Choosing a Data Quality Tier
What gets gathered about each lead, and why it affects more than price
What It Is
Every acquisition stream runs at one of three tiers, chosen on the Data Quality cards. The tier decides what is gathered about each lead at the moment it is acquired.
Standard is marked Recommended and is the right default for most streams.
What each tier gathers
| Per lead | Basic | Standard | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name, title, seniority, location | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Verified email address | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Company enrichment — headcount, revenue, description, technology stack | No | Yes | Yes |
| Intent signals | No | Yes | Yes |
| Direct phone number | No | No | Yes |
| Card price — lead charge plus qualification | $0.75 | $1.75 | $3.75 |
| Additional data charges | Email reveal | Email reveal, enrichment, intent | Email reveal, enrichment, intent, phone |
Why It Matters
The obvious effect of the tier is the price. The less obvious one matters more: the tier decides how much the qualification pass has to work with.
Four of the ten scoring criteria read data that only Standard and Premium buy. Company Signals reads the company's profile and keywords. Timing & Growth Indicators reads headcount trends and intent signals. Competitive Displacement reads the technology stack. Problem Acuity draws on the company profile too.
On Basic, those criteria are judged on little more than the job title and the company name. That is 30 of the 100 points awarded almost blind — so a Basic stream's scores are less discriminating, and a threshold set against them means less.
How It Works
The same enrichment also feeds the first-touch email. A composer that knows a company's headcount, its stack and what it has recently been doing can write something specific; one that knows only a job title cannot.
So the tier affects three things at once: what you pay, how well leads are sorted, and how personal the first email can be. Dropping to Basic to save money tends to cost more in weak outreach than it saves per lead.
Examples
You already have a list of companies and just need the right person's email.
Basic is the correct choice. Use the Domains advanced filter to name the companies, and you are only paying to find and verify the contact. You know the fit already, so you are not relying on qualification to sort them.
You are prospecting into an industry you know well, at volume.
Standard. You get the enrichment that makes both qualification and the first-touch email worth having, without paying for phone numbers you will not call.
A small number of high-value accounts where you intend to call as well as email.
Premium. The direct phone number is the only thing it adds over Standard, and at a dollar a lead it is only worth it if someone is actually going to dial.
Warning: The tier cannot be changed for leads already acquired. Editing a stream's tier changes what future leads cost and what is gathered about them; it does not enrich the leads already in the stream.
Tip: If you are unsure, run Standard at a low daily volume for a few days and read the quarantine. The scoring breakdown will tell you whether the criteria that depend on enrichment are doing useful work for your targeting — and if they are, Basic was never going to be the saving it looked like.
