leveraging a company’s data collection, verification, and enrichment expertise.

Cognism’s data collection processes, verification protocols, and data enrichment capabilities ensure the highest data quality standards.

As a result, you get data you can trust — and high response and conversion rates will follow!