Enriching a leads list and automating uploads to CRM

Intro

If you ever performed any kind of lead generation activity, through a specific marketing campaign or event, you’ve probably realized how many gaps in people's information may occur - missing email addresses or company details, or any other field you may need to sort them according to your business priorities.

This may slow down your business development activity, and prevent you from keeping a tidy and organized view of your CRM.

Although many online products offer this gap-filling service, none has the flexibility of a spreadsheet. The chances are that you will need to go back and forth multiple times, exporting and importing those lists in .CSV or .XLS(X) format.

What is a lead list

A lead list includes names and contact information of potential customers that sales reps use to reach out and convert into sales. They can be either created in-house or purchased from third parties.

Whatever the origin of your leads, to pursue an effective and accountable business development activity, you should be able to qualify the information in the list, and consolidate it in your CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive are supported).

In this short guide, we will walk you through everything you need to enrich a list of leads starting from three simple fields: first_name, last_name, and company, and then sync it automatically to your CRM. All in a spreadsheet.

Here's a sneak peek of what you will get:

Let's go!

To understand how we’re going to use it, let’s go step by step

Open our template at the following link Lead list enrichment, click on Use template and save it in one of your workspace’s folders

The template includes some sample data to show what your list will look like.

Let's reverse-engineer it together.

The first three columns of the table contain the leads' basic data: first name, last name, and company. You could type them manually or copy-paste them from an existing list. The column Role is not mandatory for our functions to work, but it may be useful to keep a better context. Columns E, F, G, and H are the engine of this template: they contain our data enrichment and validation functions. They have triggered automatically thanks to the AUTOFILL() in the header. Specifically:

• FIND_DOMAIN() uses the company name to find its website domain
• FIND_EMAIL() uses the domain and the full name of the lead to find the email address
• GET_COMPANY() uses the domain to find additional information of the company
• and VERIFY_EMAIL_ZEROBOUNCE() returns and a status code that assesses the validity of the address. This parameter can take the following values:
  • valid: the email address is valid
  • invalid: the email address is not valid
  • catch-all: the email is impossible to validate without sending a real email and waiting for a bounce.

Columns I to L include data from the GET_COMPANY() function in column H, such as location, foundation year, employees, etc. In this case, to make the template simpler, we chose to handpick only some of the available data. To do it, click on the ... icon in cell H2, and hit "View data".

A panel will open on the right-hand side showing a structured document (in JSON format). Next to each data point, there is a COPY button. Hit it and paste in any cell: you will obtain a formula similar to the following, that uses our PARSE() function to read and extract specific data points from any JSON document. The first argument is the data cell H2, and the second includes the path to follow to retrieve that specific element.

1                    =PARSE(H2,"['location']")

Once your lead list has been enriched, you can set up the automation to sync it to your CRM. Go to column M, name it Sync to CRM and click on the Actions menu. Depending on your CRM, type in the search bar Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Zoho.

For the purpose of this guide, we will enable the sync with Salesforce using the function ADD_OR_UPDATE_CONTACT_SALESFORCE().

Once the wizard is open on the right end side, follow the link to Connect the integration: a Salesforce Auth page will open, all you need to do is to log in with your credentials.

Once you are back to Rows, fill the First name, Last name, and email fields, cells linking cells A2, B2, and F2 respectively, and click on Add function. A confirmation message will appear in the cell, saying "Contact updated". Drag or copy-paste the formula along the column to easily apply it to the whole list.

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