I've watched sales teams spend most of a morning researching three companies, just to work out whether they're worth an email. I've also watched teams buy a list of 50,000 contacts and get a bounce rate that hurts their email domain for months.
There's a middle path, and it's where AI is genuinely good: reading a lot of public information about a company and telling you, in a sentence, why it's worth contacting now.
Step 1: Write your ideal customer down
Not "SMBs in tech". Something your team would recognise on sight:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Industry | Logistics and freight forwarding |
| Size | 20 to 200 employees |
| Location | India, Singapore, UAE |
| Signals | Hiring ops roles, opened a new warehouse, raised funding |
| Buyer | Head of operations or founder |
Step 2: Collect, then enrich
- 1Find matching companies
- 2Add size, tools and recent news
- 3Find the right person
- 4Verify the email
- 5Score and rank
Sources are mostly public: company sites, job boards, LinkedIn, directories and news. The AI's job is to read all of that and fill in the blanks, so a person isn't doing it one tab at a time.
Step 3: Give every lead a reason
This is what separates a list people use from a list people ignore. Each row should say why this company, why now. For example: "Posted three warehouse supervisor jobs in the last month. Expanding to Pune." That one line makes the first email ten times easier to write.
Step 4: Rank them
- Tier A: strong fit and a recent signal. Contact this week.
- Tier B: good fit, no signal yet. Add to a slower sequence.
- Tier C: partial fit. Watch for signals.
Step 5: Keep it alive
A prospect list starts going stale the day it's built. People change jobs, companies get acquired. Rebuild the important parts weekly and log every refresh, so you can always see how fresh a row is.
Questions people ask me
Where does the contact data come from?
Public sources plus standard enrichment tools. Every email is verified before it goes on the list, so your domain doesn't get burned.
Can it write the outreach too?
Yes. Each lead can come with a first draft based on its 'why now' line. A person should still approve it.
See our lead gen and outreach service.
Founder of Overtake. I was a founding engineer at four startups, two of them in Y Combinator. I write about the AI systems I build for small businesses: what works, what doesn't, and how to start.
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