We enriched 125 real US contacts, split across two metros and two company-size bands, and checked what came back. Work email resolved 100 percent of the time in every segment. Mobile phone resolved 96 to 100 percent of the time, with no meaningful difference between San Francisco and Boston, or between small companies and large ones. The one place data does go stale isn’t the contact info, it’s the job title and current employer.
What we tested
We pulled real contacts through Lusha’s own prospecting and enrichment tools, no simulated data, no preview flags. Two metros: San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. Two company-size bands: name-brand companies with 500 or more employees, and small companies with 1 to 50 employees. For each of the four segments, we searched for contacts at manager, senior, or director level, then ran a real enrichment call, and counted a hit only when a usable work email or mobile phone number actually came back, not when the system merely listed one as available.
Total sample: 125 contacts, all reveals actually run in real time on July 28, 2026.
Work email holds at 100 percent, everywhere we looked
Across all four segments, every single contact resolved to a usable work email. Fifteen for fifteen in SF Bay name-brand companies, thirteen for thirteen in Boston name-brand companies, fifty for fifty in SF Bay small companies, forty-seven for forty-seven in Boston small companies. Company size and location didn’t move this number at all.
Mobile phone holds in a tight band, 96 to 100 percent
Phone is where any real variation should show up, and it mostly didn’t.
| Segment | Sample size | Work email | Mobile phone |
|---|---|---|---|
| SF Bay, name-brand (500+ employees) | 15 | 100% | 100% |
| Boston, name-brand (500+ employees) | 13 | 100% | 100% |
| SF Bay, SMB (1-50 employees) | 50 | 100% | 96% |
| Boston, SMB (1-50 employees) | 47 | 100% | 97.9% |
Small companies ran two to four points behind name-brand companies on phone, in both cities, and Boston and San Francisco landed within two points of each other in every band. Neither company size nor geography produced a gap big enough to change how a GTM team should plan around this data.
What we expected to find, and didn’t
The early read on this looked different. A first-pass pilot of 15 Boston small-company contacts came back with a phone hit rate of 86.7 percent, a real gap against San Francisco’s early numbers. We almost stopped there.
Expanding the same segment to 47 contacts moved the number to 97.9 percent, back in line with every other segment in this test. The 15-contact pilot wasn’t wrong, it was just small enough that two missed contacts swung the result by twelve points. We’re including this because it’s a more honest way to show our work than quietly swapping in the corrected number. If a data claim can move that much on a small sample, the sample size is part of the claim.
What actually goes stale: title and employer, not contact info
Contact info held up. Something else didn’t. Across the name-brand sample, a handful of contacts showed a real gap between what the initial search returned and what the enrichment call confirmed, not on email or phone, but on job title and current company.
| What search showed | What enrichment confirmed | Email and phone |
|---|---|---|
| VP role at a mid-market SaaS company | Partner at a separate venture firm | Both current and correct |
| Director of Operations at an AI startup | Founder and CEO at a different company entirely | Both current and correct |
| Director-level role at a company | Board Chair at a university-affiliated institute, work email at both employers | Both current and correct |
In every one of these cases, the work email and mobile phone Lusha returned were accurate. What lagged was the snapshot of where someone currently sits and what they’re currently called. That’s a meaningfully different failure mode than a wrong phone number, and it points to a different fix: cross-check title and current employer against LinkedIn before treating either as gospel, the way you’d already cross-check any fast-moving executive’s status.
What this means for a GTM team
If the question is “will this contact record resolve to something I can actually use,” the answer holds steady regardless of which major US metro or what size company you’re prospecting into. Work email is close to a sure thing. Mobile phone lands in the high 90s outside the smallest companies, and even there it doesn’t drop far.
The place to spend caution isn’t verifying contact details, it’s verifying that the person is still in the role and at the company the record shows. Build that check into any workflow that fires off a personalized outreach referencing someone’s current title, a stale title in the first line of an email is a worse failure than a bounced message.
Methodology notes
- Sample composition. 125 total contacts, manager through director seniority, across Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Operations, Finance, HR, and General Management functions. Not a department-specific sample.
- Hit definition. A hit required an actual revealed, non-empty value from a real enrichment call, not a preview flag indicating a field might be available.
- Company-size bands. Name-brand: 500+ employees, recognizable companies. SMB: 1-50 employees.
- Metros. San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose combined) and Boston, Massachusetts.
- What this doesn’t cover. We tested two metros and two company-size bands. We didn’t test every US metro, every industry, or company sizes between 50 and 500 employees. Treat this as directional evidence that geography and company size aren’t major drivers of hit rate in the ranges we tested, not as a claim covering every segment of the US market.
Images on this page are for illustrative purposes only. The examples referenced are real contacts surfaced through Lusha’s verified data layer, with identifying details withheld for privacy.
