Volume instead of pipeline

The signals

1. Lead lists arrive as spreadsheets nobody opens

2. Sales spend their morning deciding who is worth calling

3. The same company appears three times under different spellings

4. Nobody has written down what a good customer actually looks like

What is actually going wrong

Buying volume is easy and mostly worthless. The work is in defining fit, then filtering hard enough that the list gets much smaller and much more useful — which feels like getting less for your money until the first month of calls.

The second half of the problem is delivery. Data that lands in a spreadsheet is data that does not get used; it has to arrive in the tool the team already works in, at the stage it belongs.

How we work through it

1. Define fit in writing

   We build the ideal-customer profile from your closed-won history and your sales team's instincts, then write it down as criteria a machine can apply.

2. Source and verify

   Contacts gathered against that profile and verified before delivery, because an unverified list damages the sending reputation covered in P03.

3. Deduplicate properly

   Matching on domain and normalised company name rather than exact string equality, which is why the same account keeps appearing three times.

4. Deliver into the CRM

   Enriched records pushed to the right stage with their source attached, so the team can see why a contact is in front of them.

What you end up holding

Outcome

A written, testable definition of a good-fit account

Outcome

Verified contacts, deduplicated against what you already hold

Outcome

Records in your CRM rather than a spreadsheet

Outcome

Provenance on every contact, so the team can trust it

Deliberately no percentages here. What a change is worth depends on your volumes and your costs, and we would rather work that out with you against your own numbers than quote someone else’s.

Practices involved

• Growth & Data
• Automation

Other patterns