There are two steps to cleaning and enriching existing records in your CRM. In this article, we take you through each of these steps and what you can do to improve the usefulness of your existing CRM data.
We've also included a roundup of the five best data cleansing and enrichment providers that you can consider, when you’re ready to take the step towards continuous, ICP-focused contact data enrichment.
Step 1: Cleanse the data
Before you enrich your CRM, ensure the data you already have is accurate, standardized, and usable. Enriching poor-quality records simply compounds existing problems, leading to inaccurate reporting, wasted outreach efforts, and unreliable segmentation.
Over time, CRM data naturally degrades. Employees change roles, companies rebrand, email addresses become inactive, and organizational structures evolve. Outdated data has been cited as a top frustration by 14% of respondents, in a YourICP commissioned survey conducted by EmpanelOnline.
Data cleansing helps identify outdated or incorrect information and either corrects it or flags it for further review. This typically includes:
Removing duplicate records
Duplicate contacts and accounts are one of the most common CRM challenges. They create confusion for sales and marketing teams, inflate pipeline metrics, and can result in multiple team members reaching out to the same prospect.
A good cleansing process identifies duplicate records based on matching fields such as email addresses, company domains, phone numbers, or contact names, and merges them into a single source of truth.
Standardizing data formats
CRM records often contain inconsistencies that make reporting and segmentation difficult. For example, one record may list a job title as "VP Sales," another as "Vice President of Sales," and another as "V.P. Sales."
Similarly, company names, industries, locations, and phone numbers may be stored in multiple formats. Standardization ensures that records follow consistent conventions, making filtering, reporting, and automation significantly more effective.
Filling obvious data gaps
Many CRM records contain missing values that reduce their usefulness. While enrichment tools are often used to fill these gaps, basic cleansing can identify incomplete records and prepare them for enrichment.
Examples include missing company names, incomplete contact information, invalid domains, or improperly formatted fields.
Improving CRM governance
Cleansing is not just a one-time project. Establishing clear data governance processes helps maintain CRM quality over time. This may include validation rules, duplicate prevention workflows, required fields, automated quality checks, and routine database audits to prevent recurring issues.
Additionally, if your business needs to comply with regulatory frameworks for storing, processing, and retrieving CRM data, integrating these standards into your data cleansing workflow starts here.
Step 2: Enrich and verify the data
Once your CRM records have been cleaned and standardized, the next step is to make them more complete, actionable, and trustworthy. Data enrichment supplements existing records with additional information from external sources, while verification ensures that the information added is accurate and up to date.
Add missing firmographic data
Firmographic information helps teams better understand the companies in their database. Enrichment providers can append fields such as:
- Company size,
- Employee count,
- Revenue range,
- Industry classification,
- Headquarters location,
- Funding status,
- Technology stack.
This information enables more precise segmentation, territory planning, account prioritization, and ICP matching.
Add missing contact data
For many organizations, the primary goal of enrichment is to improve contact records. Providers can supplement existing records with:
- Job titles,
- Departments,
- Seniority levels,
- Business email addresses,
- Direct dial numbers,
- Mobile phone numbers,
- Social profiles.
This helps sales and marketing teams engage prospects through the most relevant channels and personalize outreach more effectively.
Verify contact information
Adding data is only half the equation. Enriched information also needs to be verified. To facilitate this, verification services check whether email addresses are deliverable, phone numbers remain active, and whether contacts are still employed at the companies associated with their records.
DiscoverICP customers have reported a 4.5x increase in connection rates, thanks to accurate and verified data. Through verification, sales and RevOps teams can reduce bounce rates and wasted efforts, while improving outreach and campaign performance.
Refresh stale records
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that 30-40% of people change jobs annually. B2B contact databases deteriorate rapidly as people change jobs, companies grow or shrink, and organizational structures evolve. As a result, CRM decay is unavoidable.
Top enrichment platforms often provide ongoing refresh capabilities, automatically updating records as new information becomes available. Rather than treating enrichment as a one-time exercise, many organizations now operate continuous enrichment programs that keep CRM records up to date throughout the customer lifecycle.
Identify high-fit accounts and contacts
The most advanced enrichment providers go beyond simply appending data. Using firmographic, technographic, and behavioral information, they help businesses identify which accounts most closely resemble their ideal customer profile. This allows revenue teams to focus their efforts on the records most likely to convert into opportunities and customers.
Top five CRM data cleansing and enrichment providers
The right provider depends on your goals, budget, geographic coverage requirements, compliance obligations, and existing technology stack. However, these five platforms consistently stand out.
YourICP
YourICP, rather than focusing on sheer volume, prioritizes data accuracy by finding and verifying ICP-focused contacts for GTM teams. The platform combines enrichment with customer profile analysis to help organizations identify and prioritize accounts that most closely align with their ideal customer profile.
Try YourICP today. Sign up or log in to receive a free hygiene analysis of your existing CRM data.
Apollo
Apollo is one of two major, well-known providers of high-volume contact data (the other being ZoomInfo). Combining its significant contact database with enrichment, email verification, and outbound engagement capabilities, it is often chosen by growing sales teams seeking a balance between functionality and affordability.
HubSpot
Powered by its acquisition of Clearbit, HubSpot offers native enrichment capabilities directly within its CRM platform, followed by lead scoring that helps teams identify high-potential prospects. It is particularly useful for organizations that want to maintain accurate company and contact records without relying heavily on third-party workflows.
Cognism
Cognism, popularly known for its GDPR-compliant database framework, provides global contact data with a strong focus on compliance and verification. It is particularly popular among organizations targeting EMEA markets and businesses that require high-quality mobile number coverage.
FullEnrich
FullEnrich delivers comprehensive waterfall contact enrichment capabilities by sequentially searching 20+ premium vendors to maximize contact coverage. It is especially useful when organizations need to enrich large volumes of incomplete records and want to improve match rates.
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