A key component to data quality in Salesforce is data enrichment from 3rd-party providers. Most B2B companies that we work with have well over 100K accounts in Salesforce, which is too many accounts to be maintained and kept up-to-date manually. Instead, companies will opt to enrich their data using 3rd-party providers. Use the below criteria to evaluate about these providers:

Business Considerations

Many companies feel a low return on investment from 3rd party enrichment providers. These providers charge substantial subscription and usage-based fees (per field or record enriched), which can balloon quickly as companies seek to have a fully representative CRM.

In pursuit of an all encompassing CRM database, companies may enrich too many accounts, enrich at too high of a frequency, or use too many providers. Enriching too many accounts leads to a lack of focus. Enriching too frequently creates a high number of accounts and a high-maintenance schedule. Using too many providers causes headaches with vendor management and duplicative costs for narrow margins of quality improvement.

It is therefore important to view all below analysis and recommendations through the lens of you’s business goals and the associated costs of enrichment.

Matching

Generally, all 3rd-party providers maintain a database of company information that they themselves obtained either through scraping public information, manual research, customer feedback or user generated data (i.e. LinkedIn), and in some cases AI.  All of these methods rely - to some degree - on live, unstructured data and therefore will not be perfectly accurate or uniform.

The bare minimum a provider needs to match on are the standard Account Name and Website fields:

• Providers will attempt to fuzzy match on Account Name. For example “Salesforce, Inc.” and “salesforce” will both likely match to the company “Salesforce”.
• Providers usually do an exact match, or url fuzzy match on Website. Although Account Name cannot be null in Salesforce, the standard Website field is not usually a required field. Missing website info can lead to inaccurate matches or failure to enrich data in general.

In addition to company name and website, data providers may also use address information to match companies. In some cases they may let you choose whether to use ShippingAddress or BillingAddress for matching.

Enrichment

Universal amongst providers is to enrich with a Provider ID and Last Enrichment Date:

• Examples of a Provider ID are ZoomInfo Company ID or DUNS Numbers. Provider IDs are helpful for troubleshooting, but can also be useful as a deduplication strategy, essentially offloading duplicate identification to your data provider

• Last Enrichment Date is another useful troubleshooting tool. Not only can it be used to let your sales team know how fresh your data is, it can also be used to identify issues with the integration to your data provider. An old Last Enrichment Date can help explain why the employee count for an Account doesn’t reflect a recently publicized layoff at a company. In the case of null or old values, it could also indicate that your provider is hitting errors when trying to enrich that particular account.

  *Enrichment providers usually need a Salesforce account to authenticate as. It’s recommended to use an integration user that is excluded from validation rules.*