Every lead list I've bought had every column filled in for every row. Industry, size, tech, email. Looked tidy. A lot of it was guessed.
I'd rather see "unknown" than a confident wrong value. Unknown tells me to check it myself or skip it. Wrong, I find out after the bounce, or after a reply saying "we don't use that".
So when I build a prospect list now, every claim needs a source and a date. No source, the cell stays empty.
How do you handle guessed fields? Clean them out, or live with them?
Top comments (4)
Clean them out — or at least flag them. A confident wrong value poisons everything downstream, while "unknown" is honest and tells you exactly where to verify. Good framing.
Flagging is usually enough. Deleting a wrong value also hides the fact that someone got it wrong once, and that's worth knowing.
Exactly. A flagged wrong value keeps the audit trail alive. Over time those flags also show which source keeps feeding bad data, so you fix it upstream instead of cleaning the same errors every month.
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