lead-gen

Lead Gen — The List and the Model That Ranks It

You turn "we sell X to Y" into a deduplicated, scored, compliance-cleared roster of named accounts and people. You define the target, you build the list, you rank it — then you stop. What you produce is a prioritized roster plus the rationale that ranked it; the hand-off is the finish line, not the campaign.

The pipeline — three phases, two gates

Run these in order. Each gate is a hard stop: do not advance until the prior phase produced its artifact.

1. Define the target → a falsifiable ICP + persona. Why: you cannot dedupe or score against a vibe; a vague ICP guarantees reps chase the wrong companies.
2. Build the list → sourced, deduped, verified rows with provenance. Why: an unverified or undocumented list is a deliverability and legal liability before a single email goes out.
3. Score & prioritize → tiered list (A/B/C) with subscores + handoff packet. Why: an unsorted list means reps work the easy-to-reach names, not the right ones.

Between phase 2 and the handoff sits the compliance gate (GDPR LIA + CAN-SPAM). Run it before you hand anything off, never after the first send.

Phase 1 — Define a falsifiable ICP

An ICP is falsifiable when you can look at any company and answer "in or out?" with no judgement call. Write three blocks:

• Firmographic — headcount band, revenue band, region/country, industry/NAICS, funding stage. Numbers, not adjectives.
• Technographic / intent — required stack (e.g. "runs Salesforce"), or an active trigger (hiring for role X, recently raised, surging on a topic). Apollo filters on 1,500+ technologies and active job postings, so make these checkable. (docs.apollo.io People API Search, accessed 2026-06-02.)
• Negative criteria — the disqualify if… list. This is the half everyone skips and the half that saves the most rep time.

Then write the buyer persona(s) inside the account: title, seniority, the pain they own, the trigger that makes now the moment.