prospecting

Start by defining your ICP with firmographic fit, buying signals, and disqualifiers, then source 2-3x more candidates than needed from tools like Apollo or ZoomInfo. Score each against the checklist with source URLs, verify emails before finalizing, and output a Hot/Warm/Cold ranked lead sheet.

Apollo works for firmographic breadth, Clay for multi-source waterfall enrichment, Crunchbase for funding signals, and BuiltWith or Wappalyzer for tech stack qualification. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator manually for decision-maker mapping and Truelist to validate emails before outreach.

Search Google Maps manually for your target category and area, then cross-check each business name plus city in web search to confirm website status. Classify results as no site, social only, weak site, or has site, and prioritize no-site and social-only businesses as hot prospects.

No, bulk scraping LinkedIn or Google Maps violates their terms of service and risks permanent account bans. Use browser-assisted manual research for discovery on those platforms, and only run programmatic extraction tools like Firecrawl against individual prospect websites you already found.

Data providers like Apollo are typically only 60-80% accurate, and bounce rates above 2% damage sender reputation that is hard to recover. Run every address through a validator like Truelist, keep deliverable results, and exclude invalid ones before adding contacts to an outreach list.

Use the demand-signal branch: mine public forums, reviews, GitHub issues, and job posts for explicit pain, workaround, and switching signals rather than filtering contact databases. Score prospects on a 0-100 demand-fit rubric and require a cited public signal for every shortlisted candidate.