Lead enrichment
Lead enrichment is adding context to a bare name, email or domain, such as company size, role, funding or the tools in use, so you can judge whether the lead fits your profile.
Also called Data enrichment.
Lead enrichment is turning a thin record into one you can act on. You start with a domain, or a name and an email, and you add the attributes that let you judge fit: headcount, what the company sells, the person's role and seniority, funding history, the technologies on their site, recent hiring.
It exists because qualification is otherwise manual. A list of two thousand domains cannot be assessed by a person in reasonable time, but it can be filtered mechanically once each row carries the attributes your profile is written in terms of. Enrichment is what makes an ICP operational rather than aspirational.
The important limitation is that enrichment data is inferred and dated. Headcount comes from professional profiles that people do not update, technology detection reads what is on the public site and misses anything internal, and job titles mean different things at different companies. Treat a field as evidence rather than fact, weight recency, and be careful about the ones that drive automated decisions. A message that opens by naming a role the person no longer holds is worse than one that names nothing.
Enrichment is also processing of personal data. Under GDPR the person has a right to know where their data came from, which means keeping the provenance rather than flattening every source into one record.
In practice
- A domain enriched to: 45 staff, Series A, sells to marketing teams, running HubSpot and Segment.
- A stale record showing a person as a manager who has since become a director elsewhere.
- Technology detection that misses an internal tool because it never appears on the public site.
Questions
How accurate is enrichment data?
Good on stable firmographics, weaker on anything that changes. Domain, industry and rough size band are usually right. Job titles and headcount drift constantly because they depend on people updating profiles they have no reason to update, and roughly a third of business contacts change role each year. Technology detection sees only what is publicly visible. The practical response is to weight recency and to avoid making a claim in an email that depends on a field being current.
Is enriching data on people legal under GDPR?
It can be, and it is regulated. Enrichment is processing personal data, so it needs a lawful basis, normally legitimate interest for business contacts, and it comes with obligations: the person can ask what you hold, where it came from, and can object. Because you obtained the data indirectly rather than from them, you also have to tell them the source. Keeping provenance per field rather than a merged record is what makes that answerable. This is not legal advice.
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