Week one — definition
An hour with you to establish what you sell and what a good customer looks like. The profile is derived, written down and argued over until you agree with it. The exclusions are settled before the first search runs.
The method
Six stages.One of them is the whole of it.
The map, the field, the survey, the judgement, the route, the handover. Five of the six are table stakes that any serious operation performs. The fourth is the one that decides whether the other five were worth running, and it is the one this was built around.
01
The map
Before anything is searched, the profile is written down and argued for. It is the document the rest of the run is accountable to.
- You describe what you sell, what it replaces, and who has signed for it before, in plain language rather than in filters.
- The system proposes the profile — seniority, function, company shape, sector, and the events that indicate timing — with the reasoning attached to each element.
- The exclusions are written in the same pass: the adjacent segments that look right, buy nothing, and take a year to prove it.
- You disagree with it in a sentence. Corrections go to the definition, not to a hidden weighting, so the next run inherits the argument rather than the override.
- Each version is kept. When results change you can see which definition produced them, rather than reasoning about a profile that has quietly moved.
02
The field
The people are constructed for your definition rather than filtered out of a database your competitors licence from the same vendor.
- Searches are derived from the profile and rewritten as it is corrected, so the population tracks the definition instead of ageing away from it.
- Sourcing runs continuously. Someone who becomes a fit next month is picked up on the next cycle rather than missed until the next export.
- People are identified on the route the system works today. The map is written independently of that route, so adding a further one does not mean rebuilding the definition.
- A person who appears under more than one identifier is resolved to one individual before anything is spent on them, so a single name is never worked twice under two records.
- Anyone your workspace has suppressed, claimed or already taken up is removed before a minute of research is spent on them. Exclusions you add are held by identity, so they survive a redraw of the map.
- Anyone this system has already approached is excluded permanently, by identity rather than by date range, so a re-run never rediscovers them.
03
The survey
Every candidate is read individually. This is the expensive stage, and it is the reason the population that survives is deliberately small.
- Remit and accountability: what this person owns, what they are measured on, and whether your offer touches either.
- Company context: what the business does, its shape, and what has changed recently enough to matter.
- The public record: what they have said, published or committed to, in their own words rather than inferred from their title.
- Change: a new mandate, a build-out, a reorganisation, a public commitment — the observable events that move a person from indifferent to interested.
- Where the public record is thin, the system spends a deeper look rather than filling the gap with a guess and proceeding as though it knew.
04
The judgement
A written verdict on every name, and a bar that does not move to make a quiet week look better.
- A score and a stated confidence, both of which must clear the thresholds you set. Neither is a number the run may override to fill a thin week.
- A score against each criterion the profile named, so you can see which part of the case was weak rather than only that the total was.
- Hard exclusions sit outside the scoring entirely. A person who trips one is refused however well they score on everything else.
- Weak on any one of the three and the person is held back rather than pushed through on the strength of the other two.
- If the research cannot produce a specific, defensible reason this person should hear from you today, they are not contacted. There is no fallback template underneath.
- Most of what matched on paper does not survive this stage. Every rejection is stored with the sentence that produced it, and any of them can be opened and argued with.
05
The route
Timing, spacing, follow-up and the decision to stop are handled per person. A sequence is not a schedule everyone is put through.
- The approach is written from that person's file, not assembled from a template with their name substituted in.
- Someone who reads and goes quiet is treated differently from someone who never engaged at all.
- A reply resumes the run that was waiting on it, carrying the exchange so far into what is written next, rather than landing in a separate inbox for somebody to notice.
- A redirection to a colleague is followed properly — that colleague is researched before they are approached, not messaged because their name came up.
- Objections are answered within the claims you have sanctioned. Anything that presses past that boundary is escalated rather than improvised.
- The sequence ends where a competent person would end it, rather than running to the end of a template because there were steps left.
06
The handover
The run is complete when there is something worth your attention — and you receive the whole file, not a notification.
- A person who has agreed to meet, or who has said something someone from your side should answer — handed over with the research and the whole exchange attached.
- You get the person, the reason they were selected, everything the research established, and the full exchange to date.
- You arrive at the conversation knowing more about them than they expect, without having spent the hour it would have taken to get there.
- Sends, opens and acceptances are available as diagnostics. They are not reported to you as achievements, because they are not outcomes.
A decision, walked through
What judgement looks like when you can read it.
An illustration rather than a customer story — the shape of a single decision, from the definition down to the one person pursued. Every step below is readable in the product for any name it handled.
The definition
A firm selling treasury software to mid-market manufacturers. The profile lands on finance leadership at manufacturers of a certain size, and excludes groups with a shared treasury function — they look identical on paper and buy centrally, somewhere else.
The population
People matching that definition are found on the route the system works, resolved so that a person appearing under two identifiers is counted once, and reconciled against everyone the workspace has already suppressed, claimed or taken up before anything else runs.
The research
Each is read: what they own, what the business does, what has changed. One has just been given responsibility for a second entity. Another wrote publicly about a migration finishing this quarter. Most have nothing that indicates now.
The exclusions
Most are set aside, each with the sentence that did it. “Remit is controllership, not treasury.” “Fits, but the group treasury function buys centrally.” “Nothing observable indicates this quarter.” You can open any of them and disagree.
The judgement
The person with the second entity clears all three: the remit meets the offer, the new responsibility is the timing, and there is a route they will respect. The approach names that responsibility specifically, because that is the reason the approach exists at all.
The handover
They reply with a question about migration effort. It is answered inside the claims the firm has sanctioned. A meeting is booked, and it arrives with the file: who they are, why they were chosen, what was established, and everything that was said.
The first thirty days
What the first month actually contains.
Judge it on the conversations it opened. The map is sharper at the end of the month than at the start, because it has been corrected against responses rather than assumptions.
Week two — the first approaches
The population is built, research begins, and the first people clear selection. First conversations begin inside two weeks. Most firms start on approval and watch the first stretch before letting it run unattended.
Weeks three and four — correction
Replies, refusals and meetings come back, and the profile is corrected against them. Segments that answer are widened; segments that go silent are closed. Each change is recorded with the evidence behind it.
What we do not do
Widen the definition to improve the numbers. If a market is not answering, that is information about the market or the offer, and you should have it rather than have it papered over with volume.
You have read how it decides.Give it something to decide about.
An hour to establish the profile, and the first conversations begin inside two weeks.