# Prospect

A **prospect** is an organisation or person Connect's research discovered, kept as a candidate record that is not yet a relationship. Discovery and contactability are separate on purpose: a prospect is stored the moment the organisation is identified, whether or not a usable public address for it has been found, and it never carries an address that was guessed.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/prospects
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/prospect/

## Why the record exists before an address does

The obvious design is to keep only prospects you can write to. Connect does not do that, and the reason is a failure it produces. A research pass that discards an organisation because its site did not expose a role mailbox in the first few pages throws away the good ones along with the unreachable ones, and leaves no trace that it did — so the list looks thin rather than wrong, and nobody investigates.

So the candidate record holds the organisation, and contactability is a second, separately answered question recorded beside it. A prospect can sit in the list marked as having no address found, which is a fact you can act on: somebody can look the business up, or a later research pass can. The alternative — inventing an address because the pattern usually holds — is [never done](/docs/prospects/no-guessed-email/).

The same separation runs through qualification. Whether an organisation fits what you sell is scored on evidence; whether you may contact it, on which channel, in its jurisdiction is a different verdict entirely. A perfect fit in a country requiring prior consent is qualified and unreachable, and the two verdicts appear side by side rather than being collapsed into one.

## The word names two different things

This is the confusion worth reading the page for. *Prospect* is both a record type and the first of the six [lifecycle stages](/docs/glossary/lifecycle-stage/) a [person](/docs/glossary/person/) can be at. They are not the same object and they do not move together.

|  | The candidate record | The lifecycle stage |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A discovered organisation, from research | Where one person's relationship has got to |
| Where it lives | The Prospects screen and the prospects sheet | On the person record, in the relationships screen |
| Created by | A discovery run, or an uploaded list | A person, or Connect proposing a move |
| Ends when | It is qualified, contacted, or set aside | The relationship advances to *qualified* |

So a human can be a *person at the prospect stage* without any candidate record existing — that is the normal case for somebody who wrote to you first — and a candidate record can exist for an organisation nobody has ever spoken to. Reading a count of one as a count of the other is how a pipeline review ends up arguing about numbers that were never measuring the same thing.

## Three neighbours it is mistaken for

**A [lead](/docs/glossary/lead/)** — Someone who expressed interest, captured from a conversation you were already having. The direction of travel is the difference: research found the prospect, the lead found you.
**A [company](/docs/glossary/company/)** — An organisation you have a relationship with. A prospect may become one; until it does, keeping them apart is what stops a research list from polluting the records you actually rely on.
**An [opportunity](/docs/glossary/opportunity/)** — A deal with a value and a stage. A prospect has neither, and creating an opportunity for one you have not spoken to makes a pipeline number out of a search result.

> **Careful** A prospect that turns out to be an existing customer is common enough to plan for rather than treat as an error. Check before the first message goes out, not after — the reply to a cold approach sent to somebody you already invoice is the expensive kind.

## Questions

### Does a prospect count as a relationship?

No. It is deliberately outside the relationship records until somebody or something promotes it, which is why prospect counts and people counts do not agree and are not supposed to.

### Where does a prospect's information come from?

Public sources, with the source attached to each claim. A claim with no source is not carried forward, which is what makes a fit reason something you can check rather than something you have to believe.

### Can I add prospects myself?

Yes — an uploaded list becomes candidate records the same way a discovery run's results do, and goes through the same qualification and contactability checks.

## Related

- [Lead](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/lead/)
- [Lifecycle stage](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/lifecycle-stage/)
- [Prospecting in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/)
- [Connect does not guess email addresses](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/no-guessed-email/)
- [Evidence-first prospecting without guessed emails](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/evidence-first-prospecting/)

## What this page is based on

- `backend/app/models.py` — `ProspectCandidate` and its docstring
- `backend/app/prospect_compliance.py` — fit and eligibility as separate verdicts
- `docs-source/facts.py` — CANONICAL_TERMS Prospect, CAPABILITY_STATUS no_guessed_email