Lattice Engines Releases Lead Enrichment

Lattice Engines, a provider of predictive marketing and sales applications, has released Lead Enrichment, an enhancement designed to help B2B marketers and sales professionals prioritize their strongest inbound and outbound leads, as well as engage them more effectively.

Lattice Engines' tools are designed to give sales and marketing teams insight into the buying process, helping them determine which potential customers are most likely to make a purchase, what they will buy, and when. Its technology combines a company's internal data with external buying signals and applies machine learning capabilities to generate predictions.

Lead Enrichment bolsters Lattice Engines' predictive account scoring process, as it pulls thousands of additional attributes from the company's data partners HGData and BuiltWith. This data is placed into two pools: Technology indicators and Firmographic attributes. Technology indicators consist of any Web technologies or behind-the-firewall and security technologies. Firmographic attributes consist of information like a company's industry, revenue, number of employees, growth trends, financial status, address, and phone number.

The supplemental account information is automatically added into existing customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MPA) integrations, enabling teams to determine their top predictors of success.

According to Nipul Chokshi, Lattice Engines' head of product marketing, the ability to analyze and determine the technologies "companies are using behind the firewall on their Web site [has proven] particularly useful to companies who are looking to identify either complementary (or competitive) technologies so they can run the proper campaigns."

Chokshi notes that one of its customers—a firm that sells its software to other independent software vendors (ISVs)—has leveraged Lead Enrichment to determine which of its prospects are using development and QA platforms. "That enabled them to prioritize those accounts higher on the call list for the outbound sales development reps who were doing reach-outs to those accounts," Chokshi says. The marketing team was able to further tailor its messaging to include the ways in which its product complemented the development and QA platforms.

"One of the things we've learned is that it's not just about data, or giving sales and marketing a predictive score and a couple of fields that tell them something about a particular account," Chokshi says. "We believe it's important to take that one step beyond and to actually enable you to take action on that data."

Chokshi points out, for instance, that Lattice Engines offers a "templatized talking points" feature. Using this tool within Salesforce.com, a marketing manager who wants the sales team to pursue a lead can outline specific questions members should ask the prospect, the value proposition they should be highlighting, and any links to relevant materials. "It's really about making it easy for the sales side to take action on all those things," Chokshi says.

And to make it even easier for companies to take action, Lattice Engines' future releases will incorporate data from additional sources, simplify the integration of a company's data with CRM and MAP, and add workflows that enable marketers to create more targeted campaigns, Chokshi says.