Core Concept: Lead Gen vs. Enrichment
In this video, Zach explains the two key list-building operations you’ll use when building a list: “Lead Generation,” and “Enrichment.”
TL/DW:
Lead Generation:
Any process that generates “raw leads” that may or may not be ICP-filtered enough to email yet.
Mental model: “If this is creating new rows in my LeadTable, it’s probably a lead gen operation.”
Examples:
- Google search scraping
- Apollo exports
- Crunchbase
- Builtwith exports
- etc.
Enrichment:
Any process that generates more information for already-known leads / any process that generates NEW information based on known leads.
- Find the linkedin URL for a website
- Find out revenue, employee counts, etc. for a company
- Creating personalization lines
- Finding contacts for a company ← This one is weird because it’s enrichment but also sort of feels like lead gen. It’s the reason for my sort of clunky enrichment definition.
Dual-Use Hybrids:
Some lead sources can function as lead gen and enrichment, depending on how you use them.
For example, BuiltWith:
- Lead Gen: “Hey BuiltWith, give me a list of all the Shopify stores in the U.S.”
- Enrichment: “Hey BuiltWith, what are all the technologies leadtables.io uses?”
Or for example, LinkedIn:
- Lead Gen: “Hey LinkedIn, give me a list of all the Fortune 500 CEOs”
- Enrichment: “Hey LinkedIn, tell me how many employees work at this company from my leads list”
Weird Edge-Cases:
The main edge-case to the “lead gen inserts new rows and enrichment doesn’t” concept is when you’re finding contacts for companies — e.g. the Snov Prospect Finder data module — in these cases, it’s enrichment, because you’re enriching known companies with contacts you found for them.
(The reason I draw this line is due to where you’ll later navigate to in LeadTables to run this kind of operation)