B2B Sales Prospecting

Relevance is the whole job

A buyer decides whether to keep reading in about two seconds, and they're not judging your product — they're judging whether you appear to understand their situation. Everything else in prospecting, across every channel, is downstream of that. Cadence design, subject-line craft and call openers all matter far less than whether the underlying observation is specific to this company and this person.

Target fewer accounts, properly

Most lists are too long to be worked well. When a seller has four hundred accounts, research is impossible, so they default to templated outreach — which produces poor results, which usually leads to someone adding more accounts. A shorter list, chosen because there's a plausible reason those companies would care right now, is what makes real preparation possible at all.

Research the situation, not the trivia

Congratulating someone on a funding round is not research; it's proof you can read a headline. Useful preparation answers a different question: based on what this company is doing, what's likely to be hard for someone in this role right now, and what would make them think "how do they know that?"

• What has changed recently — hiring, structure, product, market, leadership
• What that change usually creates as a problem for someone in this role
• What they're likely already doing about it
• Why this would be worth their time this month rather than at some point

Say the observation before the pitch

Most outreach opens with who you are and what you sell, then works backwards to relevance. Reverse it. Lead with what you noticed and what you suspect that means for them, and let the reason you're contacting them come second. The point isn't to be clever — it's that the buyer can tell within a line whether this was written for them or run off a template.

Channels don't change the problem

Phone, email and LinkedIn have different etiquette and different rhythms, and none of that rescues a message with nothing specific to say. A call is more forgiving of a rough opener because you can adapt live; an email is less forgiving because it gets one shot. But the failure mode is identical across all three: generic.

Where AI helps, and where it doesn't

AI is genuinely useful in prospecting for the part sellers skip: understanding a company and a role quickly, summarising what's changed, pulling together context that used to take twenty minutes. Where it backfires is generation — used to mass-produce outreach, it makes everything slightly smoother and completely interchangeable, at a moment when buyers are already saturated with exactly that. Use it to think faster, not to write more.

Measure what leads to conversations

Activity metrics are easy to collect and easy to hit without doing the job well. If the only number anyone watches is volume, teams will optimise for volume. Look at reply quality and conversations booked alongside it, and review actual messages regularly — the fastest way to improve a team's prospecting is to read what they're really sending.