How To Enrich Intercom Leads With Hull.io

TL;DR: Hull now supports Intercom Leads. Fill in the blanks and unknowns in your Intercom Leads so your team can precisely personalize every response

At Hull, we ♥ Intercom - it’s one of our most popular integrations.

But whilst Intercom is great for knowing your existing users and customers — especially when it’s enriched with data from your other tool and databases — it can leave your team flying blind when it comes to your visitors and your leads. Those who haven’t sign up (yet!)

“Unknown” isn’t sexy. But conversations with Intercom Leads have a lot of unknowns. Rather than name each conversation “someone from somewhere”, Intercom insert these random place names.

Who the heck is “Purple Butterfly from Bermondsey” ?!

Hipsters exist. So do 13-year olds screen names. But our B2B SaaS website (like yours) attracts real people from real businesses. Names… job titles… companies… I need to know who those people are!

“Purple Butterfly from Bermondsey” doesn’t help me close deals.

intercom-empty

Too often, your inside sales reps are flying blind with the limited information they have within Intercom. They don’t know who they’re talking to, and it’s not 100% clear what they’re supposed to say.

Rather than responding with a highly-relevant, personal message, your reps are left trying to establish the basics:

  • Are they already a lead in our CRM?
  • What conversations have we had already?
  • What campaign did they arrive from?
  • What pages have they visited on the website?
  • What company are they from?

So many questions!

But what if I could have more data like this on each Intercom Lead?

Intercom Lead Enriched

Aha! I haven’t even got their email address, yet I know we’re talking to Stripe. I know no one from Stripe has requested a demo, and I know their technologies.

Now Details on the Intercom Leads conversations can give me the context on the account that I need to talk to this account.

With Tags, I can bubble up the high level details too without leaving the page.

Intercom - Enriched Tags

So this person looks like a good lead to talk to! I know WHO to talk to, and I know WHAT to say:

  • They’re in London
  • They’re from Stripe
  • They’re already an opportunity
  • But they haven’t requested a demo

“Thanks for getting in touch - charming weather in London today! We can setup a demo for Stripe tomorrow afternoon your time. Would that work for you and your team?”

(Not sure about your personalization strategy? Check out our 5-Part Personalization Framework here).

How do you enrich your Intercom Leads?

You need to use data to fill in the blanks. The data with these answers sits in tools outside of Intercom. You need to sync data from all your:

  • CRM profiles
  • Web tracking tools
  • Enrichment tools
  • Backend database
  • Email tools

… into your Intercom Leads.

Data to Intercom

But, this needs to happen within seconds, so your team has the answers they need ready-and-waiting when they reach each conversation in Intercom.

Hull makes this simple and seamless.

Hull is a customer data platform. Connect all your tools to Hull in a few clicks, then combine their data into one “master” profile. The Hull profile becomes the “source of truth” and go-between for all your customer-facing tools.

The IP address is the key to account-level data (without an email)

When a new visitor lands on your website, Hull creates an anonymous “guest profile”. The new conversation in Intercom is added as an event on this profile, just like all their other page views and actions.

Since most analytics tracking tools (and Hull.js ) capture IP address too, we can use this for Reverse IP address lookup using APIs like Clearbit Reveal. This returns us the company name and domain. This is the key to a host of other account-level data for assessing and qualifying leads like:

  • Lifecycle stage
  • Firmographic data (revenue, employees, industry)
  • Technologies used
  • Previous signups
  • Account spend

We can now push all this data back into Intercom in seconds with Hull using Hull Fastlane.

When you get their email address, you can fetch personal information

If you have their email (not every Intercom Lead has an email address yet), Hull add's this to their profile and de-duplicates it against any existing records. We can use this to associate the Intercom Lead with lots more personal data including engagement and interactions across many channels:

  • Web page visits
  • Email engagement
  • Ad engagement (with individuals)
  • Enrichment data including job title, social bios, location etc.
  • Other live chat engagement
  • Other activities in the CRM

Send Intercom Leads to all your sales and marketing tools too

Leads, and their conversations, should never sit in a silo. With Hull, you can sync the useful data from Intercom to other tools where you need it - through Hull’s master profiles.

  • Salesforce
  • Marketing automation
  • Email newsletter
  • Ad audiences
  • Slack

Live chat enrichment needs fast and reliable syncing to work

Live Chat enrichment is not possible with the six “old techniques” for syncing your customer data.

To make live chat enrichment work, you need to sort, segment, and sync all this data to and from Intercom in seconds. It’s not realistic to run this with other techniques:

  • Intercom doesn’t do this out of the box
  • No one-click integrations exist to handle all this complexity
  • You can’t import-and-export data like this round the clock
  • Zapier and other workflow tools can’t reliably process and combine multiple sources of data this fast.
  • Building a custom integration with this is complex (Hull’s own Live Chat enrichment use case wires together more than half a dozen APIs).
  • Data warehouses are not designed to be constantly updating and sync data back to live chat tools.

The only way to sync fast, reliable, and useful data for live chat is with a purpose-built customer data platform like Hull.

For Example: Intercom Leads with an Account-Based Marketing Campaign

Let’s imagine we’re orchestrating an account-based marketing campaign.

We’ve built our target accounts and contact lists and piped into our CRM. We’ve saturated the newsfeeds of multiple stakeholders in an organization with ads (built from custom ad audiences from our prospects list) about our product, and enrolled prospects in outbound sales cadence.

The ads and email cadences are all driving target prospects to your website with your live chat windows.

Is this Intercom Lead talking to you by chance, or has it tied back to a broader campaign? Who are they?

Without connecting these together, your inside sales reps will be flying blind and drop the ball. To fill in the blanks and give them the context they need to close, you need to connect together:

  • Intercom
  • Your CRM (like Salesforce)
  • Your data enrichment service (like Clearbit)
  • Your web analytics tool (or just Hull.js)
  • Your ad audiences tool (like Facebook)

With point-and-click setup in Hull, we can configure the data to flow to-and-from all of these tools so your Intercom Leads will be enriched with all the information about

Every new customer at Hull gets a personalized demo and white glove onboarding. We make sure your scenario is setup. If you’re ready to setup on Hull, hit us up here on Intercom 😃. Or request your personalized demo to get started unifying your customer data today.

Ed Fry

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth

If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇