Make Enrichment Work: Build Better Recruitment BD First (with Ben Browning)

If you run a recruitment agency or lead BD, this is worth getting right early.

Built with Ben Browning, and combining Firefish data with what we’re both seeing in the market, this piece is about one simple idea:

Enrichment is powerful — but it works best when it sits on top of the right BD strategy.

The usual advice is still right:

• Define your ICP
• Target the right stakeholders
• Lead with buyer problems
• Measure outcomes over activity

Where teams go wrong is trying to scale before those pieces are in place.

That’s when enrichment drives more activity, but not necessarily better outcomes.

So the real question isn’t, “How do we do more BD?”
It’s, “How do we build BD in a way that actually scales?”

Pick a market you can win, not a market you can name

A lot of recruitment teams still confuse a sector with a strategy.

• “Tech companies in Manchester”
• “SME accountancy firms”
• “Civil engineering contractors”

That is not an ICP. That is a label.

A commercially useful target market is one where three things are true at the same time:

• You can fill the jobs you find
• You can work jobs on favourable terms
• You work with clients who deliver repeatable revenue

That is the real filter. Not whether you can describe the sector, but whether your team can build momentum inside it.

A better question is: Where do we have the highest probability of winning good work repeatedly?

That usually comes down to five filters:

• Market fit — where demand exists
• Commercial fit — where fees, urgency and repeatability are attractive
• Operational fit — where your team can actually deliver well
• Pain fit — where the client’s problem is real, expensive and visible
• Relationship fit — where the likely buyer is someone your recruiters can credibly talk to

"Most teams define their ideal client as a broad label because it feels safe. It gives them a big market to go after. Better results come from making your ICP much tighter, because most recruiters hit target with a small set of high-fit clients, often 8 to 12. They do not need long target lists. In fact, long lists usually get in the way." - Ben Browning

A simple way to see the difference is to compare average and best-fit client economics:

• Average client: 2 to 3 hires per year × average fee × ~25% contingent fill rate = ~£10k value
• Best-fit client: 5 to 6 hires per year × average fee × ~75% exclusive or retained success = ~£50k value

When you narrow your focus to a precise list with clear commercial value, two things happen: expected value per client rises, and win rate improves because your targeting and messaging become more specific.

Weak ICP: a label
“London SaaS companies, 20 to 50 person tech team.”

This gives you no angle. You end up enriching lots of contacts and sending generic outreach that is easy to ignore.

Commercially useful ICP: a clear commercial target
“UK-based SaaS businesses with London HQ, selling into the US, recently Series A funded, led by a technical founder or early-stage CTO, and now under pressure to deliver the product roadmap quickly while protecting retention.”

Now targeting becomes clearer. You can look for Series A announcements, product hiring, signs of attrition, or repeated vacancies. Your outreach can then anchor to the buyer’s priorities:

• Weak message: “We help CTOs at funded SaaS companies hire engineers.”
• Stronger message: “Series A funding usually increases delivery pressure and makes the cost of a wrong hire more expensive. How are you protecting output and retention as you scale the team?”

That is the difference. Specificity is what moves a conversation from “generic supplier intro” to “worth a reply”.

Define “strategically relevant” before you enrich anyone

Once teams have a target account list, it is tempting to pull as many names into the CRM as possible. Too many contacts. Too little thought. Too much faith that volume will sort the signal from the noise.

A contact is only strategically relevant if four things are true:

• They are close enough to the problem to care
• They are senior enough to sponsor or influence action
• They sit inside an account that matches your ICP
• You have a credible reason to contact them now

That is a much higher bar than “works at target company”.

For example:

• A weak contact choice is an HR manager in a target sector with no obvious hiring trigger, unclear ownership and no reason to prioritise your message.
• A stronger contact choice is a divisional lead who has just opened a new location, inherited a hard-to-fill team, or is visibly growing faster than their hiring process can support.

That is what “strategically relevant” should mean in practice: not merely reachable, but worth reaching.

The operating rule is simple: Enrichment works best when it follows clear targeting.

Ben’s take:
Here is the filter to use so enrichment does not turn into noise.

Level 1: hiring relevance
This is the obvious case. The business is actively hiring, the pain is visible, and the solution is relatively straightforward. Your job is to enrich and reach the people closest to the requirement, with enough influence to move it.

Enrich immediately:

• Functional hiring managers with open roles
• Team leads building headcount
• Heads of TA who clearly own delivery for that function

Ignore for now:

• Generic HR contacts with no sign of ownership
• Junior coordinators
• Anyone in a target account where there is no trigger and no reason to care right now

Level 2: strategic relevance
This is the layer most teams miss. The business has a wider commercial context where hiring quality, speed and cost will influence the outcome. The goal is not just to fill jobs, but to improve how they hire so the business can hit a strategic objective.

Signals include:

• A new executive hire
• Rising staff turnover
• Restructuring
• Funding
• A product launch
• Supply chain issues
• Repeated hiring delays

In these cases, strategically relevant contacts might include a GM, Director, COO, Ops leader, or a Head of HR with a mandate to improve hiring performance.

A useful rule of thumb: if someone would care about making hiring systematically better, and can support change, they are strategically relevant even if they are not hiring today.

These people are targeted less often by recruiters, so it is easier to cut through. And when you do, they are more likely to embed you strategically rather than treat you transactionally.

Fix the message before you scale

A lot of outreach underperforms for a simple reason: it sounds like recruitment outreach.

• “We recruit in your market.”
• “We have strong candidates available.”
• “I wanted to introduce our agency.”
• “I wondered if you are hiring.”

None of that is offensive. It is just easy to ignore.

The market does not have a shortage of outreach. It has a shortage of messages that feel commercially worth answering.

The practical implication is simple:

• Do not write your first message around what your agency does
• Write it around what the buyer is likely dealing with

"A strong first message earns the reply because it is about their world, not your service." - Ben Browning

Example 1: hiring-now relevance

Weak outreach
“Hi Sarah, hope you’re well. We recruit sales professionals across SaaS and I thought it would be good to connect. Are you currently hiring?”

Stronger outreach
“Hi Sarah, I noticed you’re hiring for a couple of AEs and a Sales Ops hire at the same time. That usually means one of two things: either there is a serious growth push on, or pipeline coverage is getting tight. Which is driving it for you at the moment?”

Why it works

• It leads with a real-world signal, not a generic introduction
• It shows a commercial read without pretending to know everything
• It asks an easy question, which makes replying feel low effort

Example 2: capability relevance

Weak outreach
“Hi Tom, I wanted to introduce our agency. We support fast-growth businesses with senior hires. Would you be open to a quick chat next week?”

Stronger outreach
“Hi Tom, for most Ops Directors, the plan is locked in after launch. The harder part is keeping pace as the team scales to deliver it. If you had to pick one this year, is the bigger headache speed to hire, quality of hire, or retention? P.S. Congrats on the launch.”

Why it works

• It anchors to a business moment, so the message has a reason to exist now
• It frames hiring as a performance lever, not just vacancy filling
• It gives the prospect three simple options, so they can reply in one line

Run smaller campaigns you can inspect

One of the easiest ways to waste data is to scale too early. Teams enrich a big list, build a sequence, send it wide, and then decide whether it worked based on open rates and a handful of replies.

That is not a system. That is guesswork with reporting.

A better model is smaller, inspectable outreach plays:

• Choose 20 to 30 ICP accounts
• Pick one stakeholder group
• Anchor the message to one commercial angle
• Run the sequence through one full cycle
• Review what happened before changing variables

That gives you something useful to learn from:

• Which accounts replied?
• Which titles engaged?
• Which messages earned a second conversation?
• Where did interest show up but trust did not?
• Which signals mattered before the first response?

That is the difference between “doing BD” and building a BD operating model. Focus is what lets you learn faster than competitors who are still hiding weak thinking behind big numbers.

Run this type of campaign over three weeks:

• Target 25 contacts from one tight ICP segment, not a whole sector
• Call and email them twice per week for three weeks
• DM them once per week using a mix of text, video or voice notes
• Stop outreach to a contact as soon as they respond

A simple cadence might look like this:

Review rule:
At the end of the three weeks, change only one variable — either the ICP slice, the persona, or the angle — and run the next 25.

With a list this small, outcome data alone will be misleading. At this stage, you are testing whether the messaging is relevant and building a benchmark for future campaigns. It also turns “cold calls” into something more useful: research calls.

Where enrichment adds the most value

This is where enrichment becomes genuinely valuable.

Once your market, accounts, stakeholders and messaging are clear, enrichment helps you execute faster, more consistently and at greater scale.

Once you know the market you can win, the accounts you want, the contacts that are strategically relevant, and the message that earns attention, enrichment becomes powerful.

Without that groundwork, enrichment adds activity faster than it adds outcomes.

Used properly, enrichment helps in four ways:

• It cuts research time
• It improves contactability
• It keeps records current
• It gives the team cleaner data for repeatable outreach

That is exactly how Firefish Enrich fits best: richer contact records, validated contact details, and less admin drag inside the CRM.

But the highest-leverage question is still not:

How many contacts can we enrich?

It is:

Which contacts become commercially useful once enriched?

That is the shift from feature thinking to operator thinking. And it is the difference between using enrichment to inflate activity and using it to improve outcomes.

Ben’s take:
Enrichment is a brilliant tool when it is boosting a coherent strategy.

Use enrichment when:

• The account is a real ICP fit and you have a clear reason to pursue it
• You know which stakeholder group matters
• Your message is already clear
• You are running a defined campaign and need clean data to track what works

Enrichment will be lower-value when:

• You are still working out your ICP and enriching a whole sector to “see what sticks”
• You cannot explain why the account is worth pursuing beyond it looking like a good logo
• You are enriching junior or generic contacts with no ownership of outcomes
• The plan is volume first and hope second

Simple decision rule:
Before you enrich anything, ask:

1. Would we still want this account if we had to research it manually?
2. Do we know the one or two stakeholder types we actually want to reach?
3. Do we have a message specific enough to earn a reply?

If the answer is yes to all three, enrich. If not, enrichment is unlikely to deliver the commercial return you want.

If you’re serious about improving BD, the next step isn’t adding more disconnected tools - it’s building a system where targeting, outreach, enrichment and follow-up all work together.

Firefish helps you plan and run targeted BD campaigns, enrich and maintain high-quality data, and manage outbound across LinkedIn, email, calls and your CRM in one place.

That means less admin, better visibility, and a BD engine your team can actually scale with confidence.

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