AI can help organise information about potential customers. A large list is not yet a useful pipeline. The harder work is establishing relevance, checking the evidence and deciding whether a contact would be appropriate.
- 01Define the qualification criteria
- 02Separate discovery from judgement
- 03Put review before outreach
- 04Measure quality downstream
Define the qualification criteria
Write the business conditions that make an organisation a plausible fit. Use relevant, observable information. Avoid inferring sensitive personal traits or inventing a need from a vague signal.
Keep the source and retrieval date with each finding. A company page can change, and a generated summary should not become detached from the evidence behind it.
Separate discovery from judgement
Let the discovery step collect candidate organisations and public business information. Use a separate qualification step to assess the criteria and mark uncertainty. An unavailable fact should remain unknown rather than becoming a confident guess.
Deduplicate records and identify existing relationships before further action. A new row in a spreadsheet may represent someone the team already knows.
Put review before outreach
Have a person verify the fit and any proposed message. Reading information and sending a message are different actions with different consequences. A research workflow should not quietly acquire permission to contact people at scale.
Any eventual outreach needs to follow the applicable rules and the recipient's preferences. Keep the system's permissions aligned with the work actually authorised.
Measure quality downstream
Track accepted candidates, useful conversations and eventual fit rather than celebrating the number of generated names. Include the time spent rejecting or correcting records in the cost.
The source transcript framed the process around a very low price per lead. Without a common definition of lead quality, that number is not a useful comparison. Cost per reviewed, relevant opportunity is a more informative starting point.