What is Waterfall Enrichment?

No single data provider covers the entire B2B landscape. According to industry analysis, even the largest B2B data providers (ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism) achieve only 40-60% coverage on direct phone numbers and 50-70% on verified email addresses for any given target list. Waterfall enrichment addresses this gap by combining multiple providers to achieve aggregate coverage of 70-90%.

The economic argument is compelling. Rather than paying premium prices for one provider's best-in-class data on the 55% of records they cover, waterfall enrichment lets you use a primary provider for most records and fall through to secondary (often cheaper) providers for the remainder. The result is better total coverage at comparable or lower total cost.

Waterfall enrichment also provides data resilience. If one provider experiences quality issues or coverage gaps in a specific segment (common after provider acquisitions or data source changes), the waterfall automatically compensates by routing more records to alternative providers.

Waterfall enrichment follows a cascading query pattern with configurable logic.

**Provider prioritization** establishes the query order. Providers are ranked by accuracy, coverage, and cost for each data type. Provider A might have the best email coverage for enterprise accounts, Provider B might excel at direct dials for mid-market, and Provider C might have the best international data. The waterfall order can differ by field type and segment.

**Sequential querying** sends each record to the first provider. If the provider returns data for all requested fields, the record is complete and no further queries are needed. If some fields remain empty (no phone number found, or no verified email), the record passes to the next provider with only the unfilled fields requested.

**Match confidence scoring** evaluates the quality of each provider's response. If Provider A returns an email address with 60% confidence, the waterfall might still query Provider B. If Provider B returns the same address with 90% confidence (or a different, higher-confidence address), the better result is used.

**Deduplication and conflict resolution** handles cases where multiple providers return different values for the same field. Rules determine which provider's data wins: some organizations prioritize the most recently verified data, others prefer specific providers for specific fields, and some use majority-vote logic (if 2 of 3 providers agree, that value is used).

**Cost optimization** tracks spend across providers in real time. Since secondary and tertiary providers typically charge per successful lookup, the total cost per enriched record is lower than querying all providers for all records. Some waterfall platforms use predictive routing to estimate which provider is most likely to have data for a given record, minimizing wasted queries.

**Orchestration platforms** like Clay, Tray.io, and Workato provide visual workflow builders for designing waterfall enrichment sequences without code.

Autobound applies waterfall logic across its 400+ signal sources, ensuring maximum coverage for every prospect profile. Rather than relying on a single data provider for company intelligence, the Signal Engine queries multiple sources for each data category — funding data from SEC filings and Crunchbase, hiring data from multiple job boards, technology data from web scanning and job posts — and synthesizes the most complete and current profile possible.