We asked a sales ops manager last week what their email coverage was across contacts in Salesforce. Not their enrichment tool's claimed accuracy rate. Their actual, right-now, in-the-CRM number.
She didn't know. Nobody on her team did either.
They'd been paying for an enrichment tool for seven months. They assumed it was working because it was running. But they'd never measured the baseline before turning it on, and they'd never checked the number since. Seven months of spend with zero proof it moved anything.
The problem nobody measures
Most sales teams buy enrichment tools the same way they buy gym memberships. They sign up, feel good about the decision, and assume the results will follow. The difference is that a gym membership costs $50 a month. An enrichment tool for a 10-person sales team can run $500 to $2,000 a month, depending on the vendor and tier.
Coverage is the percentage of your records that have a given field filled in. If you have 500 contacts and 380 have email addresses, your email coverage is 76%. That's the number that matters, and almost nobody tracks it.
Without a baseline, you can't prove improvement. Without proof of improvement, you can't justify the tool to finance. And when budget season comes around, the enrichment tool is the first thing that gets cut because nobody can point to a report and say "email coverage went from 61% to 84% in three months."
We set up a coverage report in Salesforce that took about 15 minutes. Here's exactly how to build one.
What you need before you start
You need access to Salesforce Report Builder. If you can create and edit reports, you're good. No admin permissions required. No AppExchange installs. No third-party tools.
You also need to know which fields you care about. For most sales teams, the list looks like this:
Email (Contact) - Can't email someone without it
Phone (Contact) - Direct dials for outbound calling
Title (Contact) - Lead routing, scoring, personalization
Company (Contact) - Account matching, territory assignment
Industry (Account) - Segmentation, reporting, ICP filtering
Pick the fields that matter to your team's workflow. Don't try to track everything. Four or five fields is enough to start.
Step 1: create a row-level formula
Open Report Builder and create a new report on Contacts (or whichever object you want to measure).
Click the column dropdown and select "Add Row-Level Formula." Set the return type to Number with zero decimal places.
Here's the formula for email:
IF(ISBLANK(Contact.Email), 0, 1)
This does one thing: it checks each record and returns a 1 if the email field has a value, or a 0 if it's blank. Name this column something like "Email Filled In."
One thing to know: Salesforce row-level formulas only let you reference up to five fields per formula, and you can only have one row-level formula per report. So if you want to track four fields, you'll need four separate reports. That's fine. They take about three minutes each once you've built the first one.
For a picklist field like Industry, wrap it in TEXT first:
IF(ISBLANK(TEXT(Account.Industry)), 0, 1)
ISBLANK doesn't work directly on picklists. The TEXT function converts the picklist value to text so ISBLANK can evaluate it. Salesforce won't give you an error if you skip it, but your numbers will be wrong. We missed this the first time and spent ten minutes wondering why Industry showed 100% coverage when we could see blank values on records.
Step 2: add a custom summary formula
Now you need to turn those 1s and 0s into a percentage.
In the Fields pane, find Summary Formulas and click "Create Formula." Set the output type to Percent with zero decimal places. Set it to display at the Grand Total level.
The formula:
CDF1:SUM/RowCount
CDF1 references your row-level formula from Step 1. RowCount is the total number of records in the report. The result is the percentage of records where the field is populated.
If you named your row-level formula something specific, the reference might show as a different name in the formula builder. Use the insert field button instead of typing it manually to make sure you're referencing the right column.
Step 3: run the report and save it
Run the report. You'll see a single percentage at the bottom of the Grand Total row. That's your coverage number.
If you have 1,200 contacts and 840 have emails, the report shows 70%. That's your baseline.
Save the report somewhere your team can find it. We use a folder called "Data Quality" in the Reports tab. Name it clearly: "Contact Email Coverage" or "Contact Phone Coverage."
Step 4: build reports for each field you care about
Repeat Steps 1 through 3 for phone, title, company, and whatever else you identified earlier. Each report takes about three minutes once you know the pattern.
When you're done, you'll have a set of reports that look like this:
Contact Email Coverage - 70%
Contact Phone Coverage - 54%
Contact Title Coverage - 82%
Account Industry Coverage - 63%
Those numbers are the real story of your CRM data. No enrichment vendor's marketing page can tell you this because they don't know what your database actually looks like.
What to do with the numbers
The coverage numbers alone are useful, but they get more useful over time.
Run the reports once before you add or change any enrichment tool. That's your baseline. Then run them again 30 days later. The difference between the two numbers is what the tool actually did for you.
If your email coverage went from 70% to 83% in a month, that's 156 new emails on a 1,200-contact database. You can put a dollar value on that. If your average reply rate is 8% and your average deal size is $15,000, those 156 emails are worth doing the math on.
If coverage didn't move, you have a different kind of answer. Maybe the tool isn't matching well against your specific market. Maybe it's filling in contacts that already had emails and missing the ones that don't. Either way, you know, and you can have a real conversation with the vendor instead of guessing.
We've also seen teams add a group-by to the report, splitting results by record owner or by account industry. This shows you which reps are doing manual cleanup and which segments have the worst data. It's the same report, just with a grouping added.
The report Salesforce already built (and why it's not enough)
Salesforce has a free AppExchange package called Data Quality Analysis Dashboards. It installs preconfigured formula fields and dashboards that score records on completeness. It works, and it's worth installing if you want a quick visual overview.
But it measures data quality as a composite score across multiple fields on a single record. It tells you "this opportunity has a quality score of 40% because it's missing Type, Lead Source, and Next Steps." That's useful for record-level coaching. It's not the same as knowing "54% of all contacts have a phone number."
The report you build yourself answers the field-level question: what percentage of my records have this specific piece of information? That's the number that moves when enrichment works, and the number you show leadership when you need to justify the budget.
Making the case for enrichment spend
If you're trying to get budget for an enrichment tool, or trying to keep the one you have, the conversation with finance usually goes one of two ways.
The first: "We need this tool because our data is bad." Finance asks how bad. You don't have a number. The request gets tabled.
The second: "Our contact email coverage was 61% in January. After three months with the tool, it's 84%. That's 276 additional contacts we can reach by email. At our current conversion rates, that pipeline coverage is worth approximately $X." Finance approves the renewal.
The only difference between these two conversations is a report that takes 15 minutes to build.
Try building one today
Pick one field. Email is the easiest because it's a standard field on every Salesforce Contact. Build the report using the three steps above. Write down the number.
Then, next month, run it again. See if it moved. If you're using an enrichment tool, that delta is the tool's report card. If you're not using one yet, the baseline number is the starting point for evaluating whether you need one.
If you're on Salesforce and want to test how an enrichment tool changes your coverage, ShareCo SalesSync gives you 40 free saves a month. Run your coverage report before and after enriching a batch of contacts, and you'll see exactly what moved.