The Left-Shift Evolution of Lead Enrichment in SaaS ⚊ From GTM to Product Engineering
Learn how integrating lead enrichment early in the development cycle enhances SaaS Growth and Efficiency
After our podcast episode on the topic of Lead enrichment, We received a few questions on its use cases, tools available in the marketplace and market evolution.
We decided to turn our learnings into a blog post.
First off What Is Lead Enrichment?:
This is how Clearbit defines it
Lead enrichment is the process of finding and adding information, such as company and contact data, to a lead record to speed up your qualification and routing processes. For instance, let’s say you have the names and email addresses of the people who attended your breakout session at a third-party event. They’ve shown interest in your company and you want to engage them, but who do you reach out to first? And how do you make the conversation interesting and relevant for them?
Contact Enrichment: Typically it involves doing a lookup on the newly Signed-Up User, and collecting associated traits like email ID, social profiles, location, job title/function.
Company Enrichment: And if your SaaS Business is a B2B business, the user might be an employee of an Organization (aka Account), whose traits are critical for you to understand the buyer profile a lot better. Your teams will do a lookup of the account’s domain (e.g. acmecorp.com) and fetch company traits like Industry, Employee count, Revenue, HQ Location etc.
How is Lead Enrichment typically used?
The following is a list of primary use-cases and their secondary off-shoots.
And as you can tell, the usage of Lead-Enrichment is left shifting towards Product & Engineering.
Why Lead Enrichment Matters in PLG?
How does it matter?
Enrichment accelerates Expansion: Accurate user and account representation helps identify large accounts where expansion is possible.
Enrichment helps retention: Understanding accounts better help in (re)engagement, especially when the usage falls below threshold.
What are the Unique Challenges in PLG:
In traditional B2B sales, companies typically know their customers because they go through a sales process.
However, in PLG, product adoption often precedes an actual sale.
Users adopt free or low-price product SKUs without going through a lengthy procurement process.
Companies must connect the dots to identify users and understand their readiness to convert
The best time to understand your user (and ICP-fit) is at the earliest time the transactional user interacts with your SaaS Application.
And typically its the Signup/Registration step of your User Onboarding..— ThriveStack
Let’s look at some history, mostly a pictorial view
Classic SaaS: Enrichment was primarily designed to support Marketing teams
Marketing teams used enrichment to target accounts that are mostly likely to convert. Some might remember about Marketing-Qualified-Leads (MQLs), which was the best game in town - and only the big kids could use these tools.
Enrichment evolved to start supporting adjacent Product & GTM use cases
Product-Led movement necessitated a need to combine product usage and enrichment data, primarily to enable Product-Led sales.
The beneficiaries were now Marketing, Sales and Growth teams who could use the combination to target what was working well (product-usage) with customer acquisition tactics (some refer to this as Product-Led Marketing)
The following diagram is a simplified representation of how it generally works…
Enrichment starts simplifying high volume of Self-Serve registrations and the entire Product-Led GTM
Customization and Personalization:
Enrichment data allows tailoring the onboarding experience. e.g.
Based on the job function (e.g. Title) of the user automatically highlight JTBD functions that the user can feel connected to.
Using their social handles like LinkedIn, Twitter to auto-populate how they can be contacted. Of course, trying to make it less creepy and allowing privacy is the key.
Bringing auto-enrichment makes the downstream pipeline of PLG Analytics, PLG CRM all the more useful.
Shameless plug:
ThriveStack is pioneering the left-shift movement of User and Account enrichment into its Self-Serve Infrastructure thus enabling, personalized self-serve, PLG Analytics and PLG CRM in the fastest way possible.
Try it out here
Let us know your thoughts!