How Data Enrichment Can Generate Better Leads

Gina Goanta, Chief Data Officer, BNZSA

Data enrichment is an often-overlooked area of B2B marketing strategy. But why? It’s time consuming and doesn’t give the adrenalin hits of getting straight out in the market. But without it your marketing, business development and sales teams will really miss out.

Enriched data can give you:

Better content to really provide value to your prospects
A strong pipeline of prospects to nurture over time
Better qualified leads within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Higher value customers with strong renewal potential

What is data enrichment?

Depending on the dataset you’re starting out with, it simply means adding additional data to your list of key accounts that will support your efforts from the prospecting stage through to sale.

Firmographics – key data about the company (HQs, company size, revenue, internal decision-making structures etc.)
Technographics – what technologies your key accounts already have in place, when they were purchased, when they anticipate renewal etc.
Intent – what signals key accounts are giving to indicate they are in-market
Contact details – who is on the buying committee and how to reach them
Custom information – depending on your product / service there may be specific things you need to know e.g., the number of invoices processed each year, number of potential users, what servers they use, and so on.

Best practices for data enrichment

Focus on actionable insights – it’s tempting to flood the database with everything you can find, but often it makes it hard for marketing and sales to wade through. Think about what data will add qualifying insights to help them take action or make decisions, then focus your efforts there.

Continuous improvement – too many people take a “once and done” approach, but we know that data can age pretty quickly. As well as keeping contact information and account structures up-to-date, you’d miss out on quick wins if you fail to stay on top of buying signals for your key accounts. Make sure you factor in some element of ongoing maintenance into any enrichment programme.

Respect data privacy – it should go without saying, but collecting personal data (especially contact information) can be problematic. If you’re going to include this in the database, be sure to give all of your users the right training to use data in a compliant way.

How we can help with data enrichment

Defining customer profile – our data analysts can help you study your sales data to define your Ideal Customer Profile. This could include the best industry verticals or best job functions to target, identifying what size or scale a company would need to take advantage of your product, or even understanding which segments or accounts have strong renewal potential.

Multiple third-party data sources – we leverage multiple data sources to ensure that we can enrich with the most recent, relevant and reliable data for your organisation’s specific objectives. We have access to over 81 million contacts globally, covering all industries across 90+ countries. Our third-party sources provide firmographics, technographics and intent.

Custom first-party data – our team of 10 researchers generate our own first-party custom data, supported by proprietary AI. We can also activate our huge native-language call centre capability to generate opt-ins or even to qualify all the way through to BANT/SQL level.

Ongoing enrichment – this can be tricky to deliver in-house because it requires many different skillsets at different stages. We have analysts, architects, strategists, developers and researchers, so you can access the right specialisms as and when you need them.

Compliance with global data regulations – our whole business is driven by data, so best-practice compliance is absolutely essential for us. Led by our DPO Maxim Olivier, we’re always up to date with the latest developments worldwide – whether GDPR, California, Australia or other jurisdictions.

3 common pitfalls when implementing a data-driven marketing strategy

The most effective B2B marketing campaigns start with a nice clean dataset – for ABM especially, but in general if your database is in bad shape, you’ll create a lot of other problems for your campaign further down the line.

In this article, our Chief Data Officer Gina Goanta explores some of the common traps that marketers fall into when planning their strategies and how you can address them.

The most common data strategy mistakes

1. Poor definition of the best customer profile

All businesses have a dream customer who they’d like to partner with for whatever reason – could be their purchasing power, their values, the reputational boost of working with them etc. But is this customer actually buying from you? Focusing on who you want to sell to rather than who actually buys from you can set your whole strategy on course for failure, as you’ll end up focusing on an audience that isn’t necessarily a good fit.

Marketing and sales really need to align from the beginning to define the best customer, not just the dream customer. Building that ideal customer profile (ICP) requires great data analysis – who buys, how much, where upselling and cross-selling happens – supported by predictive intelligence models that help identify similar accounts to target.

2. The “once and done” approach to data strategy

Too many people see data strategy as a sprint, one good clean run and its done. The problem is of course that data ages pretty quickly – you need to be able to update buying signals, technographics and contact information on a regular basis, otherwise your database becomes completely irrelevant. It’s incredibly important to stay on top of account structures and hierarchies within multinational or multi-business companies so that you know who to reach out to and when.

Maintenance and ongoing enrichment are absolutely essential, although both are very hard to deliver in-house since they require many skillsets at different stages. An external data service can really help here since you can access the right specialisms as and when you need them.

3. Lack of alignment between budgets and stakeholders

A challenge that we often encounter is that data cleaning and maintenance is paid from a different budget than the original purchase of the dataset, making it very difficult to track exactly how costly a bad data strategy can be. It means that the team feeling the impact of the flawed data are very far removed from the team who requested it in the first place. Whoever is going to use the data must be involved from the beginning.

How we can help with your data strategy

Working with an external data provider can help address all of these things. By working with us, you’ll be able to tap into the following:

Experience – we’re experts at building datasets for global technology companies like Oracle, SAP and Google. We know exactly the challenges that companies like yours are facing, and we know the questions to ask to avoid issues coming up later. We’re also experts in GDPR so you can be sure that your data will always be compliant.

Coverage - we have access to over 81 million contacts globally, covering all industries across 90+ countries. We use multiple third-party sources for firmographics, technographics and intent, and have a team of 10 researchers who generate our own first-party contact data, supported by proprietary AI.

Flexibility – we have all the skillsets you’ll need in-house – from data researchers to strategists to architects, CRM and AI experts. This means that whatever you need can be handled quickly, and we can accommodate shifts in verticals or geographies at short notice.

You can learn more about our Data Services here, or you can get in contact with us directly.