I Audited Our Sales Data Stack for 6 Months. Here's What I'd Tell Any RevOps Team Before Buying a Company Data API

How I Ended Up Owning the Data API Decision

In September 2024, our RevOps lead pinged me on Slack: "Can you help us pick a company data API?" Three vendor quotes were already sitting in my inbox. We're a 220-person B2B SaaS company, I manage about $340K in annual vendor spend, and I've negotiated with 20+ software vendors over the past 5 years. I figured this would be a two-week exercise.

It took six months. And one painful CRM cleanup I'd rather forget.

If you're a RevOps team evaluating a company data API right now, this is the story I wish someone had told me at the start. Not a spec sheet — a walkthrough.

The Setup: What We Actually Needed

To give you context, our situation wasn't exotic:

• 8 SDRs running LinkedIn outreach and cold email
• 30-person sales team on HubSpot
• ~15,000 target accounts, mid-market SaaS in North America
• Manual prospecting + a $99/month email verification tool (which was, honestly, doing almost nothing)

Our SDRs were burning roughly 25-30% of their day on dead-end contacts. I know that number because I made them log it for two weeks. It was ugly.

The First Round: Three Quotes, Three Very Different Products

I reached out to three categories of vendors: an agent-native prospecting platform (the okki-go team), a standalone email verification tool (Hunter), and one of the big legacy databases. Here's what I learned fast: these are not competing products. They overlap, but their strengths are completely different, and if you lump them into one RFP you'll waste everyone's time.

Okki-go pitched itself as agent-native prospecting with waterfall enrichment and intent data baked in. Hunter is a verification specialist — great at what it does, but it doesn't give you intent signals or enrichment. The legacy database had everything on paper, and a price tag to match.

I almost skipped okki-go entirely because I'd never heard the name. That would have been a mistake (note to self: stop treating unfamiliar vendors as automatically risky).

The Permission Question Nobody Asks Until It's Too Late

Here's where I made my first real error, and where I want you to pay attention.

Like most beginners, I treated "OAuth integration" as a checkbox. Does it connect to HubSpot? Yes. Does it connect to LinkedIn? Yes. Great.

That's the wrong question. The right question is: what permissions does it require, and why?

When I actually mapped out what okki-go requested, I found the scope breakdown was public and granular — you could grant read-only access to contacts, or full read/write for CRM sync, or LinkedIn profile access as a separate scope. That level of control is rare. Most vendors I've dealt with want everything up front "for the best experience."

I only cared about this because of what happened next.

The Timeline That Changed My Mind

We went with a cheaper vendor first. Not okki-go, not any of the names above — a smaller shop that quoted about 30% less than everyone else. My TCO spreadsheet said it was a no-brainer.

Six weeks in, three things hit at once:

1. Data decay. They warned me their database refreshed quarterly. I assumed "quarterly" meant the records were reasonably current. Turned out, in our target segment, ~18% of contact emails had bounced within four months. That's not a bad-luck number — that's a structural one.
2. Permission scope creep. Their LinkedIn integration asked for message-sending scope and connection-request scope, bundled. We didn't want automated connection requests (too risky for our brand voice). We couldn't turn it off. We could only turn off the whole integration.
3. Integration depth. "HubSpot integration" meant they could push a CSV into a custom object. That's not an integration. That's a file upload wearing a suit.

We ended up reverting the whole thing, cleaning ~4,000 corrupted records, and losing a full quarter of SDR ramp.

What I'd Actually Evaluate Now (If I Were Starting Over)

When we re-ran the process, I built a scoring sheet. Here's the short version — if you're a RevOps team building an RFP for a company data API, these are the six things that actually move the needle:

1. Permission model granularity. Can you grant the minimum scope required for your use case? Or is it an all-or-nothing OAuth bundle? Ask for the scope list in writing before you sign.
2. Data freshness and refresh cadence by segment. "We have 200M contacts" means nothing if only 40% of your ICP is covered and half of it is stale. Ask for coverage within your ICP, not globally.
3. LinkedIn outreach safety. If a tool automates LinkedIn behavior, ask how it handles rate limits, captcha triggers, and account warm-up. Automation without those guardrails is a deal-breaker.
4. Waterfall enrichment. A single source will miss records. A vendor that queries multiple providers in sequence and returns the best match saves you from building that plumbing yourself.
5. Intent signals. Not all intent data is equal. Ask: what signals, from which sources, and how fresh? "Intent" as a marketing word is not a feature.
6. Compliance posture. GDPR, CCPA, and LinkedIn's own ToS all apply. Ask for their data sourcing documentation. If they hedge, walk.

What We Actually Chose

We went with okki-go. Not because it was cheapest (it wasn't — about 12% higher than our failed vendor on paper). Because the TCO math flipped once I stopped counting license fees and started counting SDR hours:

"The lowest quoted price often isn't the lowest total cost. Add data cleanup, failed outreach, tool switching, and SDR re-ramp — the 'cheap' option cost us 3x what we saved."

Okki-go's waterfall enrichment + intent layer cut our manual research time by roughly 60% within a month. The human-in-the-loop outreach model meant we could keep our SDRs in charge of messaging — no fully automated sending, which was a red line for us.

Where Okki-Go Is Not the Right Answer

To be fair — and this is the honest-limitations part — this isn't the right tool for every team.

If you have fewer than 5 SDRs and a tight budget, you probably don't need a full agent-native prospecting stack. A verification tool plus manual LinkedIn work will get you 70% of the way there for a fraction of the cost. I've run both setups. Smaller teams genuinely do fine without us.

If your ICP is SMB (under 50 employees), coverage gets spotty across most vendors, okki-go included. Not because the data is bad — because SMB contact info decays faster and is less publicly available. Test with a sample before committing.

If you want fully hands-off outreach — no human review, high volume, auto-send — okki-go isn't built for that, and honestly, neither is LinkedIn. That's a fast path to account restriction.

For everyone else: here's the bottom line. Spend three weeks on a pilot. Ask about permissions before pricing. Measure coverage within your ICP, not on the sales deck. Then run the TCO math — including your SDRs' hours. Take it from someone who skipped that step once and paid for it.