Find your first prospects

The rule that shapes everything else#

An address is either found with evidence or left blank. There is no pattern-matching of first name and surname against a domain, no 'probably', no confidence score standing in for a fact. This is worth understanding before you write a brief, because it changes what a good result looks like: a list of thirty organisations where eleven have reachable people is a better outcome than thirty rows that all look complete and bounce.

The same standard applies to the rest of a prospect record. Qualification and evidence are separate things — what was found, and what it implies — and both are attached, so a decision to approach somebody can be defended later by reading it rather than by remembering it.

What a brief should contain#

The situation, not just the sector

'Manufacturers who have just opened a second site' beats 'manufacturers'. A situation is a reason to be in touch; a sector is not.

Where

A city, a region, a country. Narrow first — a brief that returns too few is easy to widen, and one that returns too many teaches you nothing about which of them mattered.

Size or shape

Whatever distinguishes a business you can serve from one you cannot: staff, site count, whether they run their own fleet.

Disqualifiers

The half people forget. Say who is not a prospect — existing customers, competitors, a sector you have decided against — and the list stops wasting your attention.

Running the first one#

1. Open #/prospects and start a discovery with a deliberately narrow brief.

   Result You get a set of organisations with the evidence that put each one on the list, rather than an anonymous count.

2. Read five records properly before looking at the total.

   Result You find out whether the brief matched what you meant. If three of five are wrong, the brief is wrong — rewriting it costs minutes and filtering a bad list costs hours.

3. Check how existing relationships were treated.

   Result Somebody you already deal with should be recognised as a customer rather than discovered as a stranger. Telling a new prospect from an existing customer explains how that resolution works.

4. Only then decide about outreach, and set the autonomy you want for it explicitly.

   Result Nothing goes out unread unless you have said it may, on that channel, at the scope you chose.

Judging the result#

• Count the ones you would ring, not the ones returned. That is the only number that predicts whether the next brief should be wider or narrower.
• Look at what was left blank. Blanks are the honest part of the output; a list with no blanks anywhere deserves suspicion, not confidence.
• Watch headline figures. A summary that stops at a page size can misreport a large workspace — headline numbers that stop at the page size is the history of exactly that defect.
• Keep the disqualifiers. The second brief is usually the first one plus everything you learned to exclude.

Questions#

Related#

• Prospecting in Connect
• Evidence-first prospecting without guessed emails
• Telling a new prospect from an existing customer
• Write a discovery brief that finds the right companies
• Stop an outreach sequence
• Headline numbers that stop at the page size