Evaluating okki-go and Other B2B Sales Data Tools: A 7-Step Procurement Checklist

Who This Checklist Is For (And Who It's Not For)

I'm a procurement manager at a 140-person B2B company. I've managed our sales tech budget — about $180,000 annually — for 6 years, negotiated with 30+ vendors, and logged every renewal in our cost-tracking system. When our RevOps lead asked me to help evaluate okki-go alongside three other AI SDR platforms last quarter, I built this checklist because the sales pitches all sounded the same.

This list is for procurement folks, RevOps leads, or founders who are comparing tools like okki-go, and who want to avoid the hidden-cost traps I've stepped in before. If you're just curious what a data enrichment API does, this probably isn't the article you need — start with a definition piece first.

There are 7 steps. I'll be honest: we only got to step 6 with okki-go before our team made a call. Not because it failed, but because our situation was specific. More on that at the end.

Step 1: Define What You Actually Need — Data Enrichment API or Full Outreach Stack?

A data enrichment API does one thing: it takes a partial record (say, a company domain or a name plus employer) and returns filled-in fields — direct dials, verified work emails, firmographic data, intent signals. It's plumbing. You plug it into your CRM or your sequencing tool.

When should a B2B sales team use it? Honestly, if your SDRs are still manually Googling prospects to find phone numbers, yeah, you're the target customer. But if your problem is that your sequences get replies but nobody's booking meetings, an enrichment API won't fix that — it'll just give you more of the same replies.

Ask yourself: do you need better data, or better process? Get that wrong and you'll spend six figures on plumbing for a leaky pipe.

Step 2: Build a TCO Spreadsheet Before You Take a Single Demo

In 2023, I compared three vendors for a data contract. Vendor A quoted $12,000/year flat. Vendor B quoted $8,400/year. I almost signed with B. Then I built the TCO sheet and found B charged per-credit overages ($0.14 per enriched record after 50K), a $2,500 onboarding fee buried on page 4, and $1,800/year for API access that A included. B's real number was closer to $16,000.

That's a 47% difference hiding in the fine print. For okki-go and anyone else you evaluate, force the vendor to give you: per-seat vs per-credit pricing, overage rates, API access fees, onboarding costs, and annual escalation clauses. If they won't put it in writing, that's a red flag.

Bottom line: the sticker price is almost never the real price.

Step 3: Test Direct Dials and Email Deliverability on Your Own Data

Every vendor claims "95% accuracy" on direct dials and "industry-leading deliverability." I've stopped believing the numbers. Here's what I do instead: I take 100 contacts from our CRM — people I know are reachable — and run them through the tool. Then I measure:

• Direct dial connect rate: What percentage of returned numbers actually ring a human?
• Email hard-bounce rate: Anything above 2% on a verified list is a problem.
• Freshness: Are the numbers from this year, or recycled from 2022?

I only started doing this after getting burned. In Q1 2024, we bought a "verified" list of 8,000 contacts and ate a 6.3% bounce rate in the first week. Our domain reputation took three months to recover. That mistake cost us roughly $4,000 in wasted sends plus the reputation damage. Never again.

One note on email deliverability: verification and deliverability are not the same thing. A verified email can still land in spam if your sending domain is cold. Vendors who conflate the two are either confused or hoping you are.

Step 4: Understand What "Human-in-the-Loop" Actually Means

okki-go markets "human in the loop outreach," and when I first heard the phrase I assumed it was marketing fluff. It's not entirely — but the definition varies by vendor, so pin it down in writing.

Ask: which steps require a human approval, and which run autonomously? Reply handling? Meeting booking? Personalization review? If the answer is "the AI handles everything and the human just watches the dashboard," that's not human-in-the-loop — that's human-on-the-couch. For our team, we wanted mandatory human review before any sequence of 50+ sends went out. That was a deal-breaker requirement, and it narrowed the field from four vendors to two.

Context matters here. We're a mid-market company with a recognizable brand in our vertical. If you're a scrappy startup sending 50 emails a day, full autonomy might be fine. I can only speak to our situation.

Step 5: Scrutinize the Data Source (This Is the Step Most People Skip)

Nobody asks where the data came from. I get it — it's boring. But in 2023 we nearly signed a contract with a vendor whose enrichment data was scraped from LinkedIn profiles in a way that would have put us sideways with GDPR for our EU prospects. Our legal team caught it during the redline. The vendor had buried the sourcing disclosure in a 40-page DPA.

Per FTC advertising guidance, vendors must substantiate claims about data accuracy and compliance — but the burden of asking is on you. Ask: where are direct dials sourced? Is the enrichment data licensed or scraped? Do they have a documented opt-out process? Can they provide a SOC 2 report?

If a vendor gets cagey about data provenance, walk. It's not worth the legal exposure.

Step 6: Run a 30-Day Pilot with Exit Criteria Written Down First

Before you sign anything annual, run a paid 30-day pilot. And — this is the part people skip — write your exit criteria before the pilot starts. Otherwise you'll move the goalposts when the data is ambiguous.

Ours were:

1. Direct dial accuracy above 78% on our test set of 200 contacts
2. Email hard bounce under 2%
3. At least 3 booked meetings attributable to the tool in 30 days
4. No compliance flags from our legal review

We hit 81% on dials and 1.4% on bounce with okki-go. We hit 2 booked meetings, not 3. Our sales cycle is long (60-90 days), so two meetings in 30 days was arguably fine — but we wrote the number down for a reason, so we held the line and negotiated a 60-day extension instead of committing to an annual contract.

That single decision saved us from a $22,000 annual commitment on a tool we weren't yet sure about.

Step 7: Negotiate the Exit, Not Just the Entry

This is the step most procurement teams forget. You spend all your energy on pricing and features, then sign a contract with an auto-renewal clause and a 90-day cancellation window. Ask for: monthly billing option (even at a premium), explicit termination-for-convenience language, and data export rights at termination.

I get why vendors push annual — it's better for their books. But if they won't offer any exit flexibility, they're telling you something about their churn rate.

Common Mistakes (From Someone Who's Made Them)

Buying on the demo, not the trial. Demos are choreographed. Trials are not.

Ignoring the enablement cost. A tool is only as good as the team using it. We budget $3,000-$5,000 of internal time for every new sales tool rollout, and it's rarely enough.

Assuming "AI" means "automatic." An AI BDR still needs a human writing the ICP, the value prop, and the reply-handling scripts. The AI just executes faster.

Trusting the accuracy claim. Test it. Every time.

I'm not sure why some vendors consistently beat their quoted pilot numbers while others quietly miss them — my best guess is that it comes down to how much of their enrichment is licensed versus inferred. I've never gotten a straight answer on that. If someone reading this has insight, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

Bottom line: this checklist isn't a recommendation for or against okki-go. It's the process I use for every vendor, and it's kept us from at least three bad contracts in six years. Run the steps in order. Skip none. And write down your exit criteria before the first demo call — you'll thank yourself later.