I spent an entire afternoon doing something most people never bother with: actually testing whether enrichment tools deliver on their accuracy claims.
Not reading reviews. Not comparing feature pages. I mean sitting down, opening LinkedIn, and running the same 25 profiles through three different tools side by side. Same people. Same day. No cherry-picking.
Here’s what happened.
The problem that started all of this
If you’re an SDR or AE using Salesforce, you probably know the drill. You find someone on LinkedIn who looks like a great prospect. Now you need their email and phone number in your CRM.
You could copy-paste their name, title, and company into Salesforce manually. That takes about 2-3 minutes per profile if you’re fast, and you still don’t have contact info.
Or you could use an enrichment tool. There are dozens of them. Apollo. Lusha. Surfe. Hunter. Clay. They all promise to find verified emails and direct dials, and they all claim accuracy rates somewhere between 85% and 95%.
The problem is that those accuracy numbers are self-reported. There aren't many independent tests comparing these tools on the same set of profiles, under the same conditions, on the same day.
I wanted actual numbers from an independent test. So I ran one.
How I set up the test
I pulled 25 LinkedIn profiles. Not hand-picked. Not all in tech or all in the US. A mix of SDRs, directors, VPs, engineers, recruiters, and analysts across North America, Europe, and Asia. Real people with real jobs at companies ranging from startups to enterprises.
I tested three tools:
• Apollo.io (the go-to all-in-one sales platform)
• Lusha (the popular contact finder)
• ShareCo SalesSync (a Salesforce-specific Chrome extension with waterfall enrichment)
I also tried Surfe and Hunter.io, but neither made it into the test. Surfe’s Chrome extension was completely non-functional for the entire session on the free tier. Wouldn’t load, wouldn’t save, just sat there doing nothing. Hunter.io has been blocked from LinkedIn entirely. Their extension doesn’t work on LinkedIn profiles anymore.
So it was a three-way test.
For each profile, I ran the enrichment and recorded two things: did the tool find a work email, and did it find a phone number? Simple yes or no. If a tool returned a phone number from the wrong country (like a Netherlands number for someone in Vancouver), I scored that as a no. A wrong number isn’t a found number.
The results
Here’s what the data looked like after 25 profiles:
ShareCo found the most emails and the most phone numbers.
But the raw numbers don’t tell the full story. The patterns underneath were more interesting.
What actually went wrong with each tool
Lusha’s regulatory problem
Lusha was blocked on 8 of the 25 profiles. Not “couldn’t find data.” Blocked. The extension threw up a wall saying it couldn’t provide information due to state-level regulations.
This happened with contacts in Massachusetts, Florida, Virginia, and New York. Lusha’s free tier appears to have compliance restrictions that prevent it from returning data on a significant chunk of US-based contacts.
If you’re an SDR prospecting into the US, that’s a serious limitation. You’re effectively locked out of data for nearly one-third of the profiles I tested.
On the profiles where Lusha did work, the data quality was mixed. It returned old employer emails for people who had changed jobs. One person had moved to a new company in December 2025, and Lusha still had their email from two jobs ago.
Apollo’s accuracy gaps
Apollo performed closer to ShareCo on raw numbers, especially on phone. But the details revealed problems.
Apollo returned phone numbers from the wrong country on 3 of the 25 profiles. One contact was based in Burnaby, British Columbia. Apollo found a New Jersey area code. Another contact was in Virginia. Apollo returned a Texas number.
Wrong-country phone numbers waste more time than no phone number at all. At least with a miss, you know to try a different approach. With a wrong number, you’re dialing someone in the wrong state and wondering why your prospect sounds confused.
Apollo also struggled with recent job changers. If someone switched roles in January or February 2026, Apollo sometimes still showed their old company’s email. This is a known challenge with enrichment databases that update on monthly cycles.
On the plus side, Apollo was the only tool that found contact data for certain hard-to-reach profiles, and its enrichment speed was fast.
Why the coverage gap exists
The difference between 76% and 44% on email isn’t random. It comes down to how many data sources each tool queries.
Most enrichment tools rely on one primary database, maybe two. If that source doesn’t have the contact, you get nothing. Waterfall enrichment takes a different approach: it queries multiple providers sequentially. If the first source doesn’t have a valid email, it tries the next one, and the next one, until it either finds a match or exhausts all options.
ShareCo queries 20+ providers this way. Apollo uses a similar approach but relies primarily on its own database. Lusha uses a smaller pool of sources, which probably explains the lower coverage.
None of the tools were perfect. Six contacts had no email from any tool, and geography played a role. UK-based contacts were harder to reach across all three platforms. That’s a market-wide limitation.
But on North American contacts, where most B2B prospecting happens, the waterfall approach consistently returned more data.
Why this matters for your Salesforce team
If you’re evaluating enrichment tools for a Salesforce-based team, here’s what I’d take away from this test:
Run your own test. Don’t trust my numbers or anyone else’s. Pick 20-30 profiles from your actual pipeline, run them through 2-3 tools, and see what comes back. It takes about an hour and it’ll tell you more than any blog post.
Count accuracy, not just coverage. A tool that finds 80% of phone numbers but gets the country wrong on 15% of them is really finding 68%. Ask yourself: would my SDR actually be able to use this data?
Check your geography. Enrichment tools perform differently by region. If your target market is predominantly US, test on US contacts. If you sell into EMEA, test on European profiles. The numbers shift dramatically.
Consider the full workflow. How long does enrichment take? Can you keep working while it runs? Does the tool save directly to your CRM, or do you need to export and import? These seem like small things until you’re doing it 50 times a day. One thing I noticed during testing: one tool let me navigate away from a LinkedIn profile while enrichment ran in the background. The others required me to stay on the page. If you’re doing high-volume prospecting, that difference adds up.
Three things that surprised me
The gap between tools is bigger than expected. I assumed all three tools would be within a few percentage points of each other. The email gap between first and last place was 32 percentage points. On a 100-person outreach list, that’s the difference between having emails for 76 people versus 44.
“Found” doesn’t always mean “useful.” Multiple tools returned data that technically counted as a hit but was useless in practice. A phone number in the wrong country. An email from a company the person left a year ago. A personal email instead of a work address. If I’d scored those as wins, the numbers would look different.
Regulatory blocks are a real problem. I knew about CCPA and state privacy laws in theory. I didn’t know they’d functionally break one of the tools on a third of my test set. If you prospect primarily into US contacts, you should check whether your tool has compliance restrictions on your target states before committing.
Choosing a LinkedIn-to-CRM enrichment tool
Based on this test, here’s how I’d think about the decision:
What CRM do you use? Some tools are multi-CRM (Apollo, Lusha, Surfe). ShareCo is Salesforce-only, which means deeper integration but no flexibility if you switch CRMs. If you’re on HubSpot or Pipedrive, look at or Apollo or alternatives.
How important is phone data? If direct dials matter to your outreach, the gap between 84%, 80%, and 32% is massive. Phone-first teams should weigh this heavily.
What’s your budget? All three tools have free tiers. Apollo’s is generous. Lusha’s is limited by the regulatory blocks I saw. ShareCo gives you 40 saves/month free. Start with the free versions and run your own comparison before paying.
Try the test yourself
Here’s what I’d recommend: take 20-30 profiles from your target market, sign up for the free tiers of 2-3 tools, and run them head to head. You’ll learn more in an hour than from any marketing page. And if you run your own comparison and get different results, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.
If you want to test ShareCo, you can grab it from the Chrome Web Store. It connects to your Salesforce in about two minutes. No credit card for the free tier.