CRM Data Enrichment 101

A comprehensive introduction to CRM enrichment

Reading time: 5 minutes

With data now being the most important advantage companies can have to drive marketing, sales, and internal operations, staying on top of its accuracy and completeness has become one of the most important business priorities. This is also why the choice of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is such a big one.

Contact lists alone often do not have the necessary information about the companies potential prospects work for. This is why enhancing their quality through data enrichment is one of the first things and often one of the most effective things a business can do.

In this guide, we'll delve into the fundamentals of CRM data enrichment, the importance of complete and accurate data, the types of enrichment, considerations for buying data, and the best sources and tools available. Most importantly, we’ll show how to easily keep your CRM data up to date using Work With Data’s datasets.

What is data enrichment?

In the simplest terms, data enrichment refers to filling in the missing gaps in the business and contact data in your CRM. When you first obtain contact details of potential prospects, it is limited to basic information about the companies they work for. Updating the data to include the necessary context is an extremely manual process, not to mention some of the information is difficult to find or verify and the sources may not be disclosed. Instead of spending countless hours trying to find all the information, you can use existing datasets and plug them into your data to fill in the missing pieces.

Data cleaning vs data enrichment

Before we dive into the specifics of data enrichment, it's crucial to understand the distinction between data cleaning and data enrichment. While data cleaning involves rectifying inaccuracies and inconsistencies in existing data, something that can be done quite easily by data analysts, CRM managers, and operations executives, data enrichment takes it a step further. It involves Updating existing data with additional information, thereby enhancing its value and utility.

Why is it valuable to enrich data?

How incomplete or inaccurate data can hurt your performance

Incomplete or inaccurate data can prove to be detrimental to the business in various ways. It can lead to misguided marketing efforts, erroneous decision-making, and ultimately, a negative customer experience. Inaccurate data can result in wasted resources and missed opportunities, all hindering business growth. Without having the necessary information about prospects, we do not know who to target in a marketing or sales campaign. We cannot create a personalised experience, tailored specifically to a prospect’s role, the industry their company is in or the size and stage of the business.

Complete data = better leads

Complete and accurate data empowers businesses to make informed decisions, personalise customer interactions, and drive targeted marketing campaigns. With enriched data, you can gain deeper insights into your customers' preferences, behaviors, and needs, create campaigns tailored to the specific circumstances prospects are in, therefore boosting sales performance. You can prevent the wasting of resources for a catch-all marketing campaign by focusing on a small subset of your leads/customers that’s most likely to respond to the messaging.

How does data enrichment work

Company vs personal data

Data enrichment can involve the augmentation of both company and contact data. Depending on the data provider or tool you choose to use, you can improve the quality of the contextual information about your contacts (the companies) or the contacts themselves.

Company data enrichment involves enriching business records with additional information such as industry, size, revenue, and any other information about the company. Sometimes it also involved enriching the contact details of key decision-makers, although that more often falls into contact data enrichment.

Personal data enrichment, touched on above, focuses on enhancing individual customer profiles with more in-depth data.

Types of CRM data dnrichment

CSV enrichment

The easiest and most common way to enrich your CRM data. When purchasing data, you will receive a CSV file which you can upload directly into your CRM, making sure columns match the fields in your system. CSV enrichment is commonly used for batch processing large volumes of data, making it suitable for one-time data enrichment projects.

Similarly, if you’re using a tool where you upload your data and receive back an enriched file, this will most likely be done using CSV files.

API enrichment

API enrichment allows you to integrate data enrichment capabilities directly into your system. This real-time link enables you to always have up-to-date data. It also means that you should not have to purchase large datasets multiple times.

All-in-one enrichment tools

You can also use data tools that have additional capabilities on top of enrichment. When that is the case, you will often find that there are multiple ways to enrich your data through them. With Work With Data, you can filter and download the company dataset, enrich the data by uploading your file or use our API.

Buying data: key considerations

When considering buying data for enrichment purposes, you should first and foremost prioritise data quality and transparency (i.e. where the data comes from) relevance, and finally compliance with all applicable data privacy regulations. It's essential to vet data providers thoroughly, ensuring that the data obtained is accurate, up-to-date, and ethically sourced.

Data quality and transparency

Knowing the source of data is quite possibly the most important way to understand whether its quality will be high. Whether the sources are disclosed and whether the information is hidden behind a paywall are also good ways to gauge the general ethicality of the data provider’s business practices. A complete lack of transparency is a red flag that can set the tone for the buying process or halt it altogether.

Privacy considerations

Another important thing to consider when you’re looking to enrich your CRM data is whether you want to purchase company data only or if you also intend to enrich personal data. If it’s the latter, you will have to ensure that the data provider you choose adheres to relevant data protection laws, most often the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On your end, you will have to ensure that the way you store and then use the personal data similarly adheres to all applicable regulations.

Enriching your data using Work With Data

You can easily create a full picture of the companies your contacts work at using Work With Data’s companies dataset. It contains information about 3.5 million companies across 67 industries. A large portion of the dataset is populated with the help of our advanced AI models that fill in the missing gaps and project the missing numbers.

The uniqueness of our company data

No personal data

There are a few things you need to know about the data on Work With Data. First and foremost, we do not collect any personal data, meaning the entirety of our dataset consists of business data. In most cases, this is the part of the puzzle which is missing or is of low quality in a CRM. Names and contact details can usually be obtained manually or through dedicated services.

Fully transparent sources

For all datasets, including the company one, the data comes from reliable and always-named sources. We clean the data, organise it, merge sources to paint the full picture and fill in the gaps using our AI models to create the complex dataset. You will see which data points come from a source and which are estimated, predicted or projected.

Advanced AI enhancement

The missing pieces are added through our AI modelling. Over 50% of the dataset comes from those complex processes. Thanks to this, we can capture a much larger scope of data than what’s available openly.

Get access to our company dataset

Once you open the companies dataset, you can narrow down your search criteria, using the filters. Choose which pieces of data you wish to see and what parameters the company must meet.

You can explore the dataset here.

We’re always here to help, so do reach out to us to find out more about the data, how you can retrieve exactly what you need, and how we approach pricing for all AI-enhanced datasets.

Use our data enrichment functionality

If you know exactly what you’re looking for and have a list of companies you wish to enrich, you can always plug it into Work With Data and match your companies with our dataset using the URLs of their websites as the matching key.

Explore the enrichment functionality here and let us know if you have any questions.

Get in touch for more specific or custom filtered company data

You can also get in touch with us if you need to enrich your data using more specific parameters. We can always do the data finding for you and generate a CSV which you can then upload into your CRM.

Get in touch!

If you have any questions, would like to chat about data our would like some help with enriching your data, drop us an email at hello@workwithdata.com.