Finding the right person
Roles are inferred, never asserted. If public material shows a person described as running operations, the record says that material shows it and keeps the page — it does not state as fact that this person decides. The distinction matters because a message that names the wrong decision-maker with confidence is worse than one that names nobody.
Inference and assertion#
An assertion is a claim about the world. An inference is a claim about what the sources say plus a reading of it. Prospecting produces the second kind about people, and labels it that way, because published material about who does what inside a business is frequently out of date, aspirational, or a job title that means something different at this company than at the last one.
| What was found | What the record says | What it is safe to do |
|---|---|---|
| A page naming a person and a title | That page names them with that title, with the source attached | Address them by name, without claiming to know their remit |
| A team page with no titles | These people appear to work there | Nothing about authority |
| A public announcement quoting a person | They spoke for the business on that date | Reference the announcement, not their power to buy |
| Nothing about people at all | No person is recorded | Write to a published enquiry route instead |
| A title inferred from a common structure | Not recorded | Nothing — this is a guess and is not written |
The last row is the one people expect to be there and is not. Reasoning that a business of this size probably has an operations manager, and inventing one, is the same failure as constructing a contact — a confident sentence that nothing supports.
A person is a record, not a string#
When a named individual is found, they resolve against the workspace's own people before anything else happens. A Person is the canonical human; an Identity is one address on one channel that resolves to them, and one person may hold several. If the name and a sourced contact resolve to somebody you already know, this stops being cold prospecting.
Where research finds two entries that look like the same human, the duplicates are proposed rather than merged. Merging people is a human decision, and when it happens it preserves both sides' identities, stages, follow-ups, deals, demos, cases and onboarding rather than choosing a surviving record and discarding the rest.
Writing to the right person, in practice#
Prefer a published route the business chose over a person it did not publish.
Result The message arrives where the business reads, and nobody has to justify how you found them.
If a named person is sourced, check what the source actually says before approving.
Result You see whether the title is current, and whether the page is a news item from four years ago.
Let the opening reference the business's situation rather than the person's job title.
Result A wrong inference about authority cannot embarrass the message, because the message never leaned on it.
If you know who decides, record it.
Result Your statement outranks research, is stored with you as its origin, and every later message and follow-up uses it.
Where this goes wrong#
- The named person left
- Common, and invisible in public material for months. This is why the record keeps when a page was read, and why freshness re-reads people before an old name is used again.
- The title is real and the authority is not
- A title is a label a company chose. Treating it as a purchasing mandate produces a message aimed at somebody who has to forward it, which is a slower path than the published route.
- Two people, one name
- Resolution against existing identities is by address rather than by name, because names collide and addresses do not. A name-only match proposes rather than decides.
- A role address and a person, both sourced
- Both are kept. Which one to write to is a judgement about the business, and it is left to a person rather than resolved by a rule.
Questions#
Will Connect find me a mobile number for the owner?
Only if the business publishes one. Nothing is derived, and no range is dialled to discover which number answers. A published enquiry number is treated as the route it is.
Why does the record say 'appears to' about a job title?
Because that is what the material supports. The alternative wording would state as fact something that a stale page merely suggested, and the first person to act on it would carry that error into a message.
Can I tell Connect who the decision-maker is?
Yes, and that is the strongest input available. A person's direct knowledge is recorded with you as its origin and outranks anything inferred from a public page.