You rely on the customer data in your CRM – customer relationship management platform – every day when identifying and evaluating potential prospects. When this data is complete and current, your sales and marketing teams can do what they do best and conduct more targeted, successful prospecting to draw in new customers. But if it’s not? Your customer acquisition efforts are more likely to come up short.
With enriched data in your CRM, you can avoid this outcome and empower your teams with the tools they need. Let’s learn more about what CRM data enrichment is, how it can benefit your business, and best practices for success.
Every day, you directly collect raw customer data from a variety of sources, including advertising, demand generation emails, website lead forms, social media, and more.
To help you make sense of this information, you likely enter it into a CRM to store, centralize, and organize it in a way that your sales and marketing teams can utilize and leverage it for the creation of use cases.
This collected data is usually grouped according to four different categories to help build comprehensive customer profiles:
You may also have additional fields to keep track of previous outreach or communication efforts, and any other relevant notes.
Despite your best efforts, not all of this data collection may be complete. You may be missing any number of important details on a potential lead, which could create challenges for your sales teams. For example, online contact forms tend to be short and simple to encourage more people to fill them out, leading to unavoidable data gaps. You may also be dealing with entries that are out of date and haven’t been touched in months, or even years - leading to poor data quality.
Organizations like yours can address these issues through data enriching your CRM and more effectively building out your small business database. Also known as data appending, data enrichment is a process that supplements your existing firsthand CRM data with third-party external data to expand, fill in, and update your data sources.
Data enrichment is different from data cleansing, in which you remove broken, duplicate, or otherwise unnecessary entries from your CRM. Data enrichment adds crucial information to your CRM — eliminating crucial gaps and ensuring that you’re working with the most up-to-date information to obtain valuable data points and insights.
Successful customer prospecting starts on a foundation of good data and can lead to many good business opportunities. If you make CRM data enrichment a priority, you can be sure that you’re consistently providing current, reliable, and detailed data for sales and marketing.
The more you know about a potential customer, their needs, and their pain points, the more you can personalize your outreach to create a sales pitch that resonates. These kinds of targeted campaigns increase your opportunities to connect with prospects and turn them into meaningful customer relationships.
With better data comes faster, easier, and more accurate decisions and workflows. Your team can score leads more effectively, and you won’t have to waste time pursuing incomplete or dead leads. You can focus your money and your resources only on the prospects that fit your ideal customer profile.
When you work with high-quality data, you can conduct smarter, more efficient outreach that saves time and money, and lets you prioritize the most qualified leads—helping you to increase your conversion rates and your ROI. It also helps you make better business decisions across your entire organization.
If you and your competition are going after the same prospects, you have the upper hand if you have more accurate data and detailed insights needed to create a more compelling customer experience. If you don’t, that could put you at a disadvantage when trying to make a personal connection and convert promising leads into new business.
When done right, CRM data enrichment can offer tremendous benefits—but implementing it can be tricky. To avoid common pitfalls, you should:
Selecting B2B data enrichment tools is a critical step; while you can enrich your data manually, it is more efficient and accurate if you leverage an enrichment solution that can help you collect the best data possible. Depending on your needs and the scope of your data, you can opt for something as simple as browser plug-ins that integrate with platforms like LinkedIn and other social apps.
For more in-depth data enrichment needs, companies can opt for a data enrichment service provider, who can often carry out these processes for you automatically without any additional action or oversight needed on your part.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for CRM data enrichment, but for companies that are considering a data provider to assist with their enrichment initiatives and help improve the accuracy of the data itself, a provider like Enigma can offer the highest-quality data to support both your current and future needs.
With a custom mix of public, private, internet, and hard-copy records, Enigma’s trustworthy data sources combine public, private, digital, and analog information to compile a full view of any small and medium business.
With actionable data on everything from transactions and revenues to financial risk factors, Enigma’s in-depth data reports can change the way you identify, evaluate, target, and convert prospects. Our APIs can even integrate into your existing CRM, so you don’t have to change your current data platform and processes.
Ready to learn more about Enigma and how our data can support and transform your B2B sales cycle? Sign up for your free demo today.
