Maximizing the Potential of Your CRM Data with Data Enrichment

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, 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.

How incomplete or inaccurate data can hurt your CRM performance?

Data completeness and accuracy are constantly named among the key dimensions of data quality. Accurate data is that which closely corresponds to the actual state of facts. Meanwhile, data completeness is associated with the degree to which the data points expected 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 customer 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. To follow a lead, your sales team needs accurate contact data. In order to segment your customer base, you need correct and complete information about the companies you are selling to. When you don’t have that, your sales and marketing teams lose valuable time.

Waste of money

Inaccurate CRM data makes the entire company lose money in various ways. Your investment in data analytics never pays off with actionable insights. Meanwhile, your human and technological resources are wasted as without accurate data, they operate 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, which defeats 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 enriching 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 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 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 enrich 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 e-mail 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 data sources

The internet is loaded with publicly available data for CRM data enrichment. 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 scraping API is a data enrichment tool that allows you to quickly boost your CRM data with on-demand information about existing and potential customers.

Using a real-time data 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 providing our customers with the most varied and relevant data types for CRM enrichment.

How to maximize your CRM performance

CRM data enrichment enables you to use your CRM system to its fullest potential of driving sales and customer satisfaction. Here are some other best practices you can employ to maximize the performance of this tool.

• 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, which are well worth utilizing.
• Combine CRM data enrichment with other procedures that raise data quality, such as data cleansing. Companies use data cleansing and enrichment to make sure that more accurate data is used by sales and marketing teams.
• Use your CRM data not only for current contact management but 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.

Combining data enrichment with every process and practice on this list will certainly boost your CRM performance.