How to automate lead enrichment

Lead enrichment is a critical step in the lead lifecycle management process which includes lead uploads, lead-to-account matching, lead routing, and follow-up. For those in marketing or revenue operations (RevOps), lead enrichment is a vital part of creating a frictionless lead funnel, increasing conversions, and growing revenue.

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment is the process of gathering additional information about your leads to better understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. The goal of lead enrichment is to improve lead quality and increase the chances of a successful sales outcome. 

If you’ve ever reviewed a list of your company’s leads after a campaign, you’ve probably seen the telltale gaps in lead details:

• First name 

• Last name 

• Company name

• Phone number 

• Company size

• Address

Plus, any other fields you need to qualify and route leads according to your business priorities/rules.

Ignoring incomplete or unenriched leads costs your business time and potential revenue. They can still become high-value opportunities, but you can’t act on them if they’re missing important data. To make matters even more challenging, your contact database decays anywhere from 20-25% every year. Why? People who have engaged with your company may change jobs. Their company may move. And so on. Not having fully formed lead data can slow, if not completely halt, your ability to follow up with valuable leads, and cause friction along the entire lead lifecycle.

Lead enrichment solutions vs manual data enrichment

To state the obvious, manually enriching your leads is not practical. It’s a time-consuming process that requires you to play detective, scouring company websites, Google, and individual LinkedIn and social media profiles. So what are your options?

• Lead enrichment solutions: Excellent tools such as Clearbit, Datafox, DiscoverOrg, and D&B Optimizer use sophisticated software to tackle this problem, matching leads based on email domain, company name, and other information. 

• Manual lead enrichment: Another common practice for marketers is to utilize a manual lead enrichment service, paying human researchers around the globe to fill in the gaps that your enrichment solutions couldn’t match.

Despite these two options, there’s still the challenge of what to do with those leads once they’re enriched.

How to flow enriched lead data to the rest of your stack

There’s still the matter of getting those enriched leads back out to the rest of your marketing and revenue apps.

You need to flow those enriched leads into your marketing automation platform (MAP) for follow-up campaigns into your CRM for sales record-keeping, to your messaging platform to ensure customer conversations are based on up-to-date data, and to many other destinations within your tech stack.

Traditionally, there have only been two ways to get them there:

• Native integrations - Typically, you’d need an integration - a data connection between your enrichment tools and other apps - to move enriched leads across other apps. Most enrichment tools have native integrations - pre-built, out-of-the-box connections - to popular software apps. While these can be useful, they often lack the custom functionality you need for tasks specific to your business, like mapping data to custom fields. Also, there probably won’t be native integrations for all the apps in your stack. Which means you’re left with...

• Manual work - Without a customized integration from your enrichment tool to every other app that needs enriched leads, you’re left manually importing spreadsheets which is an incredibly time-consuming and error-prone process. When follow-up speed is such a critical factor in converting leads, you’re not only losing time, you’re losing revenue.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

Flow enriched lead data directly to other apps with a low-code automation platform

Forget spending hours on manually copy-pasting data. Leave behind the rigid out-of-the-box integrations. Low-code automation platforms let anyone build powerful automated lead enrichment processes resulting in better lead data and faster follow-up. Here’s how:

• Deeply integrates cloud-based apps (including data enrichment services) at the API level: Adoption of cloud-based apps will only increase, with 70% of organizations accelerating their cloud migration in the last few years. Yet, many companies still struggle with siloed data – data locked up within individual apps and departments. With a low-code automation platform, you can connect any cloud application and freely flow any data, including enriched leads, among all your apps.

• Automates processes among cloud apps: Low-code automation platforms let anyone create automated workflows – processes that the platform automatically carries out at pre-set intervals or on-demand. Modern platforms feature flexible operators such as loops, Boolean if/then logic, and a variety of advanced helpers so that you can create sophisticated workflows that automate away the tedious manual work.

• Is easy to use for anyone: Low-code automation platforms are sophisticated enough to offer the customization of scripting and coding without actually requiring you to write a line of code. With a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface, anyone can build out automated processes in minutes, not months.

Let’s see it in action.

Example use case: Enriching Intercom users in bulk with Clearbit

The messaging platform Intercom is handy for interacting immediately with both customers and prospects. But all customer messaging is most effective when you’re working from refreshed, enriched data that’s up to date. With a low-code automation platform, it’s possible to pull in a list of all people you’ve engaged with in Intercom, enrich their lead data as needed, then update leads in Intercom to ensure your lead data is in sync even within your messaging platform. 

Here’s how.

Part I: Inventory of messaging platform users

Here’s the first part of an automated workflow in Tray, a low-code automation platform, that automates the syncing of enriched leads to a messaging platform. In this case, Intercom:

• Manual Trigger: The process starts with an on-demand trigger to kick off the initial steps to pull all existing Intercom leads for enrichment. (Note: With Tray, this could just as easily be a scheduled trigger that runs this update on a monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly basis.)

• Intercom - count users: The next operation reaches into the integrated Intercom instance and pulls up a list of the total number of all leads in Intercom.

Part II: Confirming enrichment status

The second part of this automated workflow pulls up the leads from Intercom and ascertains whether they’ve already been enriched.

• Intercom - list users: This operation pulls up the full list of leads currently in Intercom.

• Loop helper: This loop helper iteratively checks each user that this automated workflow has found in Intercom for updated, enriched info.

• Object helper: This step ascertains whether the lead contains email and other enrichment information.

• Boolean if/then helper: This step then starts a follow-up loop for Intercom leads that are, in fact, missing lead data. If the loop ascertains that a lead is missing data, it passes that lead to the next step to be enriched. (If the lead is already enriched, the process more or less ends here.)

Part III: Enrich leads with Clearbit and update within Intercom

The final leg of our automated workflow enriches any leads that need it, then updates the enriched leads in Intercom.

• Clearbit - Get enrichment info: For any leads found to be “true” (not enriched), the workflow pulls up all relevant company info (including company, location, company website URL, and any missing contact information) to append as needed.

• Get attributes: This helper compares the missing attributes between the previous lead info in Intercom and the enriched data available in Clearbit and fills in the gaps.

• Intercom - update user: The final step in this process then flows any updated leads directly into Intercom to update them within the Intercom instance.

You can create a workflow like this in minutes, by dragging and dropping appropriate connectors together and linking them with logical operators that loop or set up if/then relationships. The workflow runs in minutes - rapidly enriching and syncing all Intercom leads on the spot.

Fast-growing companies are already using low-code automation platforms for data enrichment and other important business needs.

To see a low-code automation platform in action, watch a demo.