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Sales and Marketing Evaluation Guide

This guide is designed to help Sales and Marketing customers evaluate and understand the value of Enigma data. Broadly, Sales and Marketing customers use Enigma data to address two main use cases - prospect list generation and prospect/customer enrichment. You should work with your Enigma relationship manager to decide which category your needs fall into and how to best evaluate Enigma data for those needs.

List Generation​

The goal of this list generation is to provide a list of leads that fit certain criteria for outreach and marketing operations. We typically filter leads on some combination of a) business characteristics that are important to you, like annual revenue, and b) availability of information that allow you to reach the prospect (e.g. presence of contact details).

1. Specify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)​

Your Enigma relationship managers will work with you to map your ICP onto Enigma attributes, and iteratively adjust criteria to retrieve the desired number and quality of leads. It's also helpful to enter these conversations with an idea of the shape and quality of leads you're looking for - for instance, knowing whether you prioritize high volume or high precision in your leads will help Enigma frame your delivery properly.

Common ICP criteria include:

  • Size: Enigma's primary attribute for capturing business size is card revenue. Other proxies for size include:
    number of locations and years in business.
    • For business lenders and card issuers, revenues can be used to design a pre-qualification campaign.
  • Industry: Enigma's attributes for industry classification include NAICS codes, typically 4-digit plus, as well as Enigma descriptions.
  • Average ticket size: Average ticket size can be derived by dividing revenue by transaction count in a given period.

2. Choose Contact Criteria​

By default, Enigma provides business addresses and phone numbers for nearly all operating businesses. For sales teams and direct mail marketers, these features are often enough to conduct additional research or run a campaign, respectively.

Contact Enhancement

For operations that require a more personal touch, Enigma partners with market-leading third-party contact providers to source names, titles, personal phone numbers, and personal email addresses for key contacts, wherever available.

3. Retrieve Sample and ICP Counts​

Your Enigma relationship managers will use the initial criteria and contact requirements you provided to estimate the total number of leads we're able to provide for your prospecting purposes. They will work with you to iterate on arriving at the right mix of precision and volume.

Following agreement, Enigma will provide a sample of businesses for validation purposes.

4. Validate the Sample​

Once you've received a sample from Enigma, you can validate that the data we've provided you fits into your ICP and is corroborated by your existing data sources. We suggest the following approach:

  1. Pull a random sample of ~50 rows
  2. Conduct quick online searches using the business name and address
  3. Verify the criteria used to generate the sample are giving you usable leads
  4. Compare against any internal revenues you may have, especially if you conduct any card processing
  5. Verify these businesses look like they should generate the listed revenue
  6. Confirm they fit into your ICP & industry list
Merchant Transactions Accuracy

For more information on merchant transactions accuracy, please read our merchant transactions accuracy guide.

5. Optional: Gauge Net New Leads​

You may have an existing lead provider or account database. Enigma can help enrich the existing database while also providing net new leads. See the "prospect/customer enrichment" section below for more detail on enriching an existing database. After enrichment, an Enigma relationship manager will help you through the steps above to check which leads are net new to the database, by comparing a generated list derived from your Ideal Customer Profile against your existing account database.

6. Measure Value​

Consider how you will determine the value of the leads Enigma is able to provide:

  • For many customers, lead value may be a simple ROI calculation involving:
    • Conversion rate
    • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
    • Expected Lifetime Value (LTV)

As you work with Enigma's data, you will gain a greater appreciation of the above-baseline value Enigma's data delivers at each stage of the funnel.

Success Story

As a reference for typical lift on small business marketing campaigns, read our case study with FMCG.

For select enterprise customers with high volume and/or complex ROI projections with multiple factors, it is sometimes necessary to conduct live tests of Enigma leads. Ask your Enigma relationship manager what options are available if you believe this applies to you.

Prospect or Customer Enrichment​

1. Define Value Metrics​

Evaluations with Enigma will go most smoothly if both sides have a clearly defined understanding of what we're working towards together. We suggest writing out a sentence or two to define:

  • Your goal
  • What measurement you'll use to determine whether Enigma data has successfully contributed to it
  • What method you might use to test

Typical goals include:

  • More effective outreach strategies, leading to higher conversion rates
  • Improved customer prioritization, leading to higher retention rates (or lower CS time expenditure on an existing book of business)
  • Enhanced ICP definition

2. Select Enhancement Attributes​

Attributes commonly used to prioritize prospects include:

  • Card transactions revenue and growth attributes
  • Business industry classification
  • Overall number of locations
  • Ecommerce engagement status
  • Operating status (for creating suppression lists)

3. Provide Account Database​

Enigma will enrich these leads or accounts with relevant attributes and provide fill rates for important attributes to contextualize their availability for prioritization.

Required Match Criteria​

To perform matching, Enigma requires for each input:

  • The URL of the business's website, OR
  • A business address plus a business name, OR
  • A business address plus the name of an associated person
Data Validation

For maximum effectiveness, be sure to validate your inputs provided to maximize match quality and match rate.

Common Data Issues​

Some common data issues that can impair Enigma's ability to match:

Salesforce databases may append location addresses to business names as part of the account name which reduces match quality:

Wrong
Business name: "Bob's Coffee - Brooklyn"
Address: "123 Main St."
Right
Business name: "Bob's Coffee"
Address: "123 Main St."

4. Retrieve Appended Sample​

Your Enigma representative will provide your input rows with Enigma data appended to them, as well as fill rates for essential fields.

For most prospects and customers, the easiest way to retrieve a sample is via the secure file exchange in the Enigma console. Talk to your Enigma representative if you have special delivery needs.

5. Validate Businesses​

To validate the business list, you can select a random sample of the list provided and conduct basic validation checks. One simple way is to search the business names and addresses and check if they are valid businesses.

6. Optional: Lead Scoring​

For those interested in incorporating Enigma data into a lead scoring model or prioritization heuristic, you may also include outcomes data as part of your data extract with Enigma, which should at a minimum include:

  • A target variable (e.g. conversion from prospect to customer)
  • The date of the conversion

In these cases, Enigma can generate a list of attributes available prior to the date and showcase its ability to predict converted customers or high quality leads or customers from within an account database.

Get Help

Reach out to learn more at support@enigma.com.

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