Data Enrichment Tools: How to Evaluate in 2025

What is data enrichment?

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data by adding valuable information from various sources. Beyond just phone numbers and email addresses in a B2B contact database, data enrichment also includes demographic, firmographic, technographic, and behavioral insights that provide a fuller picture of leads and customers.

For example, you might have a contact’s name, phone number, and email address; through data enrichment, you can add their job title, company size, social media profiles, and recent company news to the record, getting a better understanding of the contact’s role and needs.

With enriched data, sales teams can target the right audience more effectively while personalizing outreach and improving decision-making. 

Benefits of data enrichment tools

If you’re looking to improve sales outcomes, data enrichment can be a godsend by helping you:

• Improve targeting. Data enrichment provides deeper insights into your audience, enabling more precise marketing and sales strategies that resonate with the right prospects.
  
• Personalize outreach. With enriched data, businesses can tailor their messages and offers to match the specific needs and preferences of contacts, improving engagement and response rates.
• Enhance decision-making. Enriched data also offers a comprehensive view of leads and customers, helping companies make smarter, data-driven decisions that improve overall performance. 

It’s no secret that selling is harder than ever. This is why selecting the right B2B data enrichment tools can make all the difference in the world. 

Considerations when evaluating data enrichment tools and software

When evaluating data enrichment tools, it’s important to consider a variety of factors to make sure you end up with the solution that meets your needs most thoroughly. In this section, we examine key considerations to remember as you search for a solution.

Data accuracy

If your contact data isn’t accurate, what good does it do?

Data accuracy refers to the correctness and reliability of the information in your database, ensuring it reflects the real world. When evaluating potential data enrichment solutions, it’s critical to consider data accuracy because inaccurate data can lead to poor decision-making, wasted resources, and ineffective targeting.

Data attributes

In terms of data attributes, email addresses and phone numbers can be relatively easy to obtain. An effective data enrichment tool should go beyond this basic data with the ability to track contacts as they move jobs or change positions and keep tabs on buying signals. This additional context allows businesses to predict customer intent and tailor their outreach strategies more effectively. 

Industry-specific data

Data vendors may have broad sets of data. But do they have data that’s relevant to your industry? If you sell to other software companies, chances are most data enrichment vendors will provide the data you need. But if you’re targeting more niche markets and industries, you’ll want to ensure they have accurate and updated data within those specific use cases

Integrations

To ensure you maintain a single source of truth, your data enrichment tool should integrate seamlessly with the other tools in your tech stack — like your CRM, sales engagement, and marketing automation solutions. Integrations enable real-time updates and allow enriched data to be immediately actionable across all systems. This connectivity helps reduce manual data entry, improves collaboration between teams, and ensures consistency across touchpoints.

Pricing

Since the solution you ultimately deploy needs to fit within your budget, pricing is another key factor to consider. Some tools may offer tiered pricing based on features, making it important to balance costs with the value provided by enriched data. Before making a decision, ask about any hidden fees or usage limits to ensure you’re making the best financial decision. 

Privacy and legal compliance

When evaluating a data enrichment tool, privacy and legal compliance are important to protect your organization from potential fines or legal issues. Tools need to adhere to regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and CCPA to ensure your enriched data is gathered and stored in a compliant manner. 

By choosing a compliant tool, you can safeguard sensitive information and maintain customer trust while also mitigating the risks of data breaches or noncompliance penalties.

Customer support

To ensure that you can navigate any potential issues you encounter, it’s important to analyze each vendor’s level of customer support. Robust customer support can help you maximize the tool’s effectiveness, resolve problems quickly, and ultimately unlock the most value out of your investment. 

How to actually evaluate data enrichment tools

Truth be told, there are quite a few data enrichment tools on the market today. But what are the differences between them? And how do you actually evaluate the quality and quantity of each vendor’s data?

While many vendors claim to have the best data enrichment tools, talk is cheap, and the only way you can truly find out whether that’s true is by testing the data yourself. But how exactly can you do that?

Before we get into an overview of some of the leading data enrichment tools on the market today, let’s take a step back and drill down into some of the key factors you need to keep top of mind as you evaluate data enrichment tools to determine which solution is best for your team.

1. Identify your needs for a data enrichment tool

First things first: Before choosing a data enrichment tool, you first need to clearly understand your specific needs. 

Start by asking yourself these key questions: 

• What data fields do you require? Contact information, buying signals, or firmographic details?
• Do you need the tool to integrate seamlessly with your existing CRM or sales platforms?
• How easy should the tool be to use and how quickly should your team be able to adopt it?
• How big is your budget and how much can you afford to spend without compromising on essential features?

Defining your needs up front ensures that you ultimately choose a tool that aligns with your goals, maximizing value and effectiveness.

2. Create a shortlist of providers

There are dozens of data enrichment providers, but not all are created equal. For example, some vendors might offer billions of contacts — just not the fields you’re looking for, like LinkedIn URLs, job titles, and technologies used.

As you begin narrowing down your options for a data enrichment tool, create a shortlist of providers. Depending on your needs, your shortlist might look something like this:

• LeadIQ. Okay, we might be slightly biased here. But we believe LeadIQ is an exceptional option. Not only do we source our data differently than our competitors do, we also constantly verify our data to ensure it’s accurate and up to date.
  
• ZoomInfo. While ZoomInfo serves up tons of data across all industries, the platform is prohibitively expensive, and implementation takes a lot of time. As a legacy platform, ZoomInfo also lacks real-time data verification and delivers a less-than-ideal UX. Still, ZoomInfo is a popular option.
  
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator. We’re big fans of LinkedIn Sales Navigator here at LeadIQ. While Sales Navigator has real-time sales updates and advanced search capabilities, the platform only captures individuals on LinkedIn, which can make it harder to reach prospects in niche industries. In our experience, LeadIQ and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are two peas in a pod and work best together.

For an even bigger list of data enrichment providers, check out this piece. While you’re at it, use review sites like G2 and TrustRadius to see what the market is saying.

3. If possible: Create a list of current customers you have data on

To truly evaluate data enrichment tools, you should ideally start with a list of existing customers and companies with all necessary fields you need. Since you already have data on them, you can compare to see if each data enrichment tool has that same data, which can help you analyze the accuracy, depth of data, and how current it is.

To really be able to get a measurable sample size, we suggest having at least 100 companies on this list. If this is not possible because you’re a new company or your data is too dirty to accurately extract it from your CRM, we suggest creating a list of 100 potential customers with target titles you’re looking to engage within those companies. 

If you pursue this exercise, don’t go after CEOs — regardless of whether they’re the ultimate decision-maker — because that data is pretty easy to find. To truly vet a solution, you need to make sure that they have team member data that’s harder to find as well. 

4. Run data enrichment tests

Any data enrichment tool with its weight will allow you to test data of at least 100 companies for free. Many will even let you run larger tests, but that might not be necessary during this initial phase where you’re trying to whittle down your shortlist. 

Some data enrichment tools are self-serve while others offer enterprise-only sales where you’re required to talk to a rep before signing a contract. When testing data, you should opt to speak with someone regardless of whether the vendor offers a self-service option. By speaking to someone, you not only get to test the data but also gauge the support team’s responsiveness, friendliness, and overall vibes.

To streamline this process, create a template CSV file that you share with each provider, along with a master list that has the data you know to be true, fire it off, and see what you get back! 

5. Analyze the results

After each vendor’s completed their test, they should send you a list back with the requested fields. If you started with your complete list full of data you know to be accurate, you can paste the new data on the same sheet and match the duplicates. If you’ve requested new fields from the data enrichment provider, you should look at the existing data fields you have and then look at the new fields you asked for.

On the first pass, if you have existing data on certain prospects, ask yourself these questions as you analyze the potential new provider’s data:

• Are the email addresses accurate?
• Are the job titles accurate? (especially look at folks you know who just changed roles!)
• Are the phone numbers accurate?
• Are the LinkedIn URLs and other social media handles accurate?

For new fields of data — or if you didn’t have an accurate list to start with — ask these questions:

• What percentage of the requests have data? What is the depth of the new fields?
• What is the accuracy of the new fields? (Pro tip: Don’t get super bogged down at this point; you don’t need a data scientist here. Essentially, you just want to confirm whether the data is actionable or not.) 
• Does demographic data seem accurate?
• Does financial data seem accurate (e.g., revenue estimates)? 
• Does company size seem accurate? (Another pro tip: You can do a quick reference by seeing company size as reported on LinkedIn. To be sure, those figures aren’t always the most accurate, but if the numbers are way off, it should give you pause.) 

Once you’ve identified your needs and vetted the caliber of each provider’s data, narrow down your options to the top two or three vendors that best meet your criteria, focusing on those that offer the core features you require.

From there, dig deeper into other crucial factors — like integration capabilities with your existing systems, scalability to grow with your business, privacy and security measures, and, of course, pricing that fits within your budget.

This thorough evaluation helps you ensure you choose the provider that not only meets your current needs but also supports your long-term growth and compliance requirements.  

Data enrichment tools: One might not be enough!

Each data enrichment provider — whether they say it or not — will have better data in one area than another. That’s why most companies that are scaling their sales processes typically rely on multiple data enrichment tools to ensure comprehensive coverage. If you find yourself relying on more than one data enrichment solution, it’s important to keep your CRM organized to make sure your data doesn’t turn into complete chaos!

Keep in mind that a great provider will not only help you test data but also make sure you’re set up in the way that works best for your company. At the same time, they’ll also offer support services to ensure seamless integrations, eliminate duplicates, and set you up to scale smoothly.

Supercharge data enrichment with LeadIQ

Like any company that maintains a blog, we didn’t write this piece entirely out of the kindness of our hearts. 😉

We’re a top-rated data enrichment tool used by hundreds of teams around the world, and we’re committed to helping sales organizations like yours get to the next level.

At LeadIQ, we’re always here to help. In fact, we just told you how you can evaluate data enrichment providers — including our own solutions. That’s compared to other vendors who keep their cards a little closer to their vests because they don’t want you to actually test their data and see how accurate it really is.

If you’re looking to uplevel your data enrichment capabilities, LeadIQ may be just what the doctor ordered. Want to run a data test with us? Contact our team today and get started for free.