Enrich a lead before anyone touches it

A new lead usually arrives as a name, an email and a company. Whoever picks it up spends ten minutes finding out what the company actually does, and that ten minutes happens again for every person who touches the record.

Decide what a filled-in record looks like

Write down the fields you want populated and, more importantly, what you would do differently depending on each. A field nobody acts on is a field nobody should be researching.

For most businesses the useful set is small: what they do in one sentence, rough size, industry, and anything notable in the last year.

Enrich one by hand first

Look up Halcyon Health (halcyonhealth.io) and fill in what you can:

  what they do, in one sentence a salesperson could repeat
  roughly how big they are
  their industry
  anything notable in the last twelve months

Write it back to the organization record.

Cite a source for anything specific. If you cannot find something, leave
the field empty rather than estimating. An empty field is honest; a guessed
headcount is a number someone will repeat in a meeting.

The instruction against estimating is the whole difference between this being useful and being dangerous. Company size in particular is easy to approximate plausibly and wrong, and it is exactly the field that ends up in a pitch. Empty is a state your team can see and work around. Confidently wrong is not.

Then make it automatic

Every hour, look for organizations created in the last hour with no
industry set.

Enrich each one using our standard fields. Log an activity on the record
saying what you filled in and where it came from.

If you cannot find enough to be useful, say so on the record rather than
filling it with generalities.

Logging what it did and where from matters more than it sounds. A rep who can see that the summary came from the company's own about page treats it differently from one who cannot tell whether a human wrote it.

Check the ones it gave up on

The records it declined to fill are the interesting output. Usually they are companies with almost no web presence, which is itself a qualification signal worth knowing before someone spends an hour on outreach.

What good looks like

Nobody opens a lead and sees only a domain. The first person to touch it starts from a sentence about what the company does and one thing that happened recently.

The failure to watch for is a record that looks complete and is subtly generic — the summary that would fit any company in the sector. If you see that, the prompt is asking for a description rather than for specifics, and asking for a source usually fixes it.