The Blitzen team is always looking for ways to add value to our customers. This is why we chose to partner with FullContact – an awesome contact management platform. It takes the information you currently have about your contacts such as phone numbers and emails and enhances it with pictures and online profiles from over a hundred websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Basically it fills in the gaps to create an enriched client profile that will only get better with time.

When is more information better?

You might be wondering what you can do with enriched data that you couldn’t do with an email address. To put it simply, the more you know about someone the better you can predict if they will buy your product. This saves you wasted time and money on pursuing leads that will never convert. Later on in the sales cycle, you can use this information to nurture leads that hold actual value. Using contact data at various stages of lead generation can bring tangible benefits to your business.

Here are a few places where enriched data comes in particularly handy:  

1. Lead qualifying

Before you begin your lead generation, you will likely spend a significant amount of time identifying which prospects to pursue. A popular way to do so is through the BANT exercise developed by IBM. The acronym stands for:

• Budget: They have enough money to buy the product or service
• Authority: They have the authority to make a purchasing decision
• Need: They have a compelling business need for the product or service
• Timeframe: They need a solution soon

The ideal prospect should fit into all four categories but some will not, and that’s alright – we will deal with this in the next section. Regardless of the lead, we need a lot of data to qualify them. This is where FullContact is a game changer. Besides their name, and email, FullContact supplies you with a prospect’s job title, industry, company name, geographic location, as well as their social interests.

For a smaller business with limited resources, this feature can make a huge difference. The time it takes a sales associate to do personal research through LinkedIn and Google, can now be devoted to doing actual sales.

This trove of information is also very helpful for lead scoring – a useful practice that gives numerical values to leads based on their characteristics. The more information you have, the more accurate your lead scoring becomes. Based on these numbers you can categorize your prospects into different boxes of potential, this is called segmentation.

2. Segmentation

Blitzen categorizes your leads through dynamic segmentation. This means that you set rules for your segments and Blitzen sorts them. For example, you can make a list of all the individuals that have a lead score of 80 or higher, have a known twitter profile, and also reside in Colorado. This might be the segment that is most lucrative for you and as such, requires more attention than your other segments. Having a hierarchy allows you to prioritize your time and focus on the clients that are most likely to purchase your product. Based on the data you collect with FullContact, your segments become much more accurate.

3. Customer Relationship Management

After scoring and segmenting your leads, it’s time to transfer them to your CRM. The first step in deriving value from your CRM system is loading it with robust data about your customers – something that FullContact provides for you. But not a lot of companies have that information today. A survey by HubSpot, in their State of Inbound: Sales Edition, recently discovered that most companies are not confident in the completeness of their data  within their CRM.

Unfortunately, missing contact data can affect every step of the sales cycle and lead to added costs along the way. On the other hand, loading high quality, data enriched leads into your CRM lowers the lead acquisition cost for your sales team – making it easy for them to close the deal. As Stu Schmidt (Vice President at Cisco Webex) said at the Sales 2.0 Conference, “a 10% improvement in lead quality can result in a 40% improvement in sales productivity”.  Blitzen makes populating your CRM very simple, saving you from doing manual data entry.

Thank you for following along with us today. To sum up what we have talked about: throughout the lead generation cycle, enriched data can help you better determine lead quality; it can categorize your leads to help you prioritize your time. It will also load your CRM with enriched data to help your sales team close more deals, increasing the return on investment for the company.

To learn how to leverage FullContact data with Blitzen

Join our Lead Management Webinar December 15th