I ran a bake-off between two enrichment vendors for pennies. The answer was not pick one.
We needed a verified email and cell for every contact. The email was easy. The cell phone was the wall, the signal no single vendor reliably had, and that is what led to the bake-off: two vendors, a controlled sample, about thirty-three cents to find out who could actually land a mobile.
The picture, before the words.
One vendor lands the email and whiffs the cell. The cell is the wall.
Run providers in sequence for the scarce signal. A verified mobile falls out the bottom, not just an email.
Reps needed a verified email and a cell for every contact. Email is easy; almost anyone has it.
The cell phone is the wall, the field most vendors are thin on, and the one that actually gets a rep a live conversation. The instinct is to pick one vendor and hope. But a head-to-head that only asks who is better misses the real question: who can land the hard signal, the mobile, and where does each one fall short.
Solve the seam, wire the stack, split the drag from the judgment.
I ran both vendors against the same accounts for about thirty-three cents total, scoring them on the field that actually mattered: a valid, reachable cell phone, not just an email.
Neither vendor won. They covered different halves, so on any given contact one might have the cell and the other the email. The right answer was a waterfall that ran each for what it owned, then verified, not a single pick.
The most predictive signal was a free MX-record lookup. A simple domain check instantly flagged which accounts ran our best-fit email stack, and it cost nothing. The expensive data was not the valuable data.
The bake-off did not end at coverage. It became a prioritization model, orchestrated through Deepline: enrich in cost order, the free MX check first, cheap fields next, the expensive vendor only when the cheaper rungs miss. One workflow, not a pile of vendor logins. Same data, a fraction of the spend, and a model that scales.
Five stages, one headless run.
Sourcing to a scored account, run by agents. Each stage writes what it verifies, then stamps itself so a re-run skips it.
| Stage | What it does | Providers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Firmographic | Company enrichment | |
| 2 Buying committee | Contacts, emails, mobiles | |
| 3 Product | Usage, adoption, engagement score | |
| 4 Fit | ICP fit score, playbook, disqualifier | ICP model |
| 5 Scoring | Composite score + strike flag | reads stages 1 to 4 |
What was true after that was not true before.
The result, and the detail behind it.
Lead with what changed, then break it down.
For about thirty-three cents, the bake-off replaced a gut vendor decision with a coverage map, then a cost model. The email was never the problem; the cell phone was. No single vendor landed it often enough, so the stack became a cost-ordered waterfall, orchestrated through Deepline: cheapest predictive field first, the expensive vendor only when the cheap rungs miss, then verify, until a real mobile falls out. Cheap enough to run at scale, and it put a live phone number in front of a rep. Downstream it showed up where it counts: a dollar of pipeline went from booking about 1 in 5 to better than 1 in 3, and new-business bookings per AE more than doubled.
Do not run a vendor bake-off to crown a winner. Run it to map what each one covers, then rank the stack by cost and orchestrate it as one workflow: cheapest predictive field first, the expensive vendor last. You get the same data for a fraction of the spend, a model that scales, and contact data good enough that a dollar of pipeline books better than 1 in 3 instead of 1 in 5.
The receipts, and what the field says.
From the people I built with.
“Heath is a GTM hero among sales leaders. He is always willing to roll up his sleeves and lead the initiatives most sales leaders would not. His passion is undeniable.”
“Heath is one of the rarest sales leaders I've learned from. He takes a holistic approach to go-to-market and understands every customer-facing department has a role in growth. I believe he's creating the blueprint for sales leaders to become holistic revenue leaders.”
Same method, on your workflow.
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