A record with half its fields empty is hard to act on. Which region does this lead belong to? Which tier is this customer? Who should own it? Enrichment answers those questions automatically, so people do not have to look them up or remember the mapping every time.
Two kinds of enrichment
Rule-based enrichment
Values are derived from information already on the record, using rules you define. Examples:
| If | Then set |
|---|---|
| State is TX, OK or NM | Region to Central |
| Deal value is over 50,000 | Tier to Enterprise |
| Lead source is Referral | Priority to High |
| Country is France | Language to French |
Rule-based enrichment is predictable, free, and uses only data you already hold. Its limit is that it cannot invent facts you do not have.
Provider-based enrichment
An outside data company matches your records against its own database and fills in details such as company size, industry, revenue band or social profiles. It can add facts you never collected, but it costs money per record, depends on the provider’s accuracy, and raises questions about where personal data comes from and whether you are allowed to use it.
Choosing between them
Many small businesses get most of the value from rule-based enrichment alone: consistent regions, tiers, owners and categories. Provider enrichment earns its cost mainly when you sell to companies you know little about and need firmographic data to prioritise them.
Common mistakes
- Enriching without standards. If the field you are filling is free text, enrichment just adds another spelling. Use pick lists for enriched fields.
- Overwriting good data. A rule should usually fill a blank field rather than replace something a person entered deliberately.
- Buying data you will not use. Enrich the fields that drive a decision, such as routing, priority or segmentation.
- Forgetting to update rules. When territories or tiers change, the decision table has to change too.
A worked example
A services firm covers three regions and routes each new lead to the person who looks after that region. Without enrichment, someone reads the state on every lead and types the region by hand, and a busy week produces blanks and typos. With a decision table of states and regions, the region fills itself the moment the lead is saved, and the lead list can be filtered by region with confidence.
How enrichment fits with other rules
Enrichment pairs naturally with validation rules, which reject bad input, and duplicate rules, which catch records that already exist. Together they keep records complete and consistent.
How GuardenerAI handles it
- Enrichment rules in GuardenerAI Automation fill fields from decision tables you write, for example a region from a state.
- Enrichment is rule-based only. The data comes from your own tables, not from an outside provider.
- Rules run when persons, companies, leads, opportunities, opportunity line items, tasks, cases and meetings are created or edited, or when you run them by hand.
- Each change a rule makes is recorded in the record’s history with the source marked as enrichment, so you can see where a value came from. See the CRM page.