Lead Research: From Challenge to Hyperpersonalization

In today's digital business world, many B2B companies face the constant problem of not generating enough new leads and their B2B sales pipeline is drying up. The difficulty lies in figuring out which contacts are actually ready to buy and determining the ideal time to reach out.

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The challenges companies face today when it comes to identifying and reaching new qualified leads

This is reflected in the latest Marketing Automation Report (N = 228 B2B companies), lead generation is consistently in the top 3 challenges.

Another survey of B2B SaaS companies, shows the same picture.

We present innovative approaches and tools to help you enrich your CRM database with accurate and insightful information. Discover the most effective lead research and enrichment strategies in today's digitized world.

The benefits of implementing a lead enrichment strategy that will make your sales team more effective and help you compete against the overflow of irrelevant online content. For strong online positioning.

Lead research & Hyper-personalization: validate and enrich contacts

Lead research, an indispensable tool in modern B2B marketing.

The revival of lead sources

Our journey begins with a look back to when contacts were located through phone books and yellow pages. But in this digitized world, the rules of the game are different. New, innovative approaches are needed to reach your ideal target audience.

We dive into the personal experience and explore together the challenges and solutions around lead research.

In today's dynamic business world, it's critical to always have up-to-date information. “Contact corpses” in CRM hinder the flow of your business and bog down your sales team. This is where lead research comes in. It's about finding and enriching new contacts, but also updating your existing contacts to create more effective sales and marketing teams.

The solution lies in enrichment

Enrichment is the key to a successful lead research process. Imagine a magic box into which data is poured and comes out enriched. To achieve this, we need to define clear Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and Buyer Personas and leverage an arsenal of tools and sources, from LinkedIn to specialized platforms.

This is about much more than just collecting email addresses. It's a comprehensive strategy that includes web scraping of company websites to leveraging artificial intelligence through OpenAI to enable seamless integration and personalization into your B2B marketing approach.

Results that matter

When done right, lead research enables hyper-personalization of your marketing strategies, leading to effective segmentation and shorter sales cycles. It ensures you're in the right place at the right time to target your contacts, with customized and valuable content that doesn't just end up as “another spam email” in the inbox.

Practical tips and tools

We share some concrete examples and hacks of how different industries can apply these techniques, from leveraging association memberships to leveraging personal networks through LinkedIn.

So imagine you have this magic box that's at the heart of your lead generation strategy. You feed it raw, unpolished data, and out the other side come enriched, high-quality leads, ready for fruitful business relationships. Here's the key to this process:

Your path to enriched leads: step by step

1. Preparation: it all starts with a clear vision. Before you embark on your lead search, you need to define a crystal clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and your Buyer Persona. Use Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies to focus and personalize your efforts.
2. Validation: to save time and resources, you should check the validity of potential email addresses before moving forward. Tools such as Neverbounce can be very helpful in this regard.
3. Tap sources for new leads: Now is the time to start looking for fresh leads. LinkedIn is a good place to start, but remember to also use data providers like Apollo, Zoominfo and Clearbit. They can help you find a wealth of potential contacts.
4. Website Scraping: Go a step further and explore different websites – whether it's the official company website or attendee lists from conferences and associations. These places can be real goldmines for qualified leads.
5. Expanding Sources: Have your box fed information from a variety of sources, such as Google News, BuiltWith, and Wappalyzer, to get a comprehensive picture of your leads.
6. Intelligent data enrichment with OpenAI: Here's where your magic box gets fascinating. With OpenAI, you can normalize company names and job titles and create hyper-personalized email opens that really resonate. You can even incorporate the latest LinkedIn post or company mission into your communications strategy to make a deeper connection with your leads.
7. Specialized research: sometimes the process requires a human touch. For very specific needs, you can manually scrape and crawl data, assisted by lead research specialists you can find on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.

With this approach, your magic box turns into a powerful machine capable of not only generating leads, but also nurturing and qualifying them with a lot of value.

The Tools

Overview

• Apollo is a comprehensive sales platform that offers a database of millions of companies and contacts, combined with a suite of tools to improve your outbound sales campaigns.
• ZoomInfo provides a comprehensive business database to improve B2B contact and lead generation campaigns, supported by a suite of marketing and sales intelligence tools.
• Clearbit provides AI-powered real-time data to improve lead qualification, enrichment, and score, help build better customer profiles, and support personalized marketing strategies.
• Hunter is a tool, that helps you find and verify email addresses associated with a specific domain to support your lead generation and outreach efforts.
• Clay is a meta-platform with access to other data providers. Automate your customer acquisition by combining data from any provider to find your ideal customer and send personalized messages using AI.
• DropContact is an email enrichment tool, that helps find missing contact information, clean up duplicate entries, and verify email addresses to optimize your CRM database.
• MixRank is a sales intelligence tool, that helps you identify and qualify leads through a variety of data points including technology stacks, promotional activity, and company demographics.
• Lusha is a lead enrichment tool, that integrates contact and company information directly into your CRM to facilitate lead generation and personalization of outreach efforts.
• Nymblr is a B2B data and enrichment platform for salespeople, marketers, and developers.

It is important for us to emphasize that it is not about using aggressive or unethical methods, but about building relationships and providing real value. In the modern world of B2B marketing, this means standing out through thought leadership and quality content that helps you stand out positively in a sea of noise.
At the heart of Lead Research is the pursuit of quality and the creation of authentic, valuable relationships.