What Is B2B Lead Enrichment and Why Is It Important?

When researching ways to improve your B2B company's sales process, you may come across lead enrichment. It's designed to improve the quality of leads. After you generate a set of new leads, you can "enrich" them before contacting them to pitch a product or service. What is lead enrichment exactly, and how does it work?

The Basics of B2B Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment is the process of updating, optimizing and refining leads. When you generate a lead, you'll have information about a prospect to whom you can pitch a product or service. Before doing so, though, you may want to leverage lead enrichment. You can update the lead with new information about the prospect, optimize the lead by removing inaccurate information, or you can further refine the lead by qualifying or scoring it based on the prospect's likelihood of making a purchase.

Why B2B Lead Enrichment Is Important

By leveraging lead enrichment, you'll have an easier time reaching prospects. Statistics show that over 90% of all B2B-related communications occur over the phone. Of course, that means roughly one in 10 communications occur over a different channel, such as email. Lead enrichment can help you identify prospects' email addresses and other methods of contact. You can merge these alternative methods of contact with the leads' phone numbers. If a prospect doesn't pick up, you can then try to reach him or her by using one of these alternative methods of contact.

Some newly acquired leads may contain outdated or inaccurate information. Prospects, for example, may change their phone numbers. A prospect may initially provide your B2B company with the correct phone number, only to change it shortly thereafter. Lead enrichment will allow you to update the prospect's phone number so that it's correct. When you perform lead enrichment, you'll evaluate prospects' information to ensure it's correct. If any piece of information isn't correct, you can update it.

Lead enrichment can improve your conversion rate when selling products or services. Conversion rate is the rate at which you can convert prospects into buyers. In the B2B industry, conversion rates typically range from 1% to 10%. A 10% conversion rate means that one of every 10 prospects to whom you pitch a product or service will make a purchase. With lead enrichment, you can qualify and score leads -- and you can remove bad or low-quality leads from your database. Doing so will typically improve your conversion rate.