Who this is for
If you’re in sales or marketing, you know that having complete and accurate lead data is critical. A database full of bare-bones contact info like names and email addresses is essentially useless for effective outreach. That’s why lead enrichment – the process of filling in additional valuable details about each prospect – is so important.
Traditionally, this has involved tedious manual research by your sales development reps (SDRs) or outsourced to expensive third-party data providers. But what if you could automate the entire lead enrichment workflow using cutting-edge AI?
That’s exactly what I’ve implemented for our sales team here at AutoSend by connecting two powerful tools: Perplexity’s AI-powered data enrichment platform and the workflow automation solution Pipedream. Allow me to walk you through how it works.
The Painfully Manual Status Quo
Like most companies, we’d often receive lead lists exported from events, webinars, or other sources. These spreadsheets would contain basic fields like first name, last name, email address, and company name.
From there, the tedious enrichment process would begin. Our SDRs would have to manually look up the website for each company, try to find a direct-dial phone number, and piece together background on what products/services that business offered based on their online presence.
Even with browser extensions and other productivity tools, this was incredibly time-consuming work. Enriching a single lead could easily take 5-10 minutes of focused research. Multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of leads in a typical outbound prospecting cadence, and you can see why this was such an enormous time-sink.
Not only was it inefficient, but the data quality was inconsistent. Different SDRs had their own methodologies and sources they’d rely on, leading to uneven results. And by the time all that manual work was done, leads could already be growing stale.
There had to be a better way. That’s where AI-powered automation came into the picture.
Scaling Lead Enrichment with AI
The core idea behind my approach was simple: leverage AI to instantly enrich new leads with key details like phone numbers, websites, and a helpful business summary upon being added to our database. Here’s the step-by-step process I built out:
- A new lead is added to our CRM system (ActiveCampaign in this example)
- This addition triggers a pre-built workflow on the Pipedream platform
- Pipedream passes the company name from that new lead record to Perplexity’s AI-powered data enrichment API
- Perplexity searches across the internet to retrieve the most likely website URL and phone number for that business
- It also analyzes the content from the company’s website and other online sources to generate a concise 1-2 sentence summary of what products/services they offer
- All of this freshly enriched data is sent back to Pipedream
- Pipedream’s workflow then writes the new phone, website, and AI-generated business summary directly back to the original lead record in ActiveCampaign
And just like that, with zero manual effort required, a previously sparse lead has been transformed into a robustly detailed prospect profile containing all the key information our sales team needs to effectively initiate an outbound conversation.
What’s even more impressive is how rapidly this all occurs. In the video example, the entire enrichment process took just 46 seconds from the time the lead was created to having the completed record. Contrast that with the 5-10 minutes per lead it would have taken an SDR working manually.
Powered by Perplexity’s AI, this automated enrichment workflow eliminates drudgework and human error while providing a level of depth, accuracy, and recency that would be arduous for any individual to try to manually replicate at scale.
The Future of AI-Powered Revenue Ops
This use case represents just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how AI can transform revenue operations. By embracing an “AI +” mindset of combining AI’s capabilities with other software and systems, every revenue team can start benefiting from automated workflows that enhance efficiency and productivity.
Some other areas ripe for AI-powered automation include:
- Automated lead scoring and prioritization
- Personalized outbound email/campaign content generation
- Intelligently triaging and routing inbound sales inquiries
- Analyzing voice conversations to extract key discussed topics, action items, and competitive intelligence
- Predictive forecasting and pipeline management
The possibilities are endless once you opt for a mindset shift from treating AI as a siloed capability to one of deeply integrating AI into your existing processes and tools.
Early adopters who start putting AI to work as a force multiplier throughout their revenue engine will quickly start outpacing competitors still relying on manual efforts and legacy tactics. The AI-powered future of sales is already here – the only remaining question is whether your organization will be driving it, or getting disrupted by those who do.