Find customer evidence before scaling acquisition

Write a narrow initial customer description: role or personal situation, location where relevant, current alternative and the trigger that makes the problem urgent. For a consumer product, a company offering a similar product may be a competitor rather than a prospect. For business software, distinguish the user, buyer and person who can approve a purchase.

Add exclusions. A clear list of who is outside the initial target saves research and outreach effort. Do not assign a lead a high score simply because its website contains a similar keyword.

Pick a channel where the defined customer can reasonably be reached. State the offer, the desired next action, the time window and what would make you continue, change or stop. A discovery conversation, a demonstration or an authorized landing-page invitation can answer different questions; do not combine their results into one unexplained success score.

Define the denominator. Five replies from a known number of relevant, delivered invitations mean something different from five views on an unknown audience. Missing metrics should stay unknown. Give the experiment enough context that another person can understand the result.

Respect the applicable platform rules and communication requirements for your target and channel. When a permission or connection is missing, prepare independent work and make that blocker visible.

• Research and verify a candidate before adding it to the working prospect list.
• Check target fit, source and the actual contact record.
• Prepare the message and request the required approval.
• Use an authorized account for the actual send or publication.
• Record the provider-confirmed action, later reply and resulting next step separately.
• Do not count a drafted message, found email or forecast as a contacted lead or won customer.

In StartME, Research can clarify the customer and alternatives; Product can turn the findings into a product milestone; Marketing can prepare positioning; Sales can organize sourced candidates and next actions; Growth can define and compare experiments. Use shared evidence and explicit handoffs rather than separate employees producing contradictory audience definitions.

Review outputs by what happened: a useful insight, a verified reply, an activated user or another observed outcome. A large document count is not a customer acquisition result. Scale effort after the experiment produces evidence you can explain.