Contactability
Contactability is a separate fact from fit. A business can be perfectly qualified and still have no address anybody published, in which case Connect keeps it as a researched prospect with a different next action rather than inventing a way to reach it. The contactable count, not the discovered count, is the number that tells you whether outreach has anything to do today.
Two questions that look like one#
*Is this business worth contacting* and *can this business be contacted* are answered by different stages from different material, and averaging them into a single ranking hides the more actionable one. A list sorted by fit with no contactable rows at the top is a list that produces no work.
| Fit | Contactable | What it is | Next action |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | Yes | Ready for outreach, once readiness and compliance pass | Approve or send |
| High | No | The expensive case this section is built around | A person route: call, form, introduction |
| Low | Yes | Reachable and not worth reaching | Leave it; do not spend the send |
| Low | No | Noise | Nothing; it costs nothing to keep |
The second row is where prospecting is actually decided. Every tool has an answer to it, and most answers are to generate an address that looks plausible. Connect's answer is to keep the prospect and change the action.
What makes an address usable#
Three things, all of which must hold. It was found, not constructed. Its source is recorded, so a reader months later can see where it came from. And it is for this organisation rather than for a directory, a marketing agency or a domain registrar that happens to appear beside the business.
That third test removes more addresses than people expect. A published address belonging to a web agency is a real address with a real source and is not a way to reach the business, and treating it as one produces a message that annoys a third party. Evidence for a contact address covers how provenance is stored and read.
What an uncontactable prospect is worth#
More than nothing, which is why it is kept. The research is already paid for; the judgement is already made; the record is already resolvable against your existing relationships. What is missing is one channel.
- A phone route. Many businesses that publish no address publish a number. Phone is a channel Connect works — the prospect moves to a call rather than out of the list.
- A person route. An introduction, or a contact somebody in your business already has, turns an uncontactable prospect into a relationship in one step.
- A form route. A published enquiry form is a real way in that no address guess would have found.
- A waiting route. Freshness will re-read the sources later; businesses publish addresses they did not have last quarter.
Each of those is a follow-up with a reason attached, which is what stops the prospect quietly rotting. A commitment without a reason is not useful to whoever inherits it, and an uncontactable prospect with no next action is exactly the row that gets ignored for a year.
Reading the counts#
- Discovered ≫ contactable
- Normal, and often correct. Some populations publish addresses and some do not; a trade that answers the phone is not failing to be discovered.
- Contactable ≫ qualified
- You can reach many businesses you should not write to. The criteria need a disqualifier, not more discovery.
- Contactable is zero after a large run
- Either the population genuinely publishes nothing, or the search found the wrong kind of organisation. Read three fit reasons to tell which.
- Counts look impossible
- They once were: every headline number came from the newest 500 rows, so a 540-contact workspace was told 500 organisations and zero already contacted. That is fixed — see The numbers above the list.
Questions#
Can I export uncontactable prospects and find addresses myself?
Yes. Anything you find and add is stored as your statement with you as its origin, which is exactly the provenance model research uses. Connect will not invent one; it has no objection to you knowing one.
Does an uncontactable prospect count against my allowance?
The research it consumed does, because that work happened. No send is consumed, because nothing is sent. This is why the cost router prefers to spend on candidates whose contactability is the open question.
Is a phone number treated as contactability?
It is a route, and it is recorded like any other sourced contact detail. Whether outreach happens on it depends on the voice channel's own autonomy rule and the same compliance check every channel passes through.