Prospect

There was a time when teams called everyone whose contact details they had. Business cards from a conference, people who downloaded a white paper, newsletter subscribers — three thousand rows in one list. Three reps start at the top and work down.

Run that for two months and the results come out strange. Three hundred calls produce four meetings, and three of those four sit in the same neighborhood of the list: companies over fifty people that already use a similar tool. The remaining 2,700 rows turn out to contain sole traders, students, and employees of a competitor. The reps found that out two months in.

The word prospect exists to put filtering ahead of contacting. Separate the rows worth calling from the rows that aren't and the same hours produce eighty calls instead of three hundred and more meetings than before. The scarce resource in sales isn't email volume — it's a person's time, so the purity of a list decides results more than its length does.

You fix a handful of criteria, then check each row on the list against them.

Four kinds of criteria do most of the work.

1. Industry and company size — headcount comes up most often. Pagedeck is a product for editing documents together, so it's worth almost nothing to someone working alone. Anything under twenty people comes off the list.
2. The tools they use today — a company already running something similar doesn't need the need explained, so the conversation moves fast. A company running nothing takes longer, because the need has to be built first.
3. Recent change — they raised funding, they're hiring quickly, they just stood up a new team. Decisions to change tools almost always land right after something else has shifted.
4. Where approval sits — which level of the organization can sign off on the expected amount. A $3,000 a year deal ends at a team lead; above $30,000 an executive appears. This is where the person you aim at gets decided.

Where the criteria come from matters more than the list of them. They don't get set by instinct; they get pulled out of what existing happy customers have in common. The ideal customer profile (ICP) — the written description of the customers who fit best and stay longest — is the source material. Lay thirty closed-won accounts next to thirty that churned inside a year and about three criteria surface on their own. The pairing matters — looking only at the accounts that worked produces a description of your happiest customers rather than a filter, because the traits that separate them from the ones that failed are the only traits worth screening on.

The criteria are not permanent. Run them for three months and one of them usually turns out to do nothing. If funding news went in as a criterion and the list it produced closed at the same rate as every other list, that criterion narrowed the list without raising its purity, and it's better off removed.

There are three places this distinction actually does work.

1. Building the list. A sales development representative (SDR) — the person whose job is finding potential customers and turning them into meetings — usually owns this. What decides their results is not how many companies they contact per day but which companies end up on the list.
2. Choosing how to reach out. A sales cadence, the pre-set order of which channel to use at which interval, changes with the grade of the list. Thirty companies that match every criterion get individually written emails; three hundred that match half get the same template.
3. Deciding whether it goes in the pipeline. A prospect is not yet a deal. It's a candidate to contact, so it doesn't get added to the value of work in progress. Once a conversation opens and budget and timing are confirmed, it graduates into a tracked opportunity.

The same work also decides who to aim at inside a single row. Reaching the decision maker who gives final approval is the fastest path, but that person usually won't take the meeting. So in practice you look first for whoever's own job this tool would improve most, which is usually a level or two below the signature. That's where a champion, someone inside the customer who argues for you in rooms you can't attend, comes from.

"Out of these five hundred, sixty are prospects. The rest don't fit the criteria."

The list won't be used as handed over — it gets filtered first.

"We dropped funding news from the prospect criteria. It made no difference to close rate."

The criteria were tested against actual outcomes and revised.

"I'm keeping this one as a prospect and leaving it out of the pipeline."

No conversation has opened yet, so it isn't counted as a deal.

At Pagedeck, Sofia revisits the criteria once a quarter. The exercise is pulling out what twenty accounts that signed last quarter have in common, next to eight that dropped out along the way. Last time the headcount floor moved from twenty to thirty-five, because companies in their twenties kept signing and then leaving before six months were up.

Ravi is part of that work too. When the criteria behind the list marketing brings in and the list sales builds itself don't match, the two sides erase each other's work. If only twenty of the three hundred Ravi collected fit the criteria, that isn't Sofia's problem — it's a question about where the ads were placed.

The most common belief is that a longer list is a better one. More companies to call feels like better odds, and list length is an easy number to count, which makes it look like a result. But the cost of one outreach isn't postage, it's a rep's hour. Working through three thousand rows means each of the sixty that fit gets contacted exactly once — and since replies mostly arrive between the third and fifth touch, all sixty get missed. The long list doesn't only waste hours. It spends most of them on rows that were never going to buy, and spends too few on the rows that would have.

The other mistake is treating the criteria as a one-time exercise. Building them takes effort, so once they exist there's a pull toward leaving them alone. But they were extracted from past customers, which means they drift out of true when the product or the price changes. A company that just launched an enterprise plan and kept its old criteria will never even see the large accounts it can now sell to.