Building an effective sales funnel is crucial to achieving business success. However, many businesses face four significant challenges when it comes to enriching their customer data. These can hinder their ability to create a comprehensive view of their customers. 

The data enrichment tool falls short as it only captures limited data and provides direction rather than actionable insights to businesses. Overcoming these challenges is essential if you want to make the most out of the sales funnel and drive revenue.

• The first challenge is to continuously refine and optimize lead qualification and mid-funnel prospect data.
• The second challenge is to maintain complete and accurate customer data across multiple touchpoints. 
• The third challenge is complying with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, which require businesses to be mindful of how they collect and use prospect information. 
• The fourth challenge is to find an alternative to third-party cookies, as the majority of web browsers are disabling them. 

In this article, we'll explore some of the data management strategies for efficiently augmenting your database with the details you need to determine who's truly sales-ready. 

We'll also discuss how to prioritize those precious marketing and sales resources to nurture the most promising leads. You’ll find some helpful suggestions, whether you wish to improve or completely overhaul your current data enrichment strategy.

The Importance of Data Enrichment for Lead Qualification

Today's buyers conduct a lot of research online. Therefore, having robust lead qualification and mid-funnel prospect data is more critical than ever. However, enriching that prospect information at scale can be a significant challenge. For example, as your prospect database grows, managing and updating this information becomes increasingly demanding.

Think about the leads that come into your database—how much do you know about them? You likely have basic information like their name, email, and company. But there’s a whole world of additional data out there that can provide context around your leads' potential. 

According to Aspiration Marketing, companies that excel at lead qualification and nurturing can generate 50% more sales-ready leads while spending 33% less. This emphasizes the critical role of data enrichment, as it can result in more effective lead generation and a higher return on investment. 

Data enrichment is an essential process that can help you improve the qualification of your leads and increase your conversion rates. Enriching your lead data lets you capture important details. These details enable you to segment and prioritize your leads more effectively. Reliable data sources can proactively provide you with valuable information, such as:

• The lead’s job title and role: Knowing if a lead is a director or a manager can help determine their level of influence.
• Their company’s revenue, number of employees, and industry: Understanding a company’s size and financials helps gauge how much potential there is for a deal.
• Technologies they currently use: Seeing which tools a lead already relies on can uncover opportunities for integration or replacement.
• Recent events like funding rounds, mergers, and acquisitions, or product launches: Major events often spur purchasing decisions, so capitalizing on them quickly is key.

While you can continue relying solely on basic lead data (or first-party data), you’ll miss out on key details and context that fuel sales productivity and growth. Data enrichment also allows for improved lead scoring and segmentation, so you can nurture leads properly according to their needs and interests. 

By having more comprehensive lead profiles, your sales team can effectively prioritize leads with the highest potential. They will have all the information they need to have more personalized and strategic conversations with potential customers. This will help them better understand their leads and engage them with the right insights, thus accelerating the sales cycle.

How to Use Account Targeting to Find Mid-funnel Prospects

Once you’ve figured out your ideal customer profile (ICP), the next step is to build an account list to target. The accounts that show interest in your solutions but aren’t ready to buy yet are considered mid-funnel prospects. These prospects typically need more nurturing and education before they’re sales-ready.

Account targeting is a key tactic for finding these mid-funnel prospects. It allows you to identify accounts that match your ICP and are demonstrating buying signals, even if they aren’t raising their hand to talk to sales yet.

This strategy can help B2B teams overcome two major obstacles that often hinder their success. The first is the lack of a focused framework for engaging with B2B buying committee members. The second is the absence of a clear plan for collaboration between marketing and sales teams. 

By providing a structured approach that enables teams to tailor their efforts to specific accounts and coordinate their activities, they can improve their targeting to drive revenue growth.

Some of the top ways to build your mid-funnel account list include:

• Conducting account research on your existing leads and customers to find similar organizations. Look for comparable companies in the same industry with similar firmographic attributes.
• Searching industry databases and reviewing sites for accounts that could benefit from your offerings. For example, if you sell HR software, research companies on sites like Glassdoor or Comparably that have many employees and may need an HRIS system.
• Analyzing your website analytics and advertising data to see which accounts visit your site and engage with your content. Accounts that spend time on product pages or fill out contact forms are showing interest, even if they don’t contact sales. These are great mid-funnel prospects to target.
• Purchasing intent data from data providers to get contact information and insights into target accounts. Their data can help you identify active opportunities and contacts worth pursuing.
• Monitoring social media to see what accounts and contacts are interacting with your brand and discussing issues your solutions address. Engage with them by liking and commenting on their posts and inviting them to connect for a quick call.

Using a multi-channel outreach strategy, you can then market to these mid-funnel prospects through email, phone calls, nurture campaigns, and more. While they may not be ready to buy now, with ongoing education and building trust, many of these accounts can develop into hot leads and future customers. 

Measuring Performance: Metrics to Track for Conversion Success

Lead generation is an essential aspect of any successful sales strategy. However, it is not solely focused on making sales. Lead generation is more about attracting qualified leads who have the potential to become future customers as they progress through the sales funnel. It is just one part of the overall sales pipeline and plays a crucial role in driving growth. 

By understanding the true purpose of lead generation, businesses can develop effective strategies to attract and nurture leads throughout the sales process by recognizing its true purpose. Once you have a data-enrichment strategy in place, how do you know if it’s working? Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics can help determine the success and impact of your efforts. Some of the most important metrics to track include:

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of leads that convert into sales or customers. Are more of your leads turning into real business after enriching your data? If so, your strategy is paying off. A higher conversion rate means higher revenue and a better return on investment (ROI).

Cost per lead

How much are you spending to generate qualified leads? A lower cost per lead over time means greater efficiency and optimization. Data enrichment can help reduce wasted spend on unqualified leads by improving targeting and lead scoring.

Lead quality score

A scoring system that rates how sales-ready a lead is, is based on attributes like job title, pain points, budget, authority, need, and time frame. Higher quality scores mean more high-value leads in your pipeline. Data enrichment improves lead quality by filling in missing details and profiling leads.

Sales velocity

How fast do leads move through your sales funnel from initial contact to close? Faster velocity means higher productivity and shorter sales cycles. Enriched lead data, especially around pain points and needs, helps sales teams have more meaningful conversations and progress deals more quickly.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value depicts the total revenue generated from a customer over the lifetime of your relationship. A higher CLV means greater customer loyalty and retention. Data enrichment strengthens your understanding of customer needs, interests, and journeys, so you can better serve them over time.

It is important to regularly review the metrics to gauge the impact of your data enrichment efforts. You may then adjust them as necessary to optimize performance. The more high-quality data you have, the more insight you will gain into what is working well and how you can improve. But always keep your customer at the core of every data-driven decision.

Personalization and Predictive Recommendations for Improved Conversion

B2B marketers understand that personalization is no longer an option, but rather a necessity. The significant rise in both budgets and adoption rates indicates that personalization is now an integral part of mainstream business strategy. 

A survey conducted by LinkedIn found that 43% of respondents struggled with identifying their target audience due to unreliable data. To improve lead conversion, businesses should focus on personalization and predictive recommendations. How well do you know your leads and what they need? The more data you have about each lead, the better you can tailor the experience.

Here are a few strategies to improve your sales conversion:

Collecting information from your leads at every touchpoint: 

The data could include roles, industries, business challenges, and pain points. Use this data to segment your leads into groups with similar attributes. Then, develop content, messaging, and recommendations specific to each segment. For example, if you learn that some leads struggle with data security, create content on that topic to address their concerns.

Looking for patterns in the behavior and interests of your leads: 

See what content and products they engage with the most. Use that insight to make predictive recommendations on what they may find helpful next. For example, if a lead downloads multiple case studies on data analytics, recommend a trial of your data analytics software.

Personalized onboarding: 

Once a lead converts, continue tailoring the experience. Welcome them with an email highlighting the key benefits of your product for their role or industry. Set up their account with recommended configurations and default settings based on attributes you’ve collected. Guide them to key features and resources to get started. The more you personalize, the faster they will adopt your product and become loyal customers.

Keep testing and improving your personalization and predictive recommendations: 

See what resonates most with your leads and adjust as needed. As you gain more data over time, your ability to tailor experiences will become incredibly sophisticated. The result will be higher lead conversion and customer retention. With personalization, you can give your leads exactly what they need to become lifelong customers.

Data Enrichment Strategy FAQs: Your Top Questions Answered

Have you taken a close look at your data enrichment strategy recently? If not, now may be the time. Data enrichment is crucial to improving lead qualification and driving meaningful conversions. But how do you build an effective data-enrichment strategy? Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.

What data should I enrich?

Focus on enriching data for leads in your mid-funnel, like marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs). Enrich data like:

• Contact information (email, phone, address)
• Firmographic data (company size, revenue, industry)
• Technographic data (what technologies they use)
• Intent signals (what content they’re engaging with)
• Relationship data (connections to key stakeholders)

How do I get more data?

There are a few ways to collect more data:

• Web scraping: Use a tool to scrape data from the web, like from the company’s website or social media profiles. Make sure you have permission first.
• Forms: Collect more data through lead generation forms, contact us forms, or by updating existing forms. Ask for information like job titles, departments, and business challenges.
• Third-party enrichment: Purchase additional data from third-party vendors. Look for vendors that offer data related to your target accounts and contacts.
• Manual research: Have a researcher manually search for data on key accounts and contacts. They can search public databases, news articles, social media, and other online sources. Manual research tends to be the most accurate but also the most time-consuming.

How should I store and organize the data?

You'll want a system to store and organize all the data in one place. The best tool for this is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Within your CRM, create custom fields and properties to store:

• All contact details for each lead
• Relevant account details like company size, revenue, and locations
• A timeline of all interactions and touchpoints
• Notes from research and manual data collection
• Scoring and qualification details to indicate the lead stage

Keeping data well organized will make it easy for your team to access and take the right actions. Review and update the data regularly to keep it fresh and accurate. 

How Can Machintel Transform Your Data Enrichment and Demand Generation Efforts? 

We take raw data and turn it into useful business insights that can be applied to every part of the marketing funnel. Our approach is focused on proactive insights, meaning we don't just collect data; we apply intelligence to it. This approach helps to make every marketing decision smarter and more effective. We also use AI-driven tools to provide deep competitive analysis and predictive insights.

Can you elaborate on the specific data solutions Machintel offers?

Our advanced data search tool utilizes a vast reservoir of over 5.5 billion MAID records, which enables us to target audiences with unparalleled precision. We ensure data quality by enriching and verifying it, and our system can be seamlessly integrated with your existing CRM systems. Our solutions are customizable to meet your specific needs. We adopt a layered approach to data management to improve precision and impact and maximize first-party data use.

How does Machintel’s data intelligence process work?

Our process is very thorough. We start by performing advanced data search and analysis to turn raw numbers into valuable insights. Then, we enrich and verify the data, integrate it for maximum effectiveness, and customize solutions according to the specific business needs. This approach helps us create focused sub-audiences and targeted campaigns that deliver successful outcomes for our clients.

What results can businesses expect when partnering with Machintel?

We offer a comprehensive process that includes initial consultation, continuous optimization, and reporting. Our hands-on campaign management ensures every strategy aligns with your goals and evolves with your growth. With our data-driven approach, businesses can experience sharper decision-making, optimized engagement, and sustained success.

Ready to Boost Your Data Enrichment Strategy with Machintel?

Contact us today to learn more about our data-driven approach to B2B marketing.