What is Data Enrichment? How to Use Enriched Data for Marketing and Sales

You know that sinking feeling when you realize your “perfect” prospect list is full of outdated job titles, missing contact info, and companies that haven’t existed since 2019? That’s the reality of working with bad data, and it’s costing you deals.

Data enrichment solves this problem by filling in the gaps and adding context that turns skeletal records into complete, actionable profiles that include details including:

• Firmographics
• Technographics
• Intent signals
• Behavioral data

For B2B marketing and sales teams, this is foundational. When you’re trying to identify accounts showing buying intent, prioritize outreach, or personalize campaigns at scale, enriched data is what makes it possible.

The data enrichment process: How does it work?

Data enrichment isn’t magic, but the results can feel pretty close. Here’s how it works:

1. Collect and consolidate your existing data. Start with what you have, like contact records in your CRM, MAP, or wherever you’re storing customer and prospect information. This is your baseline.
2. Identify data gaps. What’s missing? Maybe you have company names but no employee counts. Email addresses but no job titles. Domain names but no tech stack information. These gaps limit your ability to segment, target, and personalize effectively.
3. Source external data. This is where enrichment platforms tap into third-party databases, public records, intent data providers, and proprietary sources to fill those gaps. You’re layering on:
   1. Firmographic data (company size, revenue, industry)
   1. Contact information (direct dials, verified emails, org charts)
   1. Technographic data (what tools and platforms they use)
   1. Intent signals (what they’re researching, when they’re in-market)
   1. Behavioral data (website visits, content engagement, search patterns)
4. Validate and standardize. Good enrichment tools don’t just add data, they clean it. Duplicate records get merged. Outdated information gets corrected. Formats get standardized so “VP Marketing” and “Vice President of Marketing” don’t create separate records.
5. Integrate enriched data into your systems. The enriched data flows back into your CRM, MAP, and other tools so your teams can use it. Ideally, this happens automatically and continuously, keeping your data fresh as companies grow, people change roles, and new buying signals emerge.

6sense takes this process further: The Signalverse captures a comprehensive set of buying intent signals — capturing over a trillion data points every day about B2B companies and professionals; 6AI then uses more than a decade of machine learning to translate those signals into insights about which companies are more most ready to buy. For example, you see an account visited your pricing page plus that they’re in the Decision stage with a buying intent score of 93.

Benefits of data enrichment for marketing and sales

When your data goes from bare bones to fully enriched, here’s what changes.

Your ROI improves. Stop wasting budget on accounts that don’t fit your ICP. Enriched data lets you filter accounts and contacts by revenue, employee count, industry, growth stage, keyword research, and more. It can narrow your TAM to accounts that fit your ICP and are actively seeking solutions.

Personalization becomes scalable. You can’t personalize what you don’t know. Enriched data gives you the ammunition for relevant outreach:

• Keyword research that points toward pain points or consideration of competitors
• Buying stage
• Buying persona (and their role-based pain points)

Lead qualification gets faster and smarter. Sales reps stop spinning their wheels on leads that were never going anywhere. When you enrich contact data with job titles, seniority, department, and buying intent, your teams know exactly who to call and why it matters to them.

Segmentation becomes surgical. Instead of “companies in healthcare,” you can target “mid-market healthcare providers in the Northeast using Salesforce who are showing intent around patient engagement platforms.” That specificity transforms campaign performance.

Account prioritization becomes data-driven. Not all accounts are created equal. Enriched data combined with predictive scoring tells you which accounts are in-market, which are just browsing, and which ones your competitors are probably talking to right now.

How enriched data transforms your marketing and sales strategy

Let’s get specific about how enriched data changes the game for the teams in the trenches.

Targeting: From spray and pray to pinpoint precision

Without enrichment, you’re targeting based on limited information, which leaves you guessing at fit and readiness.

With enrichment, you’re layering on context that tells you exactly which accounts match your ideal customer profile. You know their annual revenue, their growth trajectory, how many employees they have, what technologies they use, and whether they’re currently in expansion mode.

Even better, you’re seeing intent signals — the digital body language that shows an account is actively researching solutions like yours. Maybe they’ve been reading comparison guides, downloading competitor white papers, or searching for pricing information. This isn’t just data; it’s a roadmap showing you which accounts to focus on right now.

Lead qualification: Stop chasing ghosts

Sales has a lead scoring problem, and it’s often because the scores are based on incomplete information. Someone downloaded a whitepaper; great. But are they a decision maker? Do they work at a company that could afford your solution? Are they actually in-market or just doing homework for a project that’s six months out?

Enriched data answers these questions before your reps waste time on discovery calls. You’re qualifying based on:

• Job title and seniority: Is this person actually empowered to buy, or are they an intern doing research for their boss?
• Company fit: Does this company meet your minimum revenue threshold? Are they in an industry you serve well?
• Account-level intent: Is the entire account showing buying signals, or is this just one person being curious?
• Technology stack: Do they use complementary tools that make your solution a natural fit?

When 6sense enriches your lead data, we’re doing more than simply adding fields to a record. We’re providing the context your sales team needs to have relevant, informed conversations. Your reps know who they’re calling, why it matters to them specifically, and what business challenges they’re probably facing.

As a result, customers see shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and less rep time wasted on accounts that were never going to close.

Examples of data enrichment: Real-world use cases

Data enrichment sounds great in theory, but what does it actually look like in practice? Here are real examples from companies using 6sense to transform their GTM strategies with enrichment data.

Bonterra: From inbound dependency to predictive ABM

Bonterra, a provider of social good software, was trapped in an inbound-only mindset. They generated high lead volumes but struggled to turn that activity into meaningful pipeline because they lacked visibility into which accounts were actually in-market.

Without a confident understanding of which accounts were most important to target:

• Their database was full of contacts, but the records were missing the context needed to prioritize outreach or coordinate between sales and marketing teams.
• Target account lists changed frequently with no alignment between the two teams.

By enriching their data with 6sense’s predictive analytics and intent signals, Bonterra gained visibility into:

• Which accounts were actively researching solutions in their category
• Where prospects were on a high propensity path to purchase
• Which contacts at target accounts were showing engagement

The enriched data fed into coordinated ABM campaigns across multiple channels, with sales and marketing finally working from the same playbook. Bonterra influenced $6M in pipeline (a 445% increase) and drove 6,673 target accounts to their website. ABM campaigns saw both higher conversion rates and higher click-through rates compared to non-ABM efforts.

Reachdesk: Turning guesswork into a 35% win rate

The sales team at Reachdesk, a global gifting platform, was flying blind. They had contact information but no way to know which accounts were ready to buy versus which were just browsing.

Before enriching their data, their outbound strategy was based on guesswork. BDRs couldn’t identify in-market accounts, prioritize outreach, or tie keyword searches and content consumption to actual prospects.

After implementing 6sense intent data and enriching their account profiles with buying signals, the team started each day by checking which accounts were showing intent. The enriched data revealed:

• Website visits from target accounts
• Keyword searches indicating active research
• Content consumption patterns showing buying stage
• Which specific contacts at accounts were engaging

The 6sense data integrated directly into Salesforce through a widget, so BDRs didn’t need to switch between systems. Sales and marketing coordinated campaigns based on shared, enriched account intelligence.

The impact was a 35% win rate from accounts showing 6sense buying signals, and a 65% conversion rate from key accounts to sales-accepted opportunities (compared to 50% without intent data).

See how other organizations are using 6sense to enrich their data and drive better results.

Data enrichment solutions: Choose the right tools for your business 

Not all data enrichment platforms are the same. Some just append basic firmographic data. Others specialize in contact information. The best solutions combine multiple data sources with predictive analytics to give you a complete picture of your market.

What to look for in a data enrichment solution:

• Data breadth and depth: Does it cover firmographics, technographics, and intent? Or just one piece of the puzzle?
• Data freshness: How often is the data updated? Outdated enrichment is almost as useless as no enrichment.
• Native integrations: Does it work seamlessly with your CRM and MAP, or will you be doing manual imports forever?
• Predictive capabilities: Is it just adding data fields, or is it actually telling you what to do with that data?
• Privacy compliance: Does the platform follow GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations?

How 6sense uses data enrichment for predictive marketing

Here’s where data enrichment gets really interesting — and where 6sense separates from the pack.

Traditional data enrichment says, “this is information about the account.” Predictive marketing says “this is information about the account, and here’s what to do about it.”

6sense combines data enrichment with AI-powered predictive models to answer the questions that actually matter:

• Which accounts are in-market right now?
• What buying stage are they in?
• Which campaigns should they see?
• What messaging will resonate based on their research behavior?
• When should sales reach out?

How it works

6sense continuously enriches your account data by collecting signals from across the web, not just your website. We’re tracking:

• Keyword research
• Website visits
• Job changes
• Major company events (hiring sprees, new office openings, funding rounds)
• Content consumption patterns
• Campaign engagement

This enriched data feeds into our predictive models, which analyze patterns across millions of accounts to identify which ones are most likely to buy and when.

What you get that other enrichment tools don’t provide:

• Predictive scoring that identifies which accounts are in-market
• Buying stage intelligence that tells you where they are in their journey

Instead of just knowing who an account is, you know when to engage them and what they care about.

The result? Marketing and sales that actually work together.

Marketing builds campaigns targeting accounts at specific buying stages, using enriched data to personalize messaging based on industry, role, and research behavior.

Sales receives alerts when high-value accounts hit key thresholds, complete with enriched context about the account’s business, technology environment, and what they’ve been researching.

Ready to see how data enrichment can power your marketing and sales strategies? Request a demo of 6sense and start leveraging enriched data for better targeting and engagement.