Most AI sales tools seem obsessed with finding more companies.
But after talking to a few people, it feels like the bigger problem is rejecting bad prospects quickly.
If you had to optimize for only one, which would you choose?
Curious how experienced GTM teams think about this.
Every week I see another tool claiming: "Find 10,000 leads in seconds." But is that actually useful? I'd rather have: 20 companies than 20,000 random companies. If an AI can't explain WHY someone is a good customer, I don't think it has found a lead. Am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Every week I see another tool claiming:
"Find 10,000 leads in seconds."
But is that actually useful?
I'd rather have:
20 companies
than
20,000 random companies.
If an AI can't explain WHY someone is a good customer, I don't think it has found a lead.
Am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Over the last few days I've been talking to founders about how they find customers.
The biggest takeaway wasn't "I need more leads." It was "I waste too much time figuring out which companies are actually worth contacting."
So I redesigned the workflow I'm building. The AI first understands your business from your website, generates your ICP, finds matching companies, researches them across multiple public signals, aggressively filters out weak fits, then finds the right decision-maker and prepares personalized outreach.
The goal isn't to generate more leads. It's to help you spend your time on the right companies.
If you had to criticize this workflow, what would you change or add?
I realized something recently.
Most advice is about finding more leads.
But I spend more time deciding who not to contact.
I'm curious how everyone else does this.
What's your process for ruling companies out before you send the first message?
What are your biggest red flags?
Every founder seems to have a different process.
Some rely on LinkedIn.
Some search Reddit.
Some watch hiring pages.
Some manually research every company before reaching out.
I'm curious what your workflow actually looks like.
Where do you spend the most time before you ever send the first message?
I feel like most advice about customer acquisition focuses on writing better cold emails or posting more content.
But for me, that's not where most of the time goes.
It's researching companies, figuring out who's actually worth contacting, finding the right person, and deciding whether it's even worth spending time on them.
Curious if that's just me.
What's the part of customer acquisition that feels unnecessarily manual for you?
I've been talking to founders and early operators lately, and a pattern keeps coming up.
The work behind outreach is brutal.
You open 20 tabs just to understand one company:
- LinkedIn to find decision makers
- Job boards to see if they're hiring for relevant roles
- Crunchbase to check if they just raised
- News to see if they launched something new
- Their website to understand what they actually sell
By the time you finish researching, you've spent 2–3 hours on one prospect. And that's before you write a single message.
Then comes the personalization problem:
- Templates feel robotic
- Custom messages take forever to write
- Most prospects never respond anyway
Or you might be dealing with:
- Prospects going dark after showing interest
- Having no idea when to follow up
- Losing context between LinkedIn, email, and DMs
- Forgetting you even spoke to someone at a conference 3 months ago
I'm trying to map the full workflow that founders use today to find and qualify new customers.
A few questions that would help a lot:
Where do you go first when hunting for new prospects?
Roughly how many hours per week go into research vs. actual selling?
Where does the process break down the most?
Are you using a tool, or mostly manual research?
What's the part you dread the most?