1 min lesson
Dedup and the waterfall - where most candidates rush
Take "Dedup and the waterfall - where most candidates rush" step by step, then finish with the result that proves it worked.
Step 1 of 2
Dedup and the waterfall - where most candidates rush
Dedup is the box people skip and it's the one that breaks GTM systems in production. State your match key explicitly and handle the person-versus-account grain. Then make the enrichment a true waterfall, not a fan-out.
- 1Pick a deterministic key first. Normalized email for person, normalized domain for account. Lowercase, strip plus-addressing, strip
www/subdomains. - 2Fall back to fuzzy only when deterministic fails. Company-name + region similarity, gated by a confidence threshold, never silent.
- 3Order the waterfall by cost and hit-rate. Cheapest, highest-coverage provider first; stop the chain the instant you have a confident match.
- 4Cap spend per lead. Set a max number of provider calls so a hard-to-match lead can't run up the bill against all four vendors.
Waterfall, not fan-out
A fan-out hits every provider in parallel and merges results - fast, but you pay every vendor on every lead. A waterfall goes in sequence and stops at the first confident match, so coverage stays high while cost tracks difficulty. Saying this distinction out loud is one of the highest-signal moves in the round, because it shows you think about unit economics, not just match rate.