Hi! This is Jerome from Diffbot. You might’ve seen us around before. We’re known for our automatic extraction APIs, and our knowledge graph of the public web. Today, I’d like to introduce you to Diffbot Enhance, lead enrichment anywhere you need it.
Lead enrichment doesn’t get enough credit
When I first saw it in action, it looked like a gimmick - just fields populated in a CRM sold with shockingly pricey annual contracts up-sold alongside Salesforce.
Like keeping your personal address book up to date. Helpful? Sure. Necessary? Not really.
Sales always insists it’s helpful though. I didn’t get it.
Fast forward a few years, we noticed one day that 62% of our inbound leads never make it to a demo call. 62%! These are people who choose to ignore the self-start trial option, fill out a 6 field form, pass a captcha, and click a button that literally says request a demo.
What we discovered was that once a lead lands in our inbox, a huge amount of time was being wasted in manual research and qualification. “Googling a lead” doesn’t sound like much, but tack on assigning, replying, and scheduling, repeated hundreds of times a week - that’s a whole lot of menial time. Time that is spent ignoring leads who need a solution now, not tomorrow. And as we all know, the early bird gets the worm.
What we need is a way to automate
- Filtering out low quality leads or spam
- Assigning the correct account rep for the territory
- Providing scheduling availability
- Booking the meeting
The latter two aren’t terribly difficult, but to automate the first two, we need to enrich our leads. I’m starting to get it now.
We built Diffbot Enhance from our knowledge graph to enrich each inbound lead with attributes like company size, location, and industry. Then a custom backend service powered by Chili Piper (they’re great!) identifies ideal customer matches based on these attributes and automatically presents the lead with an availability calendar for a matched AE to schedule with.
All this happens automatically, immediately after a lead form is submitted on our website. No more inbox refreshing on weekends or wading through spam. A quality of life improvement for our account execs, while increasing our inbound contact rate by a cool +46%. Not too shabby.
I learned that enrichment is only as useful as the pain it is automating.
The pain isn’t in googling a lead, it’s acting on that information, over and over again, where it really counts - not sitting in a CRM.
For this reason, Diffbot Enhance is not an app. Not in the “pretty interface” sense of the word that is. It’s a suite of integrations and an API, designed to be accessible anywhere you need it to automate research and decision making.
I’m particularly excited about our Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel add-ons which unlock the ability to look up organizations and people with a simple formula.
In this example, the only input required is a URL in the “lead” column. Diffbot Enhance automatically fills in the rest, and the priority score is calculated from matches in the enhanced columns.
Postmates and DoorDash are lighting up like Christmas trees because I’ve setup conditional formatting to look for leads that are:
- In San Francisco
- Running some type of services business
- Around 10k employees or more
While not as showy, a practical application in my week to week is uploading a list of our latest paid customers and looking for firmographic trends to find our next channel.
This level of automated firmographic segmentation truly shines in lead funnels and email campaigns, where just a touch of personalization could go a long way.
For the no-coders - Find us on Zapier and let it work its magic in your lead gen automations or other nurture pipelines. Zapier’s partner network of CRMs is extensive, allowing you to enhance leads and automate pipelines no matter what you use.
Finally, our REST API is wonderful for all kinds of custom use cases (like our lead routing example), and even includes a bulk option for enhancing hundreds of records at once.
On the technology that powers Diffbot Enhance - it’s pretty freakin’ incredible.
We built the largest and most accurate knowledge graph in the world, created using machine learning models that read and understand the web like humans, except way faster. And then we built Diffbot Enhance to find organizations and people in it, with match rates rivaling enterprise enrichment providers like Clearbit.
Except unlike Clearbit, our data is built by a machine, not people, and 100% sourced from the public web by us, not through third party data brokers. We’re one of just a few companies actively crawling the public web. Fun fact - we’ve been crawling and extracting data behind the scenes for companies like Clearbit for over a decade.
Enrichment today costs well over $20,000 a year.
That’s a minimum figure, not a maximum. Because of how human intensive data processing is, the data is often only available to b2b enterprise companies who are able to bank on big margins to make up for the cost. Our data is processed nearly entirely by a machine, which brings me to one more thing -
Diffbot Enhance costs 5 cents a lead.
That’s 1/5 the per-lead cost of our nearest price competitor.
1/20 the minimum annual contract cost.
For over 50+ traits and attributes per lead.
Did I mention how incredible this technology is?
I can wax poetic on our technology all day. But here’s the fundamental vision for Diffbot Enhance:
Unlock productivity growth by automating data gathering for everyone.
Diffbot Enhance is available today at enhance.diffbot.com. We’re excited to see what you build with us.
Yours,
Jerome Choo
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