Template · 7 min read

The enrichment waterfall canvas

Plan an enrichment workflow field by field—before providers, automations, and credit costs hide the real decisions.

Key idea

Optimise for trustworthy, actionable fields—not for the highest possible completion rate.

Map one field at a time

Do not design a waterfall as “Provider A, then Provider B.” Each field has a different source of truth, freshness requirement, and risk when it is wrong.

Canvas field	Question to answer	Example
Target field	What exact value are we trying to improve?	Current job title
Business use	Which decision will use this value?	Select the right outbound message angle
Acceptance rule	What makes a returned value good enough?	Matched account, current source date, normalised title
Precedence	Which source wins when values conflict?	Recent first-party data beats third-party data
Expiry	When must the value be rechecked?	Before outbound activation or after 90 days
Failure behaviour	What happens when confidence is low?	Leave blank and create a research task

The minimum workflow

Resolve the record
Match the account using a canonical domain or another stable identifier before trying to add person-level detail.
Check internal evidence first
Start with CRM, product, form, and customer-success data when it is relevant and current.
Call external sources selectively
Only request a provider when the field is needed for an eligible motion.
Validate at the point of use
Verify email, recency, consent, and eligibility immediately before activation.
Store provenance
Log the source, retrieval time, confidence, and overwrite decision for every material update.

Overwrite rules to copy

Never replace recent first-party data with an unverified third-party result.
Allow a newer verified result to replace stale third-party data—but retain history.
Treat conflicting high-confidence results as a review case, not a tie to break silently.
Do not convert missing data into a negative conclusion.
Keep suppression and consent fields outside the normal enrichment overwrite path.

Monitor the canvas

Measure	Why it matters
Accepted coverage	Shows whether the workflow is filling the fields the business can actually use.
Conflict rate	Reveals weak identity resolution or mismatched providers.
Freshness at activation	Prevents stale facts from entering a live motion.
Cost per accepted record	Connects provider credits to usable data—not raw matches.
Downstream quality	Shows whether the enriched records improve routing, conversion, or research time.