Find data
Everything downstream inherits the quality of this step, and almost nobody budgets for it properly. Three jobs live here and they are not interchangeable. Deciding which companies to approach, which is a question about your market and not about software. Turning a name into an email address and a working mobile number. And getting a search out of LinkedIn as a clean file. Buy the wrong one for the job and you will pay twice without the invoice ever telling you. The numbers that matter are not the headline prices. At our volume an email costs under one cent and a mobile around twelve cents, which is the level where an agency stops rationing enrichment and starts enriching everything. Verification is a tenth of a credit, the cheapest insurance in the entire stack. And the expensive mistake here is overlap rather than price: one of our runs returned 23,089 rows for 15,363 distinct people, so a third of that spend bought nothing at all, because a duplicate is billed the moment it is returned and deduplication afterwards refunds none of it. Count the audience before you pay to collect it, order your searches from narrowest to widest, and check the hit rate on your own market rather than the vendor's. Coverage that is excellent in the United States and thin in Europe is a good product and a bad choice, if you sell in Europe.
The categories in here
What I wrote about them
8 pieces
- Clay alternatives: what I moved to, and the one number that decided it
I ran Clay, then took it off this site. Here is the published pricing of both, the part nobody compares honestly, and what a contact actually costs me now.
- Prospeo review: what a mobile really costs, and what the directories got wrong
Eleven credits for a mobile and the email that comes with it. Here is the published price, the part of it that contradicts itself, and what two years in a production waterfall look like.
- Airscale review: what an email and a mobile really cost us, and the two settings that decide it
A waterfall you do not have to assemble and credits that do not expire, run at under a cent an email. Two settings decide whether you pay that or a third more, and both are ours to get right.
- When filters run out: targeting by resemblance instead of by criteria
Every prospecting database asks you to describe your market. The description is a guess. Here is the alternative, and where it stops working.
- Count before you buy: the free step nobody takes before paying for a list
Counting an audience is free at several providers. Almost nobody does it, and it is where most of the money is lost in prospecting.
- Scraping a market twice: the overlap that eats a third of a data budget
Two searches that look different can return the same people. You pay for both. Here is how that happens and how to stop it.
- Waterfall enrichment, explained by what it costs: which provider calls first, and why the order is the whole game
Every enrichment tool now says waterfall. The word describes an order of operations, and getting that order wrong is the most expensive mistake in prospecting data.
- Prospeo vs Icypeas: the mobile or the verification
Two providers of the same shape, and they are not in competition. One finds the mobile, the other decides what reaches the sequencer.