Even if your sales and marketing teams aren’t fully utilizing your CRM, you’ve still collected data. If you’re a business that does anything, you have collected data pertaining to your customers and goals. All of this data can be resourced to improve your prospecting and lead generation efforts. But what happens after you collect that data? What happens in between the steps of initial data collection and utilizing it for your prospecting efforts?
You enrich it.
What Does Data Enrichment Mean?
You use data enrichment tools to collect more data and fully round out the information you’ll use to personalize cold outreach and nurture campaigns. This could be the difference between gathering hundreds of leads, to only being met with a trickle of unqualified potential customers.
These data enrichment tools upgrade your understanding of key buyer persona qualities that allow you to better target your customer base, leads, and everything in between. In the end, boosting your ROI.
Data enrichment, also known as data appending, can come in all shapes and sizes—as long as it’s useful information. You need significant, accurate data.
For example, if you know, Jane Smith is the CEO of ABC Company, but the website doesn’t list her email or social profiles for you to do some social selling outreach, a data enrichment tool will allow you to input the information you currently have and add additional contact points for prospecting enrichment.
That data enrichment tool could add information like her LinkedIn profile, professional email and phone number, personal email, and more to her prospecting profile.
It’s like Notorious B.I.G said, “Mo’ money mo’ problems.” Except this is a little different. It’s more like “Mo’ data mo’ money.”
Why Are Data Enrichment Tools Vital to Prospecting Success?
Your business should be like a Hungry Hungry Hippo when it comes to data. Businesses that use a data-driven approach in their sales tactics, rather than an intuitive one, are up to 6% more profitable than their competitors.
52% of customers want all offers from a brand to be more personalized.
66% of customers want brands to understand their unique needs and expectations.
You may say, “I use data in my sales approach already.”
However, there is a difference between glancing at data to compose an email and creating a comprehensive data-driven approach to boost sales.
A data-driven approach takes substantial factors into account when developing a sales or prospecting strategy. This could include demographics, contact information, or external feedback. You’re not relying on just basic observations and pre-existing strategies. You’re developing your own, unique tactics alongside something reliable and concrete: data.
Enriched data will be more comprehensive than the information you don’t enrich, and that’s a fact. You’re not a superhero. You can’t collect all the information yourself to create personalized messaging and a unique experience. You need prospecting enrichment tools to supplement crucial information to your sales strategy and boost sales.
How Do Prospecting Enrichment Tools Work?
Using data enrichment tools encompasses a broad range of potential data. When you gather the information from prospecting enrichment tools, you’re gaining not just insight but also context.
But how do data enrichment tools gain valuable prospecting knowledge that you don’t typically have easy access to?
Data enrichment tools are built to open opportunities for professionals seeking additional contacts. Contact information for enrichment activities is collected only from public sources, in the same way search engines like Google and Bing collect information.
Sidebar: Any reputable data enrichment tool will allow you to request a removal of your information should you not feel comfortable with the information collected from the contact database.
Once this information is scanned and collected from public sources, it can be used to enrich the information that data users already have in their CRM—which is vital to ensure outreach and communications are meeting the contact’s needs and wants.
With data enrichment tools, you can find the data you need quickly without having to bog down your sales team with research.
3 Steps to Complete Prior to Utilizing Data Enrichment Tools
You won’t make it far with just any old data, unfortunately. We’ve been hyping it up this whole time, but there are a few more aspects that need to be considered before rolling out your enriched data to boost sales.
1. Develop a Sales Plan
This seems like a given, but we’re serious here! You need to consider what you’re looking to get out of your data. An easy place to start is assembling a SWOT analysis. Identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will allow you to create messaging that resonates with your contact when you finally reach out to them. Using data just for data’s sake will continue to result in a poor sales performance.
2. Know What You Don’t Know
In order to fill the gaps in your knowledge with enrichment, you need to know what you don’t know. Are you scrambling for a certain bit of information that would just complete the puzzle for your sales strategy? What information could better help boost sales by informing your salespeople? Are you conducting social selling tactics and need LinkedIn profile information? Are you having SDRs cold call prospects so you need reliable and accurate phone numbers? Are you creating a nurture email that relies upon job functionality and you need updated role information? You can’t gather without a goal, and your sales tactic is vital when considering which data enrichment tools to use.
3. Choices, choices.
Finally, you need to find prospecting enrichment tools that are right for you. Now that you know what information is being gathered, what your sales tactics are, and what kind of data is still needed to boost sales, you need to choose a platform that best fits your needs. There’s hundreds of data collection tools at your disposal. But which one connects you to the right prospects?
Choosing a Data Enrichment Tool to Boost Sales
Identifying these three things will help you begin your enrichment journey and allow you to choose the best data enrichment tool for your goals.
Mo’ Data Mo’ Money
So what are we learning? Data is king. Having accurate, comprehensive data for your sales team narrows down their scope of prospecting leads that will prosper. This saves you time and money. First consider the accuracy rating of the prospecting enrichment tool you’re considering. The higher the rating, the more likely you are to create messaging that resonates with the correct prospect the first time.
Saving Time Also Means Mo’ Money
According to the Harvard Business Review, poor data costs businesses $3.1 trillion a year. How so? It increases time spent trying to correct it. When your sales team operates off bad data, they’re often left trying to manage it on their own. This wasted time costs you money and people-power. Workers waste 50% of their time correcting, hunting for, and organizing data. That’s a lot of time spent doing something that could be solved by a third-party software.
Better Data, Better ROI, Once Again Mo’ Money
It stands to reason that when your team operates with better data, it improves your ROI. This is because your team is finding leads that matter. With enriched data you find yourself narrowing prospects down from flimsy ones to ones that are solid. That is, leads that actually fit your ICPs and aren’t full of inaccurate data. As they say, less is more. A more honed sales strategy and data that is incredibly comprehensive will raise your ROI.
We’re “That” Data Enrichment Tool
At RocketReach, we’re dedicated data enrichers. That’s what we do. We gather data from over 700 million professionals and over 35 million companies to supply you with the best prospecting knowledge we can. Whether you’re searching for sales leads or the next employee for your business, our 650+ million technographics and enriched data are incredibly useful. Don’t be bogged down with bad data, which costs time and energy to fix, forcing you to miss out on valuable prospects matching your ICPs. Make the most informed decisions you can with RocketReach—the largest and more reliable contact database in the world. Try RocketReach for free today.
