Using multiple tools and resources to combat poor contact enrichment while prospecting

In my first official week as an Account Development Representative, my biggest challenge has been with the quality of the contacts I am reaching out to. When I started I felt like if I had better contact information, I would be much more effective at my job. After all, these contacts are the fuel to my job. If the contact information I am pulling is not updated, then I can’t reach anybody. Its as simple as that. I decided I need higher octane fuel!

We use Salesforce to pull contact information from a huge database. Many companies use this Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool as a directory to keep track of employees ranging from CEOs to IT directors to secretaries from different companies. I use this database to find contacts to reach out to within my target accounts.

Unfortunately, Salesforce is not properly enriched. In some cases, its not at all. In my first real week on the job, I sent out 216 emails to potential customers after pulling their information through Salesforce. Out of these 216 emails about 170, or 79% of the emails bounced back. Of course there are going to be people which won’t respond, so out of that remaining 21% of emails which were delivered, I got only two responses. 

On one of the responses, I had a guy tell me that he hasn’t worked for the company I was referring to in the email for seven years! The other response did result in a meeting, but did not amount to an opportunity. During the meeting I learned that the contact was mistakenly associated with my targeted account and was just some random guy trying to get help on setting up a website for his furniture shop! 

This all ties back to the bad data in Salesforce. My main point is that if these 216 contacts I touched had been accurately enriched, I could have seen a much higher success rate in responses. Better data leads to better results. Hence, I realized that investing a little time on enriching the contacts upfront would pay huge dividends in the results on the backend.

Having a better enrichment protocol will drastically increase generating pipeline. This will lead to an ideal situation. But the reality is that organizations struggle with bad data. Every company that uses these tools face this issue. It’s important for the companies and the individual contributors like me to invest in contact enrichment through services like Endato.com.

I have been using a strategy to significantly increase my email response rate. Rather than relying on Salesforce alone to pull contact information, now I use a couple of applications in order to do my own contact enrichment. My hypothesis was that If I used all the tools at my disposal at Google, I would yield much higher returns. 

So I started by exporting my list of accounts that were assigned to me through Salesforce, then fed that list into an account search on DiscoverOrg. DiscoverOrg then gave me a full report of all the contacts listed under those accounts based on the search criteria I provided. I then export this report into a spreadsheet. 

On the spreadsheet, I can set custom filters and filter the contacts by titles such as CEO, CTO, Director of IT, etc. I will then rearrange the spreadsheet to display only the contacts with the corresponding titles I want to focus on and it provides me with their emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn URLs. 

Since DiscoverOrg has better contact enrichment than what is in our Salesforce, I find that my emails have a 5% response rate rather than the usual 1%. Also, the mobile numbers listed in my DiscoverOrg reports have been 95% accurate thus far. This is just the first tool I have used that has helped me improve the quality of the response rates.

Then when I combine this with Account Based Prospecting, which is targeted well-researched outreach to individual decision makers, I improve even more. But for this, I need to gain some insights on my customers before I reach them. 

Again, Salesforce is supposed to have all of that information such as: the type of product and services they are receiving from Google, how much they are spending, how many employees they have, etc. But unfortunately this information is not updated as frequently as it should be and can be misleading. 

In order to avoid confusion, I use a few different applications to get better insight on my customers. In order to determine a customer’s technology stack, I use an application called Intricately. Intricately can be used as a Chrome extension which allows you to visit a company website, and it will automatically track and tell you their technology stack. That is a great way to determine if a customer is already using our services or not. 

In order to gain more insight on the company itself, like employee count and a detailed summary, I use a website called Crunchbase. Crunchbase is a perfect place to pull general information on the customer. I use Crunchbase to gain a quick understanding on what the company is all about when preparing for a meeting with the customer.

If I want to specifically see how much certain customers are spending on Google products and services, I can refer to a tool we have called Account 360, which will layout their spend on a day to day basis with us. After using these three resources in order to gain insight on my prospect, I am ready to confidently reach out to them using the enriched contact information DiscoverOrg has provided.

In conclusion, contact enrichment is extremely important when prospecting. There simply is no prospecting if salespeople can’t even reach their leads. This is an issue that is probably a major challenge for many companies. Although there is no simple fix to this issue, strategies such as using other resources and applications in conjunction with your CRM tool will lead to improved response rates. Combining this with research and information on your customers will lead to higher response rates and better overall results. I know its important and that is why I am investing in premium octane fuel going forward!