On average, 79% of generated leads don’t convert to sales. This figure highlights the extent to which converting leads into sales is an uphill climb for any business, and the sales process doesn’t always yield significant returns.

One helpful solution that too many marketing and sales teams overlook is lead enrichment. Enriching your leads helps you determine which ones are likely to convert into paying customers. It can also give you a good idea about what you need to do to boost your chances of making a sale. You can check out this BlackStorm Electrical Marketing Agency here if you’re aiming to double your leads and sales!

While lead enrichment is no crystal ball, incorporating it into your sales process can do wonders in helping your teams close more deals effectively and increase sales effectiveness.

Read on to learn more about the nuts and bolts of lead enrichment and how it can help optimize your sales process and operations.

What is Lead Enrichment?

Lead enrichment refers to the tools and processes that verify and enhance lead or target account information. If all you have is your prospect’s name and company name, lead enrichment can help add useful details to their CRM entry, pulling in contact information, data about the company, its website and social presences.

Enriching leads help marketing and sales teams create more complete profiles of potential customers based on the latest, high-quality data, which then helps a great deal to qualify and score leads, while also identifying their personas.

Essentially, lead enrichment is about collecting and analyzing lead or client data. It helps sales and marketing teams provide experiences, interactions, and services that relate to and address potential clients’ needs, increasing the effectiveness of lead nurture processes and ultimately improving sales.

Simply put, you can think of lead enrichment as knowing more about your lead to enrich your chances of making a sale.

The Importance of Lead Enrichment

Your business depends on your team’s ability to make sales. By enriching your leads, you’ll have the information and insights to make the right (and strategic) decisions to convert your leads into sales. You’ll understand who you are selling to and, in turn, know the best ways to sell to them.

This eliminates blind spots and guesswork, easing your access to insights about decision-makers in potential B2B client companies. It can give your sales and marketing teams focus, instead of them using generic tactics and issuing offers that don’t address your prospects’ individual needs.

Plus, it is possible to sort and integrate lead enrichment into most businesses through:

• Integration of internal data sources to make the information available to your other business processes
• Importing from external data sources to add information to your contacts automatically
• Automated data cleansing tasks to help you validate and clean at the data point of entry or flag the data for cleaning at the earliest point possible
• Functionality to allow sales reps to update, add, and correct data seamlessly while working on other tasks

5 Sales Operations Benefits of Lead Enrichment

When used properly and strategically, lead enrichment can improve your sales process efficiency and, in turn, increase your business’s profits.

Below are some ways lead enrichment can help your sales teams achieve a seamless and effective sales process.

1. Find the Best Potential Customers to Pitch

Is your lead’s organization a category leader, or is someone else in their niche challenging their position? Knowing details like these can help your team to assess relevance and optimize pitches.

Likewise, lead enrichment allows you to map the leadership hierarchies of your potential customers’ companies and a route to decision-makers. Armed with these insights, you’ll be able to uncover the people with the most influence, allowing your sales team to reach out to key decision-makers directly. Additionally, lead enrichment helps you avoid accommodating incorrect data and pitching to the wrong prospects, which can cost a lot of time and money.

2. Give Your Reps the Information They Need

The more data your sales team has about your potential customers, the more prepared and equipped they are to tailor their messaging to your prospects’ needs.

Leveraging lead enrichment can help your sales team do the following.

• Send case studies and content that closely relate to your potential customers’ challenges and pain points
• Tailor marketing and sales messaging in meetings and calls with prospects to touch on the challenges they want to find solutions to or resolve, based on what’s actually happening in their business niche in terms of market share and share of voice
• Use the right (or preferred) channels to target decision-makers with personalized messaging

3. Optimize Your Lead Qualification Process

Knowing more about your leads makes it easier to determine whether they are a good fit for your services or products. After all, prospects who are a bad fit won’t likely lead to a sale, no matter how skilled your sales reps are or how compelling the messaging.

You’ll waste tons of time and resources better spent on generating and converting qualified leads into paying customers. Use lead enrichment to qualify your leads, especially if you have:

• Specialized services or products
• A massive number of leads to process
• A low sales success rate

4. Reduce Friction at Crucial Stages of the Journey

According to recent data, 10% of people don’t complete lead capture forms due to unnecessary questions, and 27% abandon online forms because of the length. The more steps and details in your lead generation forms, the higher the chances of prospects abandoning them. You’ll lose tons of conversion and sales opportunities.

Lead enrichment helps you avoid this, since you can ask prospects for the bare minimum details, such as the name, company, and email address, and you can later import additional necessary information from third-party sources. This way, you can capture more leads and still gain access to data your sales team needs to sell your products and services successfully.

5. Keep Your Lead Data Updated

Old lead data can quickly become obsolete, negatively impacting your sales strategy’s success. After all, your chances of making a successful sale can diminish when you:

• Have a warped idea of a B2B buyer’s readiness to purchase because of old revenue numbers or an outdated take on the prospect’s competitive market landscape
• Reach out to the wrong person due to outdated contact information
• Pitch unsuitable solutions to prospects because you don’t know the latest number of employees within the company

Using lead enrichment solutions can eliminate these challenges. The right platform can help keep your data up-to-date, ensuring you always target the highest potential prospects and ultimately improving your sales effectiveness.

Enrich Your Leads to Boost Your Sales

Leverage lead enrichment to ensure your sales team and processes work based on complete, up-to-date, and high-quality data.

You’ll have the necessary and accurate information to streamline and optimize your sales process and turn more prospects into paying and loyal customers.