Lead enrichment is an important, but potentially painful process
If you’re in marketing operations, you already know the importance of lead enrichment - ensuring every lead is complete including their full name, location, company name, company size, and other details key to running your business. Enriched leads are necessary to properly route and assign to sales, allowing the lead owner to follow up faster with responses that are targeted to their demographic and firmographic details. Faster responses are directly correlated to higher lead qualification rates: following up with a lead within an hour makes you seven times more likely to get a conversation with a decision maker. When your prospects are shopping for a solution, up to 50% of them will choose to go with the vendor that responds first.
Conversely, incomplete leads mean potentially painful manual work. (If you’ve ever cracked open a spreadsheet containing thousands of leads with several blank fields, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) To make matters worse, an estimated 20-25% of your lead data decays every year as contacts change jobs and as companies make changes such as moving to new addresses, getting acquired, and so on.
Data enrichment services are a good first step
There’s a reason why 9 out of 10 organizations use at least two data enrichment services. Manually updating thousands of leads isn’t feasible on a daily basis and is impossible to scale. At Tray.io, we use Clearbit and Datafox to enrich our inbound leads and ensure they’re ready for the appropriate next step. We use a combination of Marketo webhooks and Tray workflows to automatically enrich leads with both services when they’re initially created, before routing to sales.
But what about teams that aren’t using data enrichment, or who need to solve that % of the database that didn’t match with your enrichment vendors? Many companies rely on outsourcing manual enrichment of lead lists. External contractors do the heavy lifting of tracking down contact details for each lead.
Unfortunately, the process of up_loading the enriched leads into your MAP or CRM_, lead by lead, or list after list every week, isn’t exactly easy or efficient.
Thankfully, you can use a General Automation Platform to automate important, time-consuming processes exactly like these. This way, you can follow up significantly faster with leads to win more deals, and your marketing operations folks can spend more time actually working on strategic operational stuff.
Let’s go through exactly how to do this.
Auto-upload manually enriched leads as they come in
Once our contractor fills out the form with any new data they found on the lead, we can automatically update Salesforce with any new values. We even mark a lead “Bad Data” if the contractor was unable to enrich them with the data provided, at which point, we hold them back, rather than routing those unenriched leads to sales.
Here’s how we seamlessly load each lead into our tech stack, with no errors or data fidelity issues.
The first leg of our journey begins with a Form Trigger that automatically begins the process when that manually-enriched lead list is uploaded to the Tray form. Our workflow then uses our CSV Processor Helper to ensure the lead data is compiled appropriately, row-by-row.
Next, our workflow checks for the matching lead in our CRM, Salesforce, using a unique ID like email address or Lead ID. Assuming it finds the matching lead, it then checks to see if the contractor noted successful research when they filled out the form.
If our contractor didn’t find any information to add to the lead, then we update a few values on the lead so that we can nurture them in marketing and try to get more info from the prospect in the future.
If research was successful, then we check if the Company field was null in Salesforce, and if so, update with the value the contractor found.
The workflow proceeds from there to update additional fields, in the case that it was blank in Salesforce, but found via the contractor’s research.
With automation, we don’t have to rely on the typical batch enrichment process which is slow and time consuming, and instead have a continual manual enrichment process happening around the clock. With a larger percent of enriched leads coming into our database, we’re able to properly route more leads to get the correct follow-up, which positions us to qualify more leads and ultimately win more deals.
Takeaways
As you’ve probably figured out by now, the Tray Platform can perform many crucial lead-related functions, including lead routing, lead-to-account matching, and even the important task of de-duping massive lead lists. Find out more about how leading ad network AdRoll uses Tray.io and Clearbit for lead enrichment and de-duping in the official Clearbit blog. As another example, our customer Outreach also uses the Tray Platform to automate lead list uploads to save hundreds of hours every year.
Learn how you can get started automating data enrichment and de-duping by joining our weekly group demo.
