Data Enrichment: What it Is & Why it Matters for B2B

Data enrichment is crucial for B2B sales and marketing teams to understand and effectively target entire buying committees. By enhancing existing customer relationship management (CRM) records with rich, contextual data, businesses can personalize outreach, accelerate sales cycles, and drive revenue.

For sellers, data enrichment is the key to unlocking the full account and driving revenue. One contact is just the starting point — to get deals across the finish line, sellers need the full context of everyone involved in making decisions. 

Traditional CRM systems, often a patchwork of inaccurate or incomplete data, leave critical gaps. The result? The sales cycle gets longer, and the likelihood of closing a deal shrinks.

But GTM teams don’t have to be stuck with guesswork. With buying committee insights integrated into their workflows, sales and marketing teams can access the complete picture, allowing them to implement effective strategies at both the prospect and account level. 

With today’s modern B2B data enrichment tools, that level of precision and automation should be standard practice. Here’s how teams can close deals faster with unmatched, 360-degree customer intelligence.

What is Data Enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing a business’ core customer and prospect records by adding contextual data from additional sources, both external (data providers) and internal (marketing tools, website analytics, etc.). 

This might include firmographic details, job titles, intent signals and behavioral data, or updated contact information.

Why Data Enrichment Matters in B2B GTM

In a B2B context, data enrichment transforms first-party data into a more accurate, complete, and actionable foundation for sales and marketing. 

B2B data enrichment helps teams: 

  • Fill in missing fields
  • Correct outdated information 
  • Add insights and context 
  • Build a 360-degree account view

This enriched data fuels better segmentation, personalization, and outreach, accelerating go-to-market efforts and aligning sales and marketing with precision. 

The Data Enrichment Process

Effective B2B data enrichment follows a structured workflow that transforms raw, incomplete records into detailed, actionable information your go-to-market teams can rely on.

Here’s how data enrichment typically works, and how leading solutions like ZoomInfo enable it at scale:

  1. Data collection: first-party data — everything from CRM entries and web form submissions to product usage and support interactions — serves as the base dataset. 
  2. Data matching: Your internal records are matched against third-party data sources like public filings, news alerts, job boards, and more to ensure a high-confidence match for every contact or account. 
  3. Data appending: Once matches are confirmed, missing or outdated fields are automatically filled in. 
  4. Data validation: Platforms like ZoomInfo apply rigorous validation protocols to eliminate duplicate data, fix inconsistencies, and maintain high deliverability rates. 
  5. Real-time updates: Enrichment isn’t a one-and-done effort; ZoomInfo powers continuous data enrichment so you never fall behind on critical contact or account changes. 

A well-orchestrated data enrichment process, especially one powered by ZoomInfo’s highly accurate B2B data, empowers your GTM strategy by ensuring your teams work with a complete view of every account and stakeholder. 

Why Data Enrichment is Essential 

Speed, accuracy, and personalization are all critical to revenue growth. But many go-to-market teams still operate with incomplete, outdated, or siloed data. 

Whether you’re trying to identify the full buying committee, create relevant outreach, or route leads effectively, you need complete, up-to-date, and trustworthy data to meet targets and stay competitive. 

The Challenges of Unenriched Data

Unenriched data is one of the biggest barriers to GTM success. Without a full picture of your prospects and accounts, teams are forced to guess. And that guesswork is costly. 

Some common issues include: 

  • Incomplete contact data: Missing emails, phone numbers, job titles, or company data limit your ability to engage
  • Outdated information: People change roles, switch companies, or get promoted. If your data doesn’t reflect those changes, your outreach will miss the mark, or aim for the wrong person entirely. 
  • Fragmented view of accounts: Siloed data prevents GTM teams from seeing the full picture of the buying group and understanding complex account dynamics. 
  • Wasted time on research: When data is stale, reps spend hours manually hunting for accurate contact info or trying to piece together org charts. 
  • Poor segmentation and targeting: Bad data leads to weak audience segmentation, resulting in generic messaging that doesn’t convert. 

The result: lower engagement, slower sales cycles, and fewer closed deals. 

Benefits of Enriched Data

By contrast, data enrichment equips your team with real-time, complete, and context-rich records — the foundation for scalable, personalized, and effective go-to-market motions. 

Here are some benefits of enriching your data sets: 

  • Complete contact and company profiles:  Fill in gaps with verified details like titles, functions, contact channels, firmographics, and technographics. 
  • Timely updates and alerts: Stay ahead of changes like job moves, funding announcements, or growth events. 
  • Clear buying committee visibility: Know exactly who’s involved in decision-making and tailor your messaging accordingly. 
  • Smarter segmentation and scoring: Use accurate fields to drive better lead routing, prioritization, and campaign targeting. 
  • Sales and marketing alignment: With shared visibility into enriched account data, GTM teams work from the same source of truth. 

With enriched data, your teams spend less time digging for information and more time driving revenue. 

Buying Committees are Prime Targets for Data Enrichment

Buying decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Most B2B purchases involve six to 10 stakeholders, each with unique agendas. This mix of influencers, decision-makers, and skeptics have different roles, responsibilities, and pain points. If your outreach is limited to one contact, you’re leaving revenue on the table. 

Not only that, but today’s buying committee members expect seamless, personalized experiences: fast answers, tailored outreach, and clear value from the start. Considering the rapid changes in decision-making and multiplying that by the average size of a buying committee today, sales and marketing teams have a real challenge on their plate. 

One thing’s clear: understanding a buying committee means running your sales strategy with a winning hand. 

With B2B data enrichment, your team can: 

  • Automatically surface every decision-maker, influencer, and blocker
  • Personalize outreach with role-specific intent data and engagement history
  • Track job changes in real time to maintain influence and momentum

With the right data, sales and marketing teams can tailor their messages to resonate with each role within the committee. Think of it this way: a pitch that appeals to a technical officer won’t necessarily strike a chord with a financial decision-maker.

3 Ways Data Enrichment Builds Buying Committees

1. Identify the Complete Buying Committee

Without rich data to work with, GTM teams are left guessing, relying on one-off contacts and outdated intelligence. They can default to generic approaches, pitching leads and manually scouring for data based on assumptions rather than intelligence. This leads to wasted time, inaccurate messaging, and missed opportunities to speak to pressing customer challenges. 

Instead, GTM teams need a CRM filled with data that helps them understand the dynamics of the entire buying committee. 

Data enrichment changes the game by automatically identifying and populating records for the full buying committee. 

For example: 

  • When a key contact switches companies, enrichment tools update their profile and alert the team. 
  • Simultaneously, a replacement contact at their previous company is added automatically, ideally with equal or greater authority.
  • The system also identifies new decision-makers at the contact’s new company, helping your team expand influence quickly. 

This level of automation ensures your CRM is never stale and your team never misses a beat with the buying committee. 

2. Automatically Add Buying Committees to Each Account

Automatically match incoming and existing records in your database. Use this to flesh out your account profiles with full buying committees instead of isolated contacts. 

Don’t discard non-decision-maker leads. Instead, activate them with enriched data to identify, validate, and engage the full committee, aligning your GTM plays with every role that matters.

Say you’ve pinpointed Sarah, an entry-level analyst at target company BigCorp. The account is a strong fit, but she doesn’t have decision-making power. Instead of discarding her as a lead, do the following: 

  • Since BigCorp fits your ideal customer profile, keep the lead but broaden your scope.
  • Use advanced tools like ZoomInfo to analyze the organizational structure of BigCorp. Find out who else is likely to be part of the buying committee, like the CTO, procurement managers, and heads of the departments that would be using your product.
  • Your system should automatically create new profiles for these identified decision-makers and add them to the BigCorp account in your CRM. This is your buying committee.

From there, your sales and marketing teams can align their messaging to match each role. The CTO might receive a technical pitch, while the procurement manager sees ROI-focused content. 

This transforms your single, ill-fitting lead into a broader, more accurate picture of the account’s buying committee. This means your sales team can tailor its approach to each key player, exponentially increasing your chances of a successful sale. 

3. Keep Buying Committee Data Fresh

Working with outdated or incomplete data kills deals. When buyers shift roles or priorities, your CRM should update with no manual effort required. 

This is where competitive revenue operations teams equipped with automated enrichment processes do more than just gather initial data on buying committees. They continue to keep that information up-to-date and relevant. 

A key strength of modern data enrichment tools is their ability to continuously update CRM records with accurate, relevant data. 

With CRM automation, teams can automatically track data changes:

  • Set alerts for trigger events like leadership changes, funding rounds, or product launches
  • Automatically refresh profiles when someone changes roles or companies
  • Partner with third-party data providers for deeper insights
  • Enrich records in real time as sellers interact with them. 

B2B data enrichment ensures your team always works from the latest intelligence on your buying committees.

The Impact of Enriched Data: Case Study

Enriched data empowers sellers to sell smarter and focus on strategy and relevance, not guesswork. For fast-growing, industry-agnostic companies like Sendoso, data enrichment is foundational. With a Total Addressable Market (TAM) spanning multiple industries, personas, and global regions, Sendoso had to manage an overwhelming amount of data and turn it into actionable intelligence for their go-to-market teams. 

Like many companies, Sendoso had records flowing in from sources like web forms, Marketo, and list imports, making their CRM vulnerable to incomplete, duplicate, or inaccurate entries. Sales reps spent valuable time manually researching or cleaning up contact information. 

Sendoso needed to ensure every account and contact record was enriched, validated, and ready for action. More than filling in the blanks, they needed data enrichment to deliver consistent, complete data at scale to fuel intelligent sales motions. 

With ZoomInfo, Sendoso was able to streamline the data enrichment process at every touchpoint. With this solution in place, Sendoso achieved: 

  • A 70% reduction in inaccurate data
  • 1,100+ hours saved in manual enrichment efforts
  • A 10% increase in access to ICP contacts
  • Over $4.9 million in new pipeline generated in just two quarters. 

The benefits of ZoomInfo’s enrichment were immediately clear: reps moved faster, targeted smarter, and drove real results. 

Use Data Enrichment to Turn Your CRM Into a Revenue Engine

Stop letting bad data block your deals. Use data enrichment to gain full-funnel visibility, pinpoint every stakeholder, and turn your CRM into a high-performance revenue driver for your business. 

Talk to a B2B data specialist today to learn how you can activate complete buying committee insights and fuel your go-to-market engine to drive revenue. 

Types of B2B Data Enrichment Tools & Platforms

Data enrichment requires specialized tools and platforms to be done well. There are several different approaches for solving common B2B data enrichment problems, each with their own strengths. Here are some of the typical categories of data enrichment solutions:

  • All-in-One Data Platforms: Comprehensive solutions offering a wide range of data enrichment capabilities, including firmographic, technographic, intent, and contact data. They often integrate directly with CRMs and marketing automation platforms.
  • Contact Data Providers: Specialized tools focused on providing accurate and up-to-date contact information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles.
  • Firmographic Data Providers: Platforms that supply company-level data, including industry, revenue, employee count, and location, to help segment and target businesses.
  • Technographic Data Providers: Tools that identify the technology stack a company uses, providing insights into their existing software, hardware, and platforms, which can inform sales and marketing strategies.
  • Intent Data Platforms: Solutions that track online behavior and content consumption to identify companies actively researching solutions related to your products or services, indicating buying intent.
  • Data Validation and Cleansing Tools: While not purely enrichment, these tools are crucial for ensuring the accuracy and usability of existing data before or during the enrichment process. They identify and correct errors, remove duplicates, and standardize formats.
  • Reverse IP Lookup Tools: Platforms that identify company information based on a website visitor’s IP address, enriching anonymous website traffic with firmographic details.
  • CRM-Native Enrichment Features: Many modern CRM systems offer built-in or integrated data enrichment functionalities, allowing users to enrich records directly within their CRM environment.
  • Marketing Automation Platform Integrations: Tools that integrate with marketing automation platforms to enrich lead and contact data, enabling more personalized and effective campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is data enrichment important in B2B go-to-market (GTM) strategies?

In a B2B context, data enrichment transforms first-party data into a more accurate and actionable asset for sales and marketing. Enrichment makes your first-party data more complete by filling in missing fields, correcting outdated information, adding insights like job function and buying intent. The result is a 360-degree view of each account.

How does the data enrichment process work?

Data enrichment typically involves data collection from internal sources, data matching against third-party sources, data appending to fill in missing fields, data validation to eliminate inconsistencies, and real-time updates to ensure continuous accuracy.

What are the challenges of using unenriched data?

Unenriched data can lead to incomplete contact information, outdated details, a fragmented view of accounts, wasted time on manual research, and poor segmentation and targeting, ultimately resulting in lower engagement and slower sales cycles.

What are the benefits of enriched data?

Enriched data provides complete contact and company profiles, timely updates and alerts, clear visibility into the buying committee, smarter segmentation and scoring, and improved sales and marketing alignment.

Why are buying committees important for data enrichment?

Most B2B purchases involve many stakeholders. Data enrichment allows teams to automatically identify all decision-makers, influencers, and blockers within a buying committee, personalize outreach with role-specific intent data, and track job changes in real time, increasing the chances of a successful sale.

How does data enrichment help in building buying committees?

Data enrichment helps by automatically identifying the complete buying committee, matching incoming and existing records to flesh out account profiles with full buying committees, and continuously keeping buying committee data fresh through real-time updates and alerts.

Can you provide an example of the impact of enriched data?

Sendoso, a fast-growing company, used ZoomInfo to streamline its data enrichment. This resulted in a 70% reduction in inaccurate data, over 1,100 hours saved in manual enrichment, a 10% increase in access to ideal customer profile (ICP) contacts, and over $4.9 million in new pipeline generated in just two quarters.