Prospecting

In a small company, selling looks a lot like answering. A blog post brings in a question, someone makes an introduction, a conference hands over a business card. As long as something keeps arriving, nothing about this looks broken.

Pagedeck ran that way for a while. Ravi's posts and ads brought in about sixty inquiries a month, and Sofia picked the promising ones and booked meetings. Then the ad budget was cut in half in March, inquiries dropped to eighteen, and Sofia's closed deals dropped by exactly the same proportion. When Grace asked what happened, the only answer available was that nothing came in. The trouble with that answer is that it contains nothing Sofia can act on.

If you only take what arrives, this quarter's revenue depends on a marketing budget, a search ranking, and somebody else's goodwill. A salesperson can't change any of the three inside a week. So the opposite activity got a name of its own: going out to look instead of waiting, building a list of companies that have never heard of you, and opening the first conversation.

What separates this from simply sending messages around is the list. Roughly half the work goes into deciding who to contact and the other half into contacting them. Pagedeck is a tool for people writing documents together, so it cannot sell to someone who works alone — not because the product is weak, but because there is nobody to share the document with. Spend a month on a list of a thousand solo operators and a few replies come back with no contracts behind them. A list of a hundred companies with more than thirty people produces fewer replies and actual deals inside them. That's why this group sits ahead of pipeline and qualification in sales: it's the only one that deals with the time before a deal exists, and when it runs dry, every later stage has nothing left to count.

The terms under this name fall into two groups. One covers who you are looking for (targets), the other covers how you reach them (methods). Getting the targets wrong makes every refinement to method pointless, so teams usually work on them in that order.

Targets sort out which companies belong on the list and who inside them you need to meet. There are six.

1. Prospect — a potential customer who matches your criteria well enough to be worth contacting. It's easy to confuse with a lead, which means anyone whose contact details you have captured by any route; a prospect is the subset you have filtered on purpose. The filters are usually industry, headcount, tools already in use, and recent funding news.
2. Warm lead — someone who has already shown interest at least once. Opened the pricing page three times, downloaded a document, started on the free plan and stopped. They belong on the same list, but the opening line changes, because the conversation starts from a company that already knows who you are.
3. Buying committee — the set of people involved in one purchase. At a company of fifty or more, adopting a single tool pulls in the person who will use it, that person's manager, a security reviewer, and someone from procurement. Convince one of them and wait, and the deal stops quietly at one of the other desks.
4. Champion — the person inside the customer who argues for you. You are never in the room for their internal meetings, so whether somebody speaks for you there sets the pace of the deal. It's usually whoever's week gets easiest if the tool gets bought.
5. Decision maker — the person who finally approves the purchase. Who that is depends on the amount. A few thousand dollars a year ends at a team lead; anything near six figures brings in an executive. Estimating the deal size during the first outreach therefore also decides who you aim at.
6. Gatekeeper — the person you have to pass before you can reach the approver. Whoever answers the main line, whoever sorts external mail, whoever collects every request for a new tool on the security team. Treat them as a wall and you generally stop there. Work out what they are screening for and speak to that standard, and they often walk you inside instead.

Methods cover how you actually reach those people. There are four, and each one costs more effort per company than the last.

1. Cold email — a first message to someone with no prior contact. Its advantage is volume and its cost is how easily it gets ignored. A template with the company name swapped in replies below one percent; a message that names the problem the company is living with right now does several times better.
2. Cold call — a first phone call with no prior contact. It gets refused far more often than email, and it answers on the spot, which is the real difference. Hearing "we're not interested" ten times also means hearing ten reasons why, so the material for fixing your list and your message piles up faster than it does over email.
3. Sales cadence — a fixed sequence of which channel to use on which day. Email on day one, a call on day three, a message on day five, email on day eight, a final email on day twelve. The sequence exists to stop people from trying once and giving up: replies usually arrive between the third and fifth touch, not the first.
4. Account-based marketing (ABM) — picking a small set of companies in advance and working each one with material built for it. The list is thirty companies rather than a thousand, and each of the thirty gets its own research into which department has which problem. This method pays off when a single contract is large enough to justify weeks spent on one account.

The two groups run in sequence. Targets decide the list and the people on it, methods deliver the planned series of touches, and a reply ends the stretch. Whether that company can actually buy is the next group's question, qualification.

The six target terms are not six separate people to chase, either. They describe positions around one purchase. A gatekeeper stands between you and the approver, a champion argues on your behalf once you are past, the decision maker signs, and the buying committee is the name for all of them together. Mapping those positions before the first message is what turns a company name into a plan: you know who to write to, who to ask for an introduction, and whose objection will stop everything if it goes unanswered.

Which method fits is settled by contract size rather than preference. Spend three weeks researching one account to sell a product worth a few thousand a year and the labor costs more than the deal; push a six-figure product entirely through bulk email and you never reach anyone who can approve it. Plenty of companies therefore run both at once — cadences for the smaller accounts, ABM for a short list of large ones.

Once a company grows a little, this stretch gets a dedicated role. The person who contacts companies that don't know you yet and books the first meeting is a sales development representative (SDR). The definition of the role is that it never handles the contract and only works the front end. Taking forty refusals a day and closing one deal over several weeks are different rhythms, so this is usually the first job to split off once there are enough people to split.

"I narrowed this week's list to eighty companies with more than thirty people that already use a collaboration tool. I dropped the solo operators."

The list got smaller on purpose, and the reason for the cut comes from what the product is.

"They replied, but that person can't approve anything. I'm going to ask whether they can introduce me upward."

The plan is to turn this contact into a champion and open a path to the decision maker.

"We're on day five of the cadence with no response. Should we switch to a call?"

It's time to change channels inside the planned sequence.

After Pagedeck stopped leaning on inbound inquiries, the first thing Sofia did was not outreach but list work. She pulled eighty domestic companies with more than thirty people that had raised money in the past year and were mixing two or more document tools. The last filter went in because companies juggling several tools are already losing track of where things are written.

Ravi added his own layer. Eleven of those eighty had someone who had downloaded a document after reading a post, so Sofia grouped those eleven as warm leads and wrote them a different opening line. She ran a two-week cadence. At the end of it there were nine replies, four meetings, and two deals that cleared qualification and entered the pipeline. What she reported to Grace was not two deals but four numbers: eighty on the list, nine replies, four meetings, two qualified. Which of the four is thinnest decides what gets fixed next month.

The most common mistake is believing that more outreach produces more results. Reply rates are low to begin with, so raising the volume looks like straightforward arithmetic. But the output here is list accuracy multiplied by contact volume, and a wrong list makes one of those factors close to zero. A thousand emails to companies that don't fit close fewer deals than a hundred emails to companies that do. Push far enough in that direction and there's a bill attached: as the ignores and spam reports accumulate, mail providers start scoring your whole domain down, and from then on even messages to well-chosen contacts land in spam. That's the path by which a team that raised volume instead of fixing the list loses the ability to prospect at all.

Treating the work as a junior stop on the way to somewhere else is nearly as common. Sending templated email and dialing numbers looks like repetition from outside. The judgments involved are a different thing. Which filter to cut the list on, whether a refusal means not now or not us, whether the person who replied sits close enough to the decision to become a champion — those choices get made every day. Hand them to whoever is free and the list degrades first. Then the people downstream spend their weeks in meetings that were never going to close, and the drop in win rate only traces back to prospecting two or three months later. A pipeline that runs thin at the front is usually the result of taking this job lightly.