Enrichment Waterfall Setup Guide

What Is an Enrichment Waterfall?

An enrichment waterfall sends each record through multiple data vendors in sequence. If the first vendor cannot enrich a field, the record passes to the next vendor. This approach increases fill rates from a typical 50-60% (single vendor) to 80-90% (multi-vendor waterfall).

Vendor Selection and Ordering

Choose 2-4 vendors and order them by coverage strength for your ICP. Here is an example configuration:

Priority	Vendor	Strength	Best For	Typical Fill Rate
1st	ZoomInfo	Broad B2B coverage	Enterprise contacts, direct dials	55-65%
2nd	Apollo	SMB/Mid-Market depth	Email addresses, company data	45-55%
3rd	Clearbit	Technographic data	Tech stack, company attributes	40-50%
4th	Lusha	Phone number accuracy	Mobile numbers, verified emails	35-45%

Setup Steps

1. Define the fields you need enriched (email, phone, title, company size, industry, tech stack).
2. Map each vendor’s output fields to your CRM field names.
3. Set priority rules: only overwrite a field if the current value is empty or marked invalid.
4. Configure API connections for each vendor in your enrichment platform.
5. Build the waterfall sequence so records move to the next vendor only when prior vendors return no data for a given field.
6. Set rate limits to stay within each vendor’s API quota.
7. Enable logging so you can track which vendor filled each field.

Quality Control Rules

Apply these rules to prevent bad data from entering your CRM:

• Reject email addresses with catch-all domains unless verified by a secondary tool.
• Flag phone numbers that fail format validation (wrong digit count, invalid country code).
• Discard job titles that are generic or clearly outdated (check against LinkedIn).
• Set a confidence threshold: only accept enrichment results above 80% confidence.
• Run a deduplication check after enrichment to catch newly created duplicates.

Monitoring and Optimization

• Track fill rate per vendor per field on a monthly basis.
• Compare vendor accuracy by sampling 50 enriched records per quarter and manually verifying.
• Rotate vendor priority order if a secondary vendor consistently outperforms the primary.
• Review total enrichment cost per record and compare against the value of filled fields.