Search for a people data API and every vendor pitches the same thing: coverage. Hundreds of millions of profiles, billions of attributes, an email and a title for anyone you can name. That is table stakes now, and it is also the wrong axis to buy on. A profile is a photograph. The thing that actually makes you money is the moment the photograph goes out of date.
Because the most valuable attribute on any B2B contact is not their title or their email. It is the fact that both just changed. A people data API that hands you a perfect static record and never tells you when it moves is selling you a database that starts decaying the day you download it.
What a people data API actually returns
A people data API answers one question programmatically: who is this person, and how do I reach them? You send an email, a name and domain, or a LinkedIn URL, and you get back a structured record:
- Identity: name, current title, seniority, department
- Contact: work email, sometimes a direct dial
- Company: employer, size, industry, location, other firmographics
- History: past roles, tenure, and in better feeds, the dates attached to them
Teams use it for three jobs: enrich records on import, keep a database complete, and power lead routing or scoring. All three are real. None of them is a signal on its own, because every field in that payload describes a state, not an event. The API tells you what is true right now. It does not tell you the one thing your pipeline actually needs: what just became true.
The field that decays fastest is the field that converts best
Here is the problem with buying a people data API on coverage alone. 2 to 3% of B2B contacts change jobs every month. On a 10,000-contact database that is 200 to 300 records going stale every 30 days, and they are never random records. The person who changes jobs is, by definition, the person in motion, with new budget, a new mandate, and a reason to make an early impression.
That is why the move is the highest-converting signal you can wire into a stack:
- Champion-sourced deals close with a 2.7x higher probability, in roughly half the sales cycle.
- You have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing relationship, versus 5 to 20% for a cold prospect.
- 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, and it is 6x more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain one.
And here is the part that a coverage-first API cannot solve: only about 6% of customers tell a vendor they changed jobs. The other 94% just disappear from your funnel and reappear, months later, as a cold lead at a company you do not recognize. If the only way your people data API surfaces that move is by you re-querying the record and diffing it yourself, you will find out long after the seat is filled.
Evaluate on freshness and event delivery, not just match rate
Most buying guides tell you to compare people data APIs on coverage, accuracy, and match rate. Those matter, but they all measure the same thing: how good is the snapshot. Add the two axes that measure whether the API can catch change:
| Axis | Question it answers | Why it decides pipeline |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Do you have this person at all? | Table stakes. Everyone claims it. |
| Match rate | Can you re-identify them after they move? | Where home-built feeds leak most. |
| Freshness | How fast do you know the field changed? | Turns a data fix into a warm lead. |
| Delivery | Do I poll, or do you push the event to me? | A push arrives in time to act; a pull arrives after. |
The last two are where a people data API becomes a job change data feed. Instead of you asking “is this record still correct?” on a quarterly cron, the feed watches the contacts you care about and pushes the event the moment one of them moves: who moved, from where to where, when, and which rep or CS owner held the relationship. You consume it as a webhook the instant a change is detected. That is the difference between learning about a move as a database cleanup and learning about it as an introduction.
Build on raw data, or buy the signal
You can assemble this yourself on top of a raw people data API, and some teams do. Pulling a profile is rarely the hard part. The hard parts are the three that a coverage number will never show you:
- Match rate through the move. Re-identifying a contact who changed their email, company, and sometimes their name is where most home-built pipelines quietly break.
- Freshness and intent. Catching the move fast, ideally reading intent-to-move signals before the change is public, so you arrive while the relationship is still warm.
- Coverage beyond Salesforce. Many tools are Salesforce-first. If you run on HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Zoho, breadth matters more than one deep integration.
Compare providers in the job change tracking landscape on those axes, not on the raw endpoint. Champions runs the whole loop for you across Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho and others, with no app to install and no logins for reps. Because the leads convert, the signal is backed by a contractual ROI guarantee: if champion-sourced revenue does not reach 2x your annual service fee, you are covered under our terms. Among the compared tools, only Champions offers that.
A note for developers scoping this: there is no public API reference page yet, so the fastest way to see payload shape and match rate against your own data is a live walkthrough.
What it looks like on real numbers
Point a job change feed at that same 10,000-contact database. Roughly 20% surface as hot leads immediately, about 2,000 conversations available on day one, because moves have been piling up unseen. After that, expect 200 to 300 new warm leads every month as contacts keep moving. A coverage-first people data API would eventually correct those same 200 to 300 records. The difference is whether you meet the change as a warm introduction inside the champion’s first 90 days, or as a stale field you patched after the fact.
Where to start
If you already call a people data API, keep it. It does the job of keeping records complete, and completeness is worth having. But do not mistake a full profile for a signal. The attribute worth building your pipeline around is the one that changes, delivered as a push, the same day, routed to the person who owns the relationship.
Book a demo and we will run detection against your own CRM live, show you the moves already hiding in it, and walk through how the feed and webhooks fit your stack. Prefer email? Reach us at [email protected] and we will get you the details.
A people data API tells you who your contacts are. A job change feed tells you the day they become your best next opportunity.
