A weekend enrichment dump makes the CRM look finished on Monday and quietly wrong by the following quarter. Companies change names, headcount bands, and parent accounts. People change jobs. The row still looks complete, which is worse than an empty field, because the next process trusts it.
Treat enrichment as a schedule with a write policy, or do not bother.
Decay is the default
Firmographics are a snapshot. The useful question is how stale you will tolerate for each field, not whether the enricher was accurate on the day you bought the file.
Industry and employee band move slowly and still move. Direct dial and current role move faster. Billing address on an account you actually invoice should be coming from finance, not from a data vendor. If those three are written by the same job, with the same confidence, you will overwrite a good billing address with a plausible one and spend a month arguing with collections.
Write a cadence per field class. Example, not a standard: firmographics quarterly, role and direct dial monthly, anything a human typed only when the human’s value is empty. Your cadence will differ. Having none is the failure.
What may overwrite, and what may not
Canonical fields your forecast, routing, or invoices depend on should not be the first target of an enricher. Put the vendor’s value in a parallel field. Promote it with a rule you can name: empty canonical, or canonical older than the cadence, or a match on company identifier. Restricted picklists need the real option value, not the label the vendor printed.
A value a rep typed is a decision. The agent should not replace it silently. If the enricher disagrees, that is an exception: show both, attach the source, let a person pick. Silent overwrite is how you get a CRM nobody will clean because they have learned the machine undoes them overnight.
Duplicates belong in this policy too. Enriching both halves of a duplicate account, then merging later, multiplies the mess. Dedup first, or refuse to enrich records that look like twins.
Re-verification is part of the run
The monthly on our sales operations workflow is not “we enriched you in week one”. It is enrichment, scoring, CRM write-back, next-step prep, and a list of records the agent could not finish, with a named owner after go-live.
Re-verification means the job runs again, on the cadence you agreed, under the same permission set, with the same conflict rules. When the vendor’s data changes, you see it as a proposal, not as a surprise in a QBR.
If you already bought a one-off enrichment from someone else, that is not a reason to skip the policy. It is the reason to install one, on the fields that are already rotting.
The assessment is free. Bring a sample of records last enriched more than 90 days ago, and one a rep edited last week. The collision between those two rows is the whole conversation.