CRM enrichment

CRM enrichment means adding firmographic and contact fields, company size, verified email, direct dial, tech stack, to a record before or as it enters a CRM. The job belongs to the enrichment layer sitting upstream of the CRM, not to the CRM itself. GTM engineering, in fact, is largely the work of building the signal and enrichment that happen before a lead ever becomes a CRM record at all.

Where the logic should live, and where it shouldn't

A CRM should hold the record of what happened: the enriched fields, the stage, the notes from a call. It shouldn't be where a waterfall runs. Letting enrichment or scoring logic live inside CRM custom fields instead of in the layer that owns it is a common, quiet mistake, one that duplicates logic a team already built somewhere else and makes it much harder to trace which source filled which field, or when.

That traceability is the actual point of keeping enrichment upstream. A waterfall built in an orchestration layer like Clay can tag every field with which provider filled it and on which pass. A CRM custom field populated by an ad hoc lookup usually can't tell anyone that, which matters the day a field looks wrong and someone needs to trace it back instead of re-buying the row.