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) and desired number of leads.

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](<https://developers.enigma.com/docs/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.

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](<https://developers.enigma.com/docs/contacts), wherever available.

3. Retrieve a lead sample and high-level 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. Conduct validation checks on 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 pulling a few simple approaches:

• Pull a random sample of ~50 rows. Do some quick online searches using the business name and address to verify the criteria used to generate the sample are giving you usable leads. Compare against any internal revenues you may have, especially if you conduct any card processing. Do these businesses look like they should generate the listed revenue? Do they fit into your ICP & industry list?
  • For more information on merchant transactions accuracy, please read this page.

5. Optional: How to gauge net new leads / incremental leads over existing providers

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. Measuring 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, CAC, and expected 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.
  • 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 what value means to you

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, and 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 attributes that you would like to enhance your existing accounts with.

Attributes commonly used to prioritize prospects include our card transactions revenue and growth attributes, a business’s industry, its overall number of locations, and whether the business engages in ecommerce. Customers have also used Enigma’s operating status attribute to create suppression lists, i.e. to deprioritize businesses that are not actively operating any more, given the staleness of many account databases.

3. Provide your current lead or account database to your relationship manager

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

Note: for maximum effectiveness, be sure to validate your inputs provided to maximize match quality and match rate. 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.”
• URLs included for matching should be standalone URLs for your businesses, not imprint pages on a larger platform:
  • Wrong:
    • doordash.com/bobs-coffee
    • facebook.com/bobs-coffee
  • Right:
    • bobs-coffee.com
  • Enigma is often unable to match platform URLs, or matches to the platform business (DoorDash and Facebook, in the examples above) rather than to the intended input.

4. Retrieve your 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. Conduct validation checks on the 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 and retroscoring

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, and 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. Reach out to learn more at [email protected].