Customer Relationships Management (CRM) is among the top data and analytics tools used in business. Companies use CRM systems to store and efficiently move customer data so that sales, marketing, and other departments can make the most use of it whenever needed.
However, the information stored in CRM often proves lacking. This is where CRM data enrichment can help. This article will cover what it is and how it can ensure that your CRM data is always in top shape.
What is CRM data enrichment?
CRM data enrichment is the process of adding more data points to the data that is already stored in the company’s CRM system. The data used for enriching CRM comes from both first-party and external sources.
Any sort of data enrichment in CRM, also known as the data appending process, is used by companies to keep data fresh. The primary goal of CRM data enrichment is to raise data quality. Enriched data is more accurate and well-rounded and thus has more value to the business.
Best data providers for CRM data enrichment
1. Coresignal
Coresignal is a leading data provider offering extensive datasets sourced from public profiles, such as job titles, professional experience, and company details. Our CRM data solutions can help businesses improve lead scoring, segmentation, and targeted outreach by providing up-to-date, relevant information on key decision-makers and companies.
2. Clearbit
Clearbit is widely recognized for providing real-time data enrichment solutions. It offers detailed company and contact data, including firmographic and demographic information, directly within your CRM. This helps businesses segment customers better and optimize sales and marketing efforts.
3. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo delivers in-depth B2B data on companies and professionals, including contact details, organizational hierarchies, and purchasing intent data. This allows organizations to update and enrich their CRM systems, leading to more accurate customer profiles and better-targeted campaigns.
4. InsideView
InsideView offers market intelligence and contact data that integrates directly with CRM platforms. Their data enrichment tools focus on providing up-to-date insights about businesses, decision-makers, and market trends, which can help sales teams prioritize opportunities and engage more effectively with prospects.
5. D&B Hoovers
D&B Hoovers specializes in providing comprehensive business data and analytics. Their CRM data enrichment services help companies gain access to detailed firmographic information, company financials, and insights on growth trends, helping to refine customer segmentation and improve decision-making.
How do I keep CRM data up-to-date?
So, if you want to always work with fresh data, what should you do to improve it?
- Automate data entry. Use integrations and automated tools to regularly update data from emails, web forms, and customer interactions. This will reduce manual errors.
- Schedule regular data audits. Regularly review your data to identify outdated or incorrect information, ensuring your data remains clean and accurate.
- Leverage data enrichment services. Partner with data providers like Coresignal to automatically refresh and enrich your CRM with the latest customer and company data.
- Remove duplicates. Regularly use deduplication tools to identify and merge duplicate records, ensuring a single, accurate source of truth for each customer.
How incomplete or inaccurate data can hurt your CRM performance?
Data completeness and accuracy are the two most important dimensions of data quality. Accurate data closely corresponds to the actual state of facts. Meanwhile, data completeness is associated with the degree to which the expected data points are present in the dataset.
Complete and accurate information is crucially important for the performance of your CRM system. Here is how the lack thereof can hurt your business.
Incomplete and inaccurate data leads to bad decisions
Your CRM database is the primary reference point for sales and marketing teams when making a decision. Whatever the task at hand is, they will need accurate and complete data to ensure that the right choices are made.
For example, bad intent data will lead to bad lead-scoring decisions, which might mean that the right prospects don’t get the attention they deserve from your sales team.
Deficient customer data will also mean inaccurate customer profiles, which will lead your marketing team to make a whole lot of bad moves when attracting new customers.
Incorrect customer data risks reputational harm
Some of the aforementioned bad decisions stemming from low data quality will eventually damage your reputation. Additionally, your customer success team needs accurate contact data to ensure smooth communication with the client.
Many more data types are needed to maintain meaningful customer relationships. Without such information, your existing customers might think less of you and eventually leave to share their displeasure with the world.
Waste of time
Working with bad information is clearly a waste of time. Your sales team needs accurate contact data to follow a lead. Also, they need correct and complete information about the companies you are selling to to segment your customer base. When you don’t have that, your sales and marketing teams lose valuable time.
Waste of money
Inaccurate CRM data causes the entire company to lose money in various ways. Your investment in data analytics never pays off with actionable insights. Meanwhile, your human and technological resources are wasted, and without accurate data, your company operates in the dark.
Hindrance to automation
Automation is one of the straightest paths to business growth. When your CRM platform is automated and integrated with other systems, your marketing and sales teams can spend more time on demand generation and screening of potential customers.
However, to trust the results of your automated procedures, you need to trust your CRM data quality. Gaps and errors in your datasets will keep hindering any automated process, making it inefficient and defeating the whole purpose.
How to enrich CRM data
Avoiding the aforementioned issues is what makes CRM data enrichment important. The question remains: how should you go about enhancing your CRM data? There are two general directions you can take.
Internal data collection
The first way is to collect data yourself, using your internal sources. Customers can provide first-party data directly to you upon request or indirectly by simply navigating your website and leaving digital footprints.
Third-party sources
The other approach would be to purchase external data from reliable third-party sources. These sources are professional data providers who can also have the best customer data enrichment tools at their disposal.
Of course, data gathering and purchasing are not mutually exclusive processes. Combining both of them for CRM data enrichment makes perfect sense.
Types of data to use for enriching CRM
B2B contact data
It is often and mistakenly supposed that contact data is too basic to have any need for CRM contact enrichment. B2B contact data doesn’t have to be restrained to the company name and location data. Updated data on your contact point within the company will allow you to know their job title, job function, and more relevant information.
Firmographic data
B2B companies will also want to enhance their CRM data with various firmographic data types. Anything from company size and growth trends to sales revenue and ownership style can inform you about their pain points. Enriched data will allow you to extract actionable insights about how you could address these points.
Technographic data
Another way to know more about the customer’s pain points is by looking at their tech stack. Enriching CRM data with technographics lets you see what solutions are technologically compatible and relevant to the client’s needs.
Intent data
Over half of US marketers use intent data to deliver targeted ad content, with 47% using it for email marketing. Determining purchase intent and providing personalized customer experience enables the sales teams to drive conversion rates. All this makes intent data one of the primary candidates for CRM data enrichment.
Top CRM data sources
The internet is loaded with publicly available data for CRM data enhancement. Web scraping and other procedures used to extract such data must be conducted ethically.
Coresignal is the top data source for legally and socially responsible CRM data enrichment. Our company API is a data enrichment tool that allows you to quickly boost your CRM data with fresh information about existing and potential customers.
Using a CRM enrichment tool enables companies to quickly get the most topical and accurate data on their customers gathered from various sources.
The sources used by Coresignal to aggregate raw data range from the largest professional social media networks to company review sites. This allows us to provide our customers with the most varied and relevant data types for CRM enrichment.
How to maximize your CRM performance
Customer profile enrichment enables you to use your CRM system to its fullest potential for driving sales and customer satisfaction. Here are some other best practices you can employ for CRM enhancement.
- Track your CRM performance. In the early days, this tool was somewhat looked down upon by senior management due to a lack of performance tracking. However, methodologies to measure CRM performance have been introduced over the last decades and are well worth utilizing.
- Combine CRM data enrichment with other procedures that raise data quality, such as data cleansing. Companies use data cleansing and CRM enrichment to make sure that sales and marketing teams use more accurate data.
- Use your CRM data not only for current contact management but also for creating buyer’s personas and customer profiles that can direct your sales and marketing efforts to find your next client.
- Create a uniform system for data entry and management with automated basic tasks. When all agents using CRM apply the same methods, your data-driven approach is well-organized and optimized.
Conclusion
Combining customer data enrichment with every process and practice discussed in this post will certainly boost your CRM performance. Customer profile enrichment, in turn, will result in higher conversion rates, more efficient operations, and greater customer satisfaction. Moreover, companies that prioritize data quality can achieve a competitive advantage more easily.
If you have decided to enrich your CRM data, we invite you to consider our regularly updated datasets, which include firmographic, technographic, and other valuable business information.
