Every cold touch has to answer two questions. Why you, which the rest of this track has been building. And why now, which is the one that actually gets replies.
"We should catch up sometime" goes nowhere. "I saw you opened a second location" or "congratulations on the COO hire" gets answered. The public web will give you those signals if you're willing to dig, and it's real work with real gold in it. The upgrade is a database that has some of it pre-computed: who grew headcount, who's hiring, who's moving.
In this episode we ask for it directly. Run my market search again using the Who We Sell To page from my CRM, but only companies that grew headcount in the last 12 months.
I also flip approvals to auto for this one, since I'm sitting there watching it. It defaults to manual, and you should leave it there until you trust what it's doing.
The result: 1,439 companies matched the profile. Claude pulled the first 50, screened them, and six cleared. Eleven more landed on a watch list, each with the one specific reason it fell short. The remaining 33 got accounted for too, mostly nonprofits and universities. Every entry came back with growth numbers, revenue, background, and a link to where the information came from. Total cost: one credit.
Then the part that makes this worth the subscription. One credit per question means you can keep asking. Second pass: drop the headcount filter, keep the geography and the profile, and show me only companies with active job postings for leadership roles. Claude asks what I count as leadership (C-suite and VP, C-suite only, or down to director and GM), runs it, and comes back with 20 companies. I enrich the top two for two credits and leave the rest for later.
The usual disclosure: I pay for Apollo at $69 a month, I'm not an affiliate, and I don't know exactly which signals sit behind the paywall. ZoomInfo and others exist and people like them. Pick a tool, then stop learning its interface.
Your assignment has two halves. Pick the signal that maps to your business, growth if you sell capacity, hiring if you sell to teams, whatever line predicts that someone needs you. Then actually send something. The intelligence is only worth what you do with it.
Next episode: we've told the assistant who we sell to. Now we write down the market we sell to, so it lives on a page instead of getting lost in the back of a chat. After that, the thing this whole track has been building toward: a rainmaker that runs without you.