TL;DR
Lead enrichment is the process of enhancing your lead data with additional, valuable information to help sales teams better qualify, prioritize, and engage with prospects. By enriching lead data—such as contact information, firmographics, intent data, technographics, behavioral insights, and account-level details—sales reps can gain deeper insights into the lead's needs, priorities, and buying signals. This leads to more personalized and effective outreach, better lead segmentation, and improved conversion rates.
Enrichment typically starts after capturing a lead but should continue throughout the entire sales process, as new data from meetings, emails, and interactions emerge. Many companies make the mistake of only enriching leads at the top of the funnel, missing out on crucial insights that come later in the sales journey. Continuously enriching lead data allows sales teams to adapt their approach based on new decision-makers, updated priorities, or shifting pain points.
AI sales assistant tools, like Locale, automate this process by extracting key information from emails, meetings, and other interactions, updating CRM records in real-time, and offering personalized next-step recommendations. This ensures that sales teams have the most up-to-date and relevant information to drive deals forward efficiently and effectively. Locale’s AI assistant streamlines the lead enrichment process, empowering sales teams to capture every detail and improve the chances of closing deals.
What is Lead Enrichment?
Enriching very simply means to add data and value to something. Lead enrichment means adding data about your leads which is of additional value to the sales team. If lead enrichment is done right, sales reps can understand the extent to which the prospect is qualified and what is the best way to interact with them to close the deal.
Why is it Important?
Lead enrichment updates missing fields in your CRM to improve qualification and routing processes, which in turn tells you which leads to prioritise. Let’s look at a few of the benefits of lead enrichment in detail:
Identifying high priority prospects: With properly enriched data, you can see prospects who are more likely to convert. This clarity allows you to utilise your time and efforts more efficiently, maximising returns.
Enhancing personalisation in outreach and follow-ups: We have seen time and time again that personalisation is what helps you get your foot in the door. The personalisation can be done on personnel level, company level or persona level. Proper lead enrichment allows sales reps to personalize their outreach and follow-ups to get them to engage with you.
Types of Data you can Enrich
With heaps of data being generated today, it’s really easy to get confused by what is the right data to enrich and what can be ignored. We share a few pointers you can start enriching your leads with.
Contact Information: Contact data is the most sought-after type of data for lead enrichment. It's key to grow your business through prospecting and lead generation campaigns. You can do this on your own or you can use third party tools to enrich this data. This usually happens as part of the the top of the funnel enrichment.
Firmographic: Firmographic data provides a deeper dive into the organisations your leads belong to. It covers aspects such as industry, company size, location, revenue, and company structure. This type of data is invaluable for segmentation, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to specific sectors or organisational profiles.
Intent: Intent data tracks online behaviours such as web searches, content consumption, website visits, and interactions. This data type is useful for understanding buying intent, showing you which leads are actively researching solutions like yours. By prioritising these leads, you can engage them with relevant offers at just the right time.
Technographic: Understanding the technologies and tools a lead’s organisation uses can give you a competitive edge. Technographic data includes insights into the software and hardware in use, as well as the overall IT infrastructure. This information helps you qualify leads better and tailor your pitches to address specific technological needs or gaps which your product may be able to fill.
Behavioural: Finally, behavioural data captures a lead’s past actions, interactions, and engagement patterns across various touch points. This includes email opens, link clicks, website visits, content downloads, and event registrations. Behavioural data can help gauge a lead’s interest level, preferences, and readiness to engage, allowing for more targeted and timely outreach.
Account data: Account data enrichment focuses on gathering and appending company details as a whole rather than as an individual lead. This includes information like hierarchy, subsidiaries, parent companies etc.
When Does Lead Enrichment Happen?
Lead enrichment usually happens in the early stages of the sales process, commonly after a lead is captured but before the 1st meeting happens. At this stage, basic information such as the prospect’s name, company, and contact details are gathered. Sales teams and marketers then enhance this data with additional information from various sources, like job roles, company size, industry, etc. This new data helps segment and prioritise leads, understand whether they match your ICP or not and assess the probability of converting.
However, lead enrichment shouldn't end here. Many companies focus on enriching leads at the top of the funnel, they often fail to continue this process throughout the sales cycle. As leads progress through different stages, new information emerges—like buying signals, pain points, and stakeholder involvement—that could drastically alter the sales strategy. Ignoring this evolving information can lead to missed opportunities for personalisation and engagement.
Why Leads Should be Enriched Throughout the Sales Process?
Most companies make a crucial mistake: they fail to enrich lead records after a prospect enters the sales process. Once a lead is captured, enriched, and qualified, many teams stop updating their information, even though they gain new, critical insights during their ongoing interactions with the lead. Every meeting, email, or call uncovers additional details about the prospect’s challenges, decision-making process, and organisational structure. This information is often neglected, leaving sales teams working with outdated or incomplete data when crafting their next steps.
This leads to missed opportunity because this information is invaluable. For example, learning more about additional decision-makers in the organisation can change the sales approach, as involving key stakeholders early can accelerate deal closure. Moreover, understanding a prospect’s shifting priorities or pain points allows for more personalised follow-ups and recommendations. When this data isn't captured and used, sales teams risk coming across as out of touch or impersonal, which can turn off leads that otherwise might have converted.
Lead enrichment is not a one-time task. It’s an ongoing process which ensures the team is armed with relevant and up-to-date information, in order to seal the deal.
Here’s the challenge: enriching leads manually through the entire sales process is time-consuming and prone to human error. This is where AI assistants come in to save the day!
How AI Sales Assistants Streamline Lead Enrichment
AI has transformed the way sales teams function, easily automating repetitive tasks, while extracting valuable insights from customer interactions. AI can be a game-changer here, especially when used for email enrichment or meeting transcripts.
Sales teams no longer have to manually go through heaps of emails and meeting notes. AI sales assistants can do that for you. They do this by automatically scanning interactions while picking up on critical information, and enriching the prospect’s information in your CRM. This ensures that all the new data—whether it’s about a lead’s preferences, business challenges, or additional decision-makers—is captured and used to inform your sales strategy.
Best AI Assistant Software to Automate Lead Enrichment: Locale
Locale’s AI sales assistants streamlines the lead enrichment process. Locale works by analysing emails, meeting transcripts, and pulls out key insights, which is available to you right when you need it. The workflow is simple but powerful. Here’s how Locale works:
Automatic data extraction: Locale scans your email conversations and meeting transcripts, automatically extracting critical information such as answers to discovery questions, key pain points, potential next steps, likelihood to convert etc. The AI assistant can also identify other stakeholders who should be involved in the sales process.
Real-time enrichment: The AI updates the lead’s details in real-time, sharing any new insights with the sales reps on Slack, and adds all this data to the CRM. This could include details about the lead’s budget, timeline, or objections, ensuring that the sales team is always working with the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Personalised recommendations: Based on the enriched data, Locale provides recommendations for next steps. For instance, if the lead has expressed interest in a specific feature, the AI may suggest sending collateral that highlights that feature, or scheduling a demo with a technical expert.
Let’s look at this with an example. Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario:
Initial lead data: You’ve captured a lead from a webinar. Their initial details include their name, company, job title, and email address.
Post-meeting insights: After a discovery call, Locale’s AI assistant analyses the meeting transcript and picks up on a few details: the lead mentioned they are looking to implement a solution within the next six months and identified two other people within their company who need to be involved in the decision-making process (a CFO and a CTO).
Review Process: All these details are sent to the concerned sales rep on Slack. The sales rep can quickly review if this info is correct and modify if required and finally give the approval to the assistant to add all this info to the CRM.
Enriched lead record: Once you are used to the process and have developed enough confidence on the tool, you can automate this step completely. Locale’s AI assistant will automatically update the lead record to include the details like the two decision-makers, the lead’s timeline for implementation, and their main challenge: reducing operational costs.
Next steps: With this enriched information, your sales team can now customise the follow-up by involving the CFO and CTO in the next meeting. They can also send custom collateral that highlights how your solution can help reduce costs, addressing the lead’s primary pain point.
Without Locale, these insights might have been lost or overlooked, but with AI-driven lead enrichment, your sales team is empowered to take the most effective next steps.
AI assistants not only make the lead enrichment process efficient — they ensure no information slips through the cracks. And with the help of tools like Locale, sales teams can ensure they have all the information they need to convert leads into customers. Book a meeting with us now to explore how Locale can solve this for you.
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