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Evergrowth Documentation

Email & phone waterfall

The Email & phone waterfall is the colleague that gets you the actual way to reach a person: a work email and a phone number for a contact you already have. It cascades through a broad set of contact-data vendors one after another until it finds a result, rather than relying on any single source.

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

Once a contact has been found and confirmed as a real fit for your buying committee, you still need a reliable way to reach them. That is this colleague’s job. It looks up the person across many different contact-data providers, in sequence, and can return two things:

  • a work email, optionally checked for deliverability, and
  • a phone number, optionally scored for how likely the person is to be worth calling.

It works as two independent lookups: an email finder and a phone finder. You can ask for one, the other, or both. Each is a separate piece of work with its own credit cost, so a calling-only motion never pays for email lookups it will not use, and an email-only motion never pays for phone lookups it does not need. The separation holds all the way to the record: some vendors answer both questions at once whether or not you asked, and the channel you switched off is discarded rather than written, so a phone-only run cannot quietly replace an email address your team curated. As with the rest of Evergrowth, this is credits, not seat licenses, and every plan gets the full set of colleagues. For the exact per-lookup credit costs, see the credits & billing page.

Why a waterfall, and why so many vendors

Section titled “Why a waterfall, and why so many vendors”

No single data provider has everyone. Each vendor has strong coverage in some regions, industries, and seniority bands and thin coverage everywhere else. If you rely on one source, you inherit its blind spots: contacts in the wrong geography come back empty, and the details you do get are often stale.

A waterfall solves this by treating coverage as a team effort. The colleague tries the first vendor; if it comes back with nothing usable, it tries the next, then the next. The practical effect is twofold.

  • Coverage compounds. Many sources reaching for the same person hit far more of your list than any one of them would alone, especially across the harder regions and the harder seniority levels.
  • Quality stays high. Drawing on several sources rather than trusting one lets the colleague favour a result that holds up over the first thing it finds - which matters most for email, where a bad address quietly bounces.

Verifying an email before you send it

Section titled “Verifying an email before you send it”

Finding an address is only half the problem. An email that bounces hurts the sending reputation your whole team’s deliverability depends on, so the email lookup can optionally run each found address through third-party verification before handing it back. The result is a clear deliverability signal - whether an address looks safe to send to, whether the domain accepts everything (so it can’t be confirmed either way), or whether it is invalid - so you can hold back sending to addresses that would only damage your reputation. The exact verification labels and what each one means are listed in the record status & fields reference.

Scoring a phone number for intent

Section titled “Scoring a phone number for intent”

A phone number that’s correct is still only worth dialling if the person is likely to be receptive. The phone lookup can optionally add an intent score that ranks contacts by how strong a calling target they are, so a rep works the high-propensity numbers first instead of dialling the list top to bottom.

This scoring runs through a separate calling-intelligence connection that has to be switched on for your workspace - if it isn’t, the plain phone lookup still works, you just don’t get the intent score. There are two scoring approaches, trading depth against turnaround:

  • a single-pass model that returns quickly and surfaces a large share of the high-intent contacts, and
  • a multi-pass model that takes longer but works harder to extract every identifiable high-intent contact.

Connecting that calling-intelligence source lives under integrations; the practical “when to score and which model” guidance sits with the how-to.

Nothing is thrown away, and your judgement outranks the vendors

Section titled “Nothing is thrown away, and your judgement outranks the vendors”

A contact rarely has exactly one email address or one phone number. Several sources return several candidates, people change roles, and switchboards and direct dials coexist. So the waterfall keeps every candidate it finds on the person rather than overwriting the last one, and treats one of each as the value to lead with: the address a play sends to, the number a rep dials, the detail that reaches your CRM. The others stay on the record as history you can fall back on.

Which one leads is decided differently for the two channels, because the useful signal differs. For email, a newer address beats an older one - people change employers and mailboxes, so recency is the best available proxy for “still real” - while an address verification graded as undeliverable sinks below the rest. For phone, verification comes first and recency second, because most numbers arrive with no verification at all and a confirmed number is worth more than a fresh unconfirmed one.

Both of those are defaults, and your team knows things no vendor does. Someone who confirmed an address on a call, or typed in the direct dial a champion gave them, can protect that value so no later run replaces it - which is what makes it safe to re-run enrichment across a growing list without losing the details people have corrected by hand. The reverse matters just as much: a value that turned out to be wrong can be pushed out of the way, so the next best candidate takes over and a later re-find cannot quietly promote the bad one again. Nothing is deleted, so a mistake is recoverable.

This is the difference between a data vendor and a colleague: the enrichment does the reaching, and the record honours what your team has learned since.

Pay for the work, not for the list

Section titled “Pay for the work, not for the list”

Because the email and phone lookups are billed separately and per contact, enriching a list never costs more than the work you actually asked for: an email-only run on 500 contacts is 500 email lookups and no phone lookups. You also avoid paying twice for the same detail - the colleague can skip contacts that already carry the result you’re asking for and use what’s already on file instead of re-running the search. That makes it safe to re-run enrichment over a growing list without re-charging the contacts you enriched last time.

You are charged for results, not attempts. A lookup that comes back empty costs nothing, so pointing the waterfall at a list where some of the contacts simply cannot be found does not quietly inflate the bill - what you pay tracks the contact details you actually gain. Re-checking the status of a detail already on file is not a new lookup either. This is what makes the waterfall safe to run broadly: the hard-to-find contacts, the ones a single data source would also have missed, cost nothing to have tried.

How a sales team gets value from it

Section titled “How a sales team gets value from it”

Enrichment is the unglamorous step that decides whether all the upstream research ever reaches a human. Research-backed outreach is worthless if the email bounces or the number is wrong.

  • Run it after the contact is locked in. The natural moment is once Contact Finder has surfaced persona-fit people and they’ve been confirmed as worth pursuing. Spend enrichment credits on the contacts you actually intend to reach, not on a raw, unfiltered list.
  • Match the lookup to the channel. If a play is email-only, run the email lookup and skip the phone lookup. If you’re building a calling motion, run the phone lookup, and add intent scoring so reps dial the most promising numbers first.
  • Protect deliverability. Turn on email verification when you feed addresses into sequencing - it keeps bounce rates down, which protects the sending reputation your whole team depends on.
  • Top up a single record on demand. You don’t have to run a whole list. A single contact can be enriched on its own, an existing unverified phone number can be checked, and you can ask for “another” email or phone when the first one isn’t the one you want.
  • Correct what the vendors got wrong, once. When a rep learns the real address or number, put it on the record and protect it, and mark the wrong one as wrong. That is a one-off correction rather than a recurring annoyance: every later run respects both decisions, so the same bad number does not come back next month.

Eva guidance: this colleague is purely contact-detail enrichment - the email address and the phone number, plus optional email verification and optional phone intent scoring. It does not decide whether a contact is worth reaching; that judgment comes from finding and qualifying the person first (see Contact Finder). When a customer says their data vendor “doesn’t cover” a region or returns bouncing emails, the waterfall is the right answer: many sources tried in sequence, with verification on top. Phone intent scoring depends on a separate calling-intelligence connection being active; if a customer can’t enable scoring, check that integration first.

Eva guidance: a contact holds every email and phone the waterfall has ever found, with one of each acting as the value the record leads with. Never tell a customer an address or number was “overwritten” or “lost” - it is on the record, behind the additional-values list, and can be promoted back. When a customer reports a wrong or stale main value, the answer is to protect the right one and push the wrong one down rather than to re-run the finder and hope; the steps are in the how-to. Email leads on recency (an undeliverable address sinks), phone leads on verification - do not state that rule the other way round.

Term mapping: “mobile” / “cell” / “direct dial” all map to the phone lookup; “verified email” / “business email” map to the email lookup with verification turned on. “Waterfall enrichment” and “data waterfall” both refer to this colleague. “Phone intent scoring” / “propensity scoring” is the optional phone score that ranks calling targets, and it runs through a third-party calling-intelligence integration. The email and phone lookups are two separate, separately-billed lookups; for exact per-lookup credit costs, point the customer to the credits & billing page.

How it fits together

Section titled “How it fits together”

The waterfall sits at the handoff between research and execution. Earlier colleagues decide who to reach: Contact Finder discovers persona-fit people inside an account. The waterfall then provides the how - the email and phone number that make outreach possible - and, where it matters, the deliverability check and the calling-intent score that decide which channel and which contact a rep should spend time on. From there, research findings turn into messages and calls.

It runs either as a step inside an automated workflow - so newly found contacts are enriched the moment they’re discovered - or as an on-demand action on contacts you select. The set of vendors it draws on, and the calling-intelligence connection behind intent scoring, are part of Evergrowth’s broader connectivity; see Integrations for the wider picture of how Evergrowth connects to your data sources.

Section titled “Related”