When data in Salesforce is stale and incomplete, it can hamper sales operations. This outdated and incomplete data can be filled using tools for data enrichment that will fill up the gaps.
Best Data Enrichment Tools:
Nektar.ai: It’s an all-in-one stop shop for everything Salesforce. It automatically updates contacts and opportunities with first party data as well as historical insights.
ZoomInfo: Has a vast collection of firmographic & technographic data perfect for finding decision makers.
Clearbit: Offers real-time appendage of data and integrates with marketing tools for lead segmentation.
Crunchbase: Concentrates on startups, gives company profiles, funding history, industry trends. (Free tier available)
Leadgenius: Customizable web crawlers that collect niche-specific information.
Cognism: Blending of data enrichment with automation and multi-channel engagement.
Ringlead: Ideal for telemarketing through features like call scripting as it cleanses and enriches B2B contact data.
Choosing the Right Tool:
Think about your industry type, what kind of information you are looking for (firmographics or technographics), how much you want to spend, and whether you would like real-time updates or automation happening.
What is Data Enrichment?
Introduction
Your ideal customer is not just a name or address. It is a full-fledged human with certain buying habits, persona and social media footprint that screams of “perfect- fit”.
Your salesforce data might only present a distorted or very limited picture of your buying committee. It can act like a dusty attic with crammed boxes full of half- remembered details.
Your CRM is the backbone of your business decisions and you can’t rely on skewed numbers. You would want to make it as much valuable as possible to base your future plan on a solid strategy. This is exactly where data enrichment can help you.
What is Data Enrichment?
Data enrichment helps to fill out complete information about your leads like contact number, address, company and even company related details like size, industry, location etc.
Imagine you get a lead of someone names Adam Doe, from Acme Ltd. It might sound promising but what is Acme all about? Who is this guy Adam beyond his email address and phone number?
Data enrichment snoops in and pulls out information from social media activity, business directories and even internal purchase history to prepare a 3D persona. Now, Adam Doe is a tech enthusiast with a knack for technology updates and purchase history of high end gadgets. There you go! It’s time to tailor your pitch and win Adam over.
Your lead has become a real person with real interest who can be engaged with at a personal level.
Data enrichment precisely adds valuable information into your existing customer data on Salesforce. This additional intel can give you a holistic picture of your target audience and prospects.
It can be performed in three ways:
- Direct: Your leads might decide to provide complete information about themselves by filling out a survey.
- Internal: You combine scattered information about your lead across different databases into one
- External: You source this out to third party data enrichment services that can access external records.
Salesforce data enrichment allow teams to create a single, unified source of all CRM data so that team members can make decisions efficiently. Data can be enriched via:
- Data Cleansing: This means getting rid of obsolete, duplicated, partial data and making the datasets error-free.
- Data Appending: By collating data from multiple sources, a unified dataset can be created that offers a complete customer profile.
Why do you need a Salesforce Data enrichment tool?
As per studies, 77% organisations struggle with data quality issues.
While the reps are already grappling with an increasing buying committee data enrichment can essentially make their life easier by providing them as much information as possible about their leads.
With right kind of data enrichment, sales teams can:
- Leverage better quality data: Data enrichment gives valuable context to the data by removing redundancy. This can help in creating an effective sales pipeline for your reps with less manual efforts.
- Craft Messages that Matter: You can uncover salient aspects about your prospects’ likes and dislikes like their favorite sports, hobby etc. This can help you tailoring your message in a way that grabs their attention and strikes the right chord with them.
- Target the Right People: With complete picture about your prospects’ company, you can understand the actual stakeholders and invest your efforts with accuracy. With better understanding of the buying committee, your reps are more likely to chase the right prospect and build effective account plans.
- Predict Success: Having proper data lets your reps understand their buying committee’s behaviour precisely. They can better equip themselves with the essential background information and forecast pipelines accurately.
Bonus! Data enrichment can elevate your internal data too. Reps can identify patterns and discover new information by connecting dots and prevent potential customer churn.
Our top 7 picks for Data Enrichment
Now that we understand the importance of putting your CRM in a better quality. Let’s talk about the top tools that can help you achieve this.
Nektar.ai
Nektar.ai is a contact and activity capture solution that keeps and recovers client contacts as well as their participation details throughout various stages of the buyer’s journey, thereby becoming an invaluable resource for groups trying to harmonize their CRM procedures. It is first party data platform with zero user adoption, meaning that the admin teams don’t have to worry about adoption and enablement challenges.
Why use it?
- Automated Contact & Opportunity Management: Teams using Nektar can automate the addition, editing and deletion of contacts in Salesforce. Contacts are automatically linked to opportunities so you are able to tell who is really going to make a decision. Its self-healing artificial intelligence (AI) makes sure that actions are taken based on current happenings and new information.
- Depth and Breadth of Activity Data: It has every single mail and information exchange between buyers and sellers across the customer journey. This enables syncing activity within leads, opportunities, accounts and their contacts for granular contact-level engagement visibility as well.
- Data Automation: Revenue professionals can define certain logic on the datasets to provide a quantitative output on Salesforce like engagement score to auto-fill Salesforce fields (eg, Competitor, MEDDICC) and even for auto-updating a sales stage like marking an opportunity closed lost if there was no engagement in last three months. This simplifies CRM data automation upto a great extent.
ZoomInfo
Zoominfo provides a 360 degree intelligence about individuals and companies like firmographic data (company name, size, industry & location). It is neatly optimized for Salesforce and automatically appends your data with existing or new records.
Why use it?
- Massive database for comprehensive searches
- Deep data insights (firmographics & technographics)
- Excellent for finding hard-to-reach decision-makers
Clearbit
Clearbit offers real-time data appendage for all your prospects by providing information “early-on”. Its intent-based outreach can help teams identify when a lead does something that signals buying intent- like visiting the pricing page. Designed for marketing and sales use, it can automatically segment leads coming to your sales pipeline.
Why use it?
- Real-time data enrichment for ultimate accuracy
- Integrates smoothly with existing sales & marketing tools to build custom workflows
- Over 100 data points for comprehensive lead profiles
- Automatic updates when a change is detected
Crunchbase
Targeted towards startups and business in tech industry, Crunchbase provides a directory of company activities, funding, structure, investment & more. It also provides insights about industry trends, funding rounds with deep profiling.
Why use it?
- Extensive company profiles with funding history, news, and key personnel details.
- Free tier provides basic company information.
- Paid plans offer deeper data insights and advanced search functionalities.
- Integrates with CRMs and marketing automation tools for streamlined workflows.
Leadgenius
Leadgenius deals with bulk data for the companies. Its mass enrichment allows for deep analysis using standard demographics like contact details, job title and even niche fields like previous location, previous company etc. it uses customizable and targeted web crawlers to gather this niche specific data.
Why use it?
- Gather tailored data for your business niche
- Discover new stakeholders with A/b test ready email outreachs
- Advanced and precise lead prospecting
Cognism
It is a one-for-all tool that not only refreshes the stale databases and fills gap about your prospect like when they switch their job, move out of a city but also keeps up with essential technographic information. Cognism’s chrome extension allows reps to tap into its GDPR-compliant database while browsing online. Its “Intent Signals” can help you detect when the buyer is ready to purchase from you.
Why use it?
- Combines data enrichment with automation & multi-channel engagement
- Automates email outreach for efficient lead nurturing
- Personalizes social media interactions for targeted communication
Ringlead
Ringlead by Zoominfo is one of the toots that targets bad data quality. If your salesforce data has problems like duplicates, inaccuracies and mismanaged accounts, you might want to check this one out. It is an end-to-end automated system that assists the sales and marketing teams to operate on high lead quality.
Ringlead also goes deeper in maintaining data integrity by importing information from LinkedIn and filling up gaps in your existing datasets through auto-update. It also provides additional features such as call scripting & voicemail dropping among others.
Why use it?
The most appropriate solution for segmentation and automation of B2B contact data
Optimized phone outreach with call scripting and voicemail dropping
Perfect for sales teams that rely heavily on phone calls
Best Practices for Data Enrichment
Data enrichment tools can indeed make your work easy but they only work the best with a right kind of approach. If you don’t want your efforts to be a hit-or-miss, you might want to tailor a strategy to ensure your workflows are optimised.
Here are some practices to help you make your Salesforce data a slam dunk:
- Define your data goals neatly: Rather than choosing software first, identify the missing information you want. They could be demographic details, firmographic data or just more precise technographics. Goals can guide you in selecting the best tool that suits your needs. What does “good enough” look to you? Why should you improve your data? How would it help you? These are some of the questions, you might want to answer in the first place.
- Dirty Data in equals Dirty Data out: In other words, clean up before ramping up! Before enriching Salesforce data, confirm that what is available is accurate and updated. You would not want to rely on twisted enrichment based on skewed foundation of data. Search for duplicates, erroneous entries, repetitions and eliminate them.
- Have a Data Governance Plan: Similarly when it comes to enriching your data with large amounts of information about ownership as well becomes very important. Going through enhanced data regularly will ensure accuracy and relevancy if there are right access controls and proper guidelines related with quality of this information.
- Use Automation To Your Advantage: A good example is Nektar.ai that offers a range of automation features such as lead scoring and data augmentation which optimizes your workflows thus enabling you to achieve better results while saving time for your employees to focus on winning deals.
