This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

For them, Enrichment = existing databases they can rent e.g. ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc

Not to pick on ZI and Apollo, but in the AI agent era, pre-existing databases of standardized rows/columns are a bit... mid?

Yes, you need Industry, Company Size, Revenue, etc. You still need Contacts. That doesn't go away but if that's all you are doing you're behind.

The REALLY valuable prospect data doesn't live in any database you can buy. You have to go find it yourself.

It's unstructured data sitting all over the internet. Examples I have seen:

• # of hospital beds pulled from website
• If heathcare provider is in a region that has a gov grant issued
• Tax specialties the firm specializes in
• Tech the company's tool integrates with
• C-suite speaking at certain conferences (indicating they are forward thinking)
• Company is fully in office vs. remote first
• Certain regulations in county/state
• Federal/state funding levels
• There are so many more, and the more custom and specific you can get for your ICP the better

In the past, you'd have dozens of SDRs researching this stuff to qualify inbound and help target outbound.

But now you can operationalize this at scale using tools like Clay, Claude Code, Actively.ai, Hubspot Smart properties, even the more legacy data enrichment vendors like ZI are moving in this direction.

I guarantee anyone reading this in GTM at a B2B tech company probably already has access to a tool that can do this at scale, or could quite cheaply onboard a tool and do this at scale in days/weeks.

there really isn't any excuse to delay moving from enrichment 1.0 to enRICHment 2.0