What's the difference between lead generation and lead enrichment?

Lead generation builds a new list from a search (a category and location). Enrichment takes a list you already have — from a trade show, a referral list, an old export — and fills in the missing details for each entry.

What columns does a CSV need before I can enrich it?

At minimum, one identifying column per row: a business name, a phone number, or a website. More than one of these per row improves match accuracy, but any single one is enough to attempt a lookup.

What happens to rows that can't be matched?

A good enrichment process should clearly flag unmatched rows rather than silently dropping them or guessing — you keep your original data intact either way and can review the unmatched rows manually.

How to Enrich a Spreadsheet of Business Names Into Full Contact Records (Step-by-Step)

Not every lead list starts from a fresh search. Trade show sign-up sheets, referral lists, an old export from a tool you no longer use, a spreadsheet someone on the team started manually — these all tend to have the same problem: a business name or phone number, and not much else. Enrichment is the process of taking that thin starting point and filling in everything a full lead record should have.

What enrichment actually adds

Starting from just a name, phone number, or website, an enrichment pass looks that business up and fills in whatever's missing:

Full address and category, if you only had a name
Current star rating and review count
Website, if you didn't already have one
A confirmed phone number, if you only had a name or website

Step 1: Get your existing list into a spreadsheet

CSV or Excel both work. The only real requirement is that each row has at least one identifying value in its own column — a business name column, a phone column, or a website column (having more than one improves match quality, but isn't required).

Step 2: Map your columns

Your spreadsheet's column headers won't always match what an enrichment tool expects by name — "Company" instead of "Business Name," "Tel" instead of "Phone," and so on. A good tool lets you map your actual column headers to what it needs (name, phone, website) rather than forcing you to rename columns in your original file first.

Step 3: Let it process — and expect it to take a little time

Enrichment does one lookup per row, so a list of a few hundred businesses takes meaningfully longer than a single search — this should run as a background job you can walk away from, not something that locks up a browser tab until it's done.

Prospectbase processes enrichment as a background job with a visible progress bar, so a few hundred rows can run while you work on something else.

Step 4: Review what didn't match

Not every row will find a confident match — a misspelled business name, a business that's since closed, or a name too generic to disambiguate (there are a lot of businesses called "Corner Store") will come back unmatched. A transparent enrichment result clearly shows which rows matched and which didn't, so you can manually review the unmatched ones rather than silently losing them or getting a wrong match with no way to tell.

Step 5: Export the completed list

The output should be your original data plus the new columns — never a replacement that drops the columns you started with. That way, whatever context or notes were already in your list (a referral source, an internal status column) survives the enrichment pass alongside the new business data.

Upload a CSV or Excel file on the Pro plan and get it back completed with Maps data.

Enrich your list

When to enrich vs. when to search fresh

If you're starting from zero for a new category or location, a category search is the faster path — it's built to return many results at once. Enrichment is specifically for the case where you already have a list from somewhere else and need to complete it, rather than replace it with a new search from scratch.

Common reasons a row won't match

Misspelled or abbreviated business names ("Joe's" instead of "Joe's Cafe & Bakery") that are too different from the actual listing name to match confidently
The business has closed or rebranded since your list was created
A phone number formatted inconsistently (missing country code, extra punctuation) that doesn't match the listed format
A generic name shared by many unrelated businesses ("Corner Store", "Main Street Salon") with no location context to disambiguate which one you mean

Enrichment vs. manual research: a real time comparison

Manually researching one business — searching its name, finding its Maps listing, copying the address, rating, and website into your spreadsheet — realistically takes two to four minutes done carefully. For a list of 200 businesses, that's six to thirteen hours of pure lookup work, before any actual outreach happens. An automated enrichment pass processes the same 200 rows as a background job you can start and walk away from, typically finishing in minutes rather than hours, which is the entire practical case for automating what is otherwise a highly repetitive, low-judgment task.