Glossary
Provenance
Provenance is the record, kept on every field of a prospect, of where that fact came from, so that a personalization without evidence never reaches an email.
A prospect base is only as good as its worst field. A company name from a directory, a role from a profile, an address from a pattern: each came from somewhere, and each can be wrong. Provenance is the discipline of writing the source next to the fact.
It does two jobs. It lets a message use only facts that have a source, so nothing in the email is a guess. And it lets the question "why did we write to them?" always have an answer: the profile, the rubric score, the page that claimed the fit.
It is the same discipline as the proof rule on this site, where every number carries its status and the file it was read from, and the build fails if a target is shown as a claim.
Questions
Does provenance slow the base down?
It slows the wrong kind of speed. A base of one thousand companies with sources beats a base of ten thousand guesses, because only the first can be sent to without burning the domain.
This term belongs to the outbound engineering glossary. The practice is defined on the category page.
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