Who this is for
Revenue teams that need to manage approved phone-data workflows with defensible field quality.Decision guide
Operating method
- Write the trigger, record identity, inputs, accepted output, owner, deadline, and permitted side effects.
- Run a representative sample in dry run and label every result accepted, rejected, or unknown with a reason.
- Apply explicit validation and precedence rules before any CRM or warehouse write.
- Retain the workflow version, source evidence, provider receipt, cost, and final result for each record.
- Review exception aging and recurrence on a fixed cadence, then repair the upstream rule that creates repeated failure.
Implementation details
- Normalize the input before calling a provider: lowercase domains, preserve the original record ID, and separate person and company identifiers.
- Stop the waterfall when the acceptance rule passes, not merely when a provider returns a value. Record which provider supplied the accepted result.
- Treat missing, invalid, conflicting, and provider-error results as different states. Each state needs its own retry or review rule.
- Measure cost per accepted field and coverage on a fixed holdout set. Provider response count is not a quality metric.
Common failure modes
- Treating a provider response or model output as accepted without a business validation rule.
- Allowing several systems to write the same commercial field without a precedence policy.
- Counting an incomplete or failed result as a successful workflow run.
- Optimizing a provider price while ignoring acceptance rate, retries, and manual repair.