# Describing who you want to reach

A discovery brief describes the business you want to reach: what it does, where it is, roughly how big it is, and what makes one worth your time. Some of that becomes a hard filter that excludes candidates outright; the rest steers research and feeds the fit reason later. Writing a brief well is mostly knowing which sentence is doing which job.

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

## Two kinds of sentence in one brief

Every one of these mixes two kinds of sentence, and they behave differently. A **filter** is a property a candidate either has or does not, checkable from the collection stage: an industry, a place, a rough size band, a language. A **direction** is a preference that cannot be checked mechanically but tells research what to look for and qualification what to weigh: *businesses that answer their own phone*, *firms that have just opened a second location*.

| You write | Treated as | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Industry or trade | Filter | Candidates outside it are not collected |
| Place, region or radius | Filter | Scope for collection; see Location and scope |
| Size band | Filter, loosely | Excludes obvious mismatches; refined by research |
| What good looks like | Direction | Steers which sources are read and how signals are weighted |
| What disqualifies | Direction, then filter | Becomes an exclusion once evidence supports it |

The practical consequence: a filter that is wrong returns nothing, and a direction that is wrong returns a full list scored badly. Those two failures look completely different on screen, and knowing which you are looking at tells you which sentence to edit.

## Writing one that returns work

1. Name the trade in the words the businesses themselves use. Not the category you would put them in — the phrase that appears on their own site and their own listings.
   - Result: Collection matches more of the real population, because public sources describe a business in its own vocabulary.
2. Give a place you would actually travel to or serve, not a country.
   - Result: Scope narrows, research per candidate goes further, and the fit reasons come back specific rather than generic.
3. Say what disqualifies, not only what qualifies.
   - Result: Exclusions are cheap and they compound: every candidate they remove is research budget spent on one that might convert.
4. Say what you sell and who normally buys it, in one sentence.
   - Result: That sentence is what the fit reason is written against later, so a vague one produces vague reasons on every prospect in the run.

> **Careful** A brief that names a specific company as the target is a relationship task, not a discovery one. Discovery finds a population; if you already know the organisation, add it directly or import it — see [Uploading your own list](/docs/prospects/prospect-upload/).

## What criteria never contain

Criteria describe businesses. They do not describe a message, a price or a promise. Commercial terms are refused by the same rule that governs every sales conversation: a price, an SLA or a warranty that Knowledge does not support is escalated to a person rather than improvised, and putting one in a discovery brief does not make it sayable.

Nor do they carry a contact-finding instruction. There is no setting that turns on address guessing, because there is no address guessing to turn on. They may say which kinds of organisation are worth deeper research; they cannot say *find an address by any means*.

## When the criteria are the problem

**Nothing was collected at all** — A filter contradicts another — a trade that does not exist in that place, or a size band no candidate in the region reaches. See [Discovery returned nothing](/docs/troubleshooting/no-prospects-found/).
**Plenty collected, everything scored low** — The directions do not describe your customer. Qualification is working; the search is describing a population you would not sell to.
**The right businesses, all uncontactable** — The trade is real and the place is right, but the population does not publish addresses. That is a channel problem rather than a targeting one — see [Contactability](/docs/prospects/contactability/).
**Results drift over successive runs** — The criteria are being edited between runs. Each run is judged against them as they stood; compare two runs only if nothing moved between them.

None of this is a one-time setting. The usual pattern is to run narrow, read ten fit reasons, and change the sentence that produced the reasons you disagree with. That loop is faster than reasoning about the brief in the abstract, because a fit reason shows you exactly which part Connect took seriously.

## Questions

### Can I have more than one discovery search running?

Yes — separate searches stay separate, which is the point. One per market or per trade keeps the fit reasons comparable and lets you retire a poorly performing search without touching a good one.

### Does editing the criteria re-score prospects already found?

Existing prospects keep the evidence and the reason they were given under the wording that found them. A change governs new work; it does not silently rewrite a judgement a person may already have acted on. If you want the old candidates judged the new way, run the search again.

### How specific is too specific?

There is no ceiling on directions — they only steer. Filters are where specificity stops the run: three narrow filters multiplied together can describe a population of nobody. If a run returns nothing, loosen one filter at a time rather than several at once, so you learn which one was the wall.

## Related

- [Prospecting in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/)
- [Location and scope](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/location-scope/)
- [Collecting candidates](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/candidate-collection/)
- [Why this prospect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/fit-reason/)
- [Discovery returned nothing](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/troubleshooting/no-prospects-found/)
- [Knowledge in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/knowledge/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §4 — discovery criteria and the stage order
- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §6 — safe_sales and refused commercial terms
- `docs-source/facts.py` — CAPABILITY_STATUS prospect_discovery