The Quiet Reshaping of Data Enrichment
LinkedIn and LLMs are transforming a $10B market - here's what our data reveals
The B2B data enrichment landscape is experiencing a seismic shift, driven by two powerful forces: LinkedIn's growing dominance and the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs). At Syft, we're seeing evidence of this transformation both in market spending data and in our own product development. Let's dive into what the data tells us.
The Shifting Power Dynamic in Data Enrichment
Recent spending data from Ramp reveals fascinating trends in the data enrichment market. While ZoomInfo maintains its leadership position with 42% market share, LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been steadily gaining ground, now commanding 18% of wallet share - a significant increase from just 4% in Q3 2023.
This growth isn't accidental. LinkedIn's strategy combines three powerful elements:
Ownership of the world's richest professional network data
Strategic expansion into intent data offerings
Aggressive stance against data scraping, directly impacting competitors who rely on LinkedIn as a data source
LLMs: The Dark Horse in Data Enrichment
But there's an even more intriguing disruption happening: LLMs are becoming remarkably effective at synthesizing public data for enrichment purposes. Our recent experience with incorporating LLMs in Syft’s waterfall produced some eye-opening results.
When we tested company revenue enrichment across providers, we found:
Clearbit: 27% success rate
Perplexity (LLM): 16% success rate
Apollo: 12% success rate
What makes this particularly impressive is that Perplexity achieved this 16% rate even when consulted last in our enrichment waterfall! For our customers (B2B companies) using revenue data to define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), this represents a significant improvement in lead qualification accuracy.
The Nuanced Reality of LLM Integration
However, this doesn't mean companies should immediately abandon traditional data providers. Here's what we've learned:
Private Data Maintains Value: Providers with proprietary datasets (like ZoomInfo, maintaining 40%+ market share) continue to offer unique value
Emerging Partnerships: The recent Perplexity-Crunchbase partnership signals a trend toward integration rather than pure disruption
Quality Control Challenges: LLM hallucinations remain a concern, making robust evaluation datasets essential
The Future: A Hybrid Approach
Based on our experience and market data, we're seeing a new enrichment stack emerge:
LLMs as the first layer for public data synthesis
Traditional providers for private and verified data
Hybrid solutions that combine both approaches
The Ramp spending report shows that the market isn't winner-take-all - different providers serve different needs. Even as LinkedIn Sales Navigator grows and new players like LLMs emerge, companies like ZoomInfo maintain strong positions through their proprietary data advantages.
What This Means for B2B Companies
For companies relying on B2B data, the implications are significant:
More accurate data enrichment through diversified sources
Potential cost optimization by leveraging LLMs for public data
Need for sophisticated evaluation and validation mechanisms
Looking Ahead
The writing is on the wall: if your data lives on LinkedIn or anywhere public, traditional enrichment providers will face increasing pressure. At Syft, we're already seeing the impact of this shift in our enrichment success rates, and we're investing heavily in building robust evaluation datasets to maximize the potential of both LLMs and traditional data sources.
The future of data enrichment won't belong to any single approach, but rather to platforms that can effectively combine the power of LLMs with traditional data sources while maintaining high accuracy standards. The market data and our own testing confirm this hybrid future is already taking shape.