You rely on the customer data in your CRM – customer relationship management – 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. But if it’s not? Your customer acquisition efforts are more likely to come up short.

With proper CRM data enrichment, 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. 

Your data and your CRM

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—or customer relationship management platform – 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:

• Personal: Personal data may include the name, location, job title of the prospect, and other basic details.

• Categorical: Categorical data may include not only demographic information like gender but also information such as job department, length of employment, and seniority.

• Contact: Contact data may include addresses, phone numbers, and social media accounts.

• Firmographic: Firmographic data may include information on a company, office locations, industry affiliations, number of employees, and more.

You may also have additional fields to keep track of previous outreach or communication efforts, and any other relevant notes.

What is CRM data enrichment?

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, through no fault of your own. 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 You may also be dealing with entries that are out of date and haven’t been touched in months, or even years.

Organizations like yours can address these issues through data enriching your CRM. Also known as data appending, data enrichment is a process that supplements your existing firsthand CRM data with third-party 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.

What CRM data enrichment does for you

Successful customer prospecting starts on a foundation of good data. If you make CRM data enrichment a priority, you can be sure that you’re consistently providing your sales and marketing teams with current, reliable, detailed data.  

Greater personalization

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 clients.

Increased productivity

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.

A better bottom line

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.

An edge in the marketplace

If you and your competition are going after the same prospects, you have the upper hand if you have the 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.

Build a lasting CRM data enrichment strategy

When done right, CRM data enrichment can offer tremendous benefits—but implementing it can be tricky. To avoid common pitfalls, you should:

• Set clearly defined and achievable goals.

• Audit your existing data so you know exactly what you have and what you need.

• Plan to enrich your data at regular, ongoing intervals so you always stay up to date.

• Implement a data enrichment tool and/or software to help support the process.

Selecting 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. 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, 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.