find-leads

name	find-leads
description	Find and score outbound leads against the ICP in this repo's CLAUDE.md. Writes a scored CSV to leads/ and files what it could not source to signals/targeting/. Every score carries the one source you would open to check it.

Find Leads

Turn the ICP in CLAUDE.md into a searched, scored, auditable lead list.

Adapted for this course from the lead-search plugin (github.com/BayramAnnakov/lead-search-plugin). This version reads your contract, files into your folders, and refuses to mark its own work as verified.

The rule this skill exists to enforce: a score you generated is not evidence that the score is right. Two production lead-gen engines have each shipped records that disagreed with reality. So every row carries the one link a human would open — and only a human may mark it checked.

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Step 0 · Load the ICP from the contract

Read CLAUDE.md section 1 — "Who we sell to" and "We never touch". That is the ICP. Also read anything in signals/targeting/ — that is what previous runs and audits already learned.

If section 1 is still a <!-- fill in --> placeholder, stop and say so. Do not invent an ICP and do not proceed from the prompt alone. Ask for two lines: who you sell to, who you decline.

If the user named an account list to enrich instead of a search to run, skip Step 2 and score that list — Steps 3-6 are unchanged.

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Step 1 · Restate the ICP as a query, and get it approved

Print, before searching anything:

SEARCHING FOR
  company:  [industry] · [size band] · [geography] · [other observable attributes]
  person:   [titles, including the variants you will actually search]
  bonus:    [signals that raise the score but are not required]
EXCLUDING
  [from "We never touch"]

CANNOT BE SEARCHED — flagging now, not after
  [criteria with no observable source, e.g. "uses Sage internally", "culture fit",
   "growing fast" — say WHY each one cannot be sourced]

Wait for approval. An ICP criterion that cannot be sourced is not a criterion, it is a wish — and the user needs to know which of theirs are wishes before the search, not after.

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Step 1b · Source the unsourceable — do not stop at "cannot"

Naming a criterion unsearchable is half the job. Most of them are still observable, just not in the obvious place — because at some point somebody was required to register, file, publish, hire, certify, or get reviewed.

For every line under CANNOT BE SEARCHED, propose the best available proxy, and say what it costs in fidelity:

CRITERION            [the wish]
  DIRECT SOURCE      none
  PROXY              [what you will actually look at]
  LIVES IN           [which kind of source]
  FIDELITY           high / medium / low — and what it gets WRONG
  VERDICT            proxy · call · delete

Where to look, by family. Run down this list before concluding nothing exists:

family	what it reveals	examples
licensing & regulatory registries	capability, equipment, permission to do the unusual thing	aviation waivers and exemptions · transport/carrier censuses · state contractor & trade licence boards · professional registers
procurement & tender records	budget, buying behaviour, incumbent vendor	government tenders, public contract awards
job postings	what hurts right now, tools in use, team shape	the company describing its own pain, in its own words
corporate filings & registries	size, revenue, ownership, legal form	SEC · Companies House · national business registers
certifications & memberships	standards, industry, trade body	ISO, accreditation bodies, industry associations
technology footprint	stack, integrations	integration/partner pages, tools named in job ads, public repos
reviews & reputation	who their customers actually are, volume	employer and product review sites, local listings
physical footprint	scale, geography, capacity	branch and location pages, fleet size, service-area maps

Worked example — the move this step exists to teach.

ICP: construction, utilities, mining and engineering firms that operate drones. There is no "uses drones" field in any company database. But flying commercially outside the routine rules — beyond visual line of sight, over people, over moving vehicles, at night — requires a waiver, and the regulator publishes every waiver it grants. Each certificate reads:

CERTIFICATE OF WAIVER AND AUTHORIZATION ISSUED TO
  <the organisation>
  Responsible Person: <a named individual>
  ADDRESS: <where they operate>
LIST OF WAIVED REGULATIONS
  <which rules they were allowed to break>

Three things fall out of one free public list:

1. the company — the certificate is issued to the organisation, even where the filename is a person;
2. a named person who owns the programme — your actual contact;
3. how serious the programme is — a beyond-line-of-sight waiver is a different buyer from a one-off photography permission. The waived rule is the intent signal.

⚠️ And what it gets wrong, which is part of the answer: it only lists operators who needed a waiver. Routine daylight line-of-sight flying requires none — so absence from the list is not evidence that a company does not fly drones. It is a high-precision, low-recall source: everyone on it qualifies, and plenty who qualify are not on it.

A second one, produced by this skill on the sample case: for "20-200 technicians" — a number nobody publishes — a national carrier census carries power units and driver counts by company. Same shape, same caveat: registration binds only above a size threshold, so absence is not evidence of being small.

Ask that question of every dead criterion: who made them write this down, and can I actually read it?

Search for the source. Do not recall it. Before proposing any proxy, run an actual search for it — " registry", " licence lookup ", "who publishes ", " association member directory". The catalogue above is a prompt for where to look, not a list of answers. Sources differ by country, industry and year, and the one that fits this ICP is usually not the famous one.

⚠️ A named registry is not a sourced criterion. Before you write PROXY, say which specific record you would look up, and confirm you can actually reach it. If you cannot, write PROXY UNVERIFIED and say why — wrong jurisdiction, paywalled, no coverage for this segment, or you simply could not open it. Naming a plausible-sounding database is the exact failure this step exists to prevent. Registries have jurisdictions and thresholds: a national register only covers its own country, and most have a size or activity floor below which nobody appears at all.

Then give each criterion one of three verdicts — never just "unsourceable":

1. PROXY — a different observable stands in. Say what it gets wrong. (A fleet count is not a technician count. An employee band counts office staff. Say so per lead.)
2. CALL — only a conversation resolves it. It is not a targeting criterion at all; it is a qualification question. Move it out of the ICP and into the first call.
3. DELETE — it does not discriminate between candidates, or it passed everything it touched. A filter that excludes nobody is identical to not having the filter.

⚠️ Verdict 3 is the one people miss. If a criterion passed every candidate you checked, it did no work. Say that plainly.

Expand title strings yourself. Literal "VP Sales" under-recalls badly; the real titles include VP, Revenue · SVP Sales · CRO · Head of Revenue · Commercial Director. Say which variants you searched.

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Step 2 · Search

Use whatever is available, in this order, and name which one you used:

1. a LinkedIn/Crunchbase/company-data MCP, if one is connected
2. web search
3. if neither: stop and say so — do not fabricate companies

Search company-first, then people, whenever the segment is niche. Vertical keywords rarely appear in a person's title.

Cast wider than the target count — you will lose rows in Step 3.

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Step 3 · Verify before scoring

For each candidate, resolve the one URL a human would open to check this row. Prefer a source the user can actually reach: a company page, a press release, a filing. Do not make a LinkedIn URL the only evidence — some of this course's participants cannot open LinkedIn at all.

Drop candidates you cannot evidence. A row you could not verify is not a lead, it is a guess.

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Step 4 · Score 1-10, and show the arithmetic

State the criteria and what each is worth before the table. For every lead, say which criteria were verified, which were assumed, and which could not be sourced.

A lead that meets every criterion but whose evidence you could not resolve does not score 9.

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Step 5 · Write the list → leads/leads-YYYY-MM-DD.csv

Bulk lists go to leads/ as CSV. Never one folder per lead — a lead earns a folder in customers/ only on first real interaction.

name,title,company,headcount,location,score,evidence_url,evidence_claim,evidence_checked,unsourced,trigger,outreach_angle,source_tool,pulled_on

• evidence_url — the ONE link to check this row. Never a search-results page.
• evidence_claim — in three or four words, which claim that URL actually supports (ownership, headcount, the trigger event). A row carries several claims; one link almost never covers all of them, and naming the claim is what stops one opened link from masquerading as a verified row.
• evidence_checked — always write no. It means, and only means: a human opened evidence_url and confirmed the claim named in evidence_claim. It does not mean the score is verified. You may never set this yourself, in this run or any later one.
• unsourced — semicolon-separated ICP criteria you could not verify for this lead. Leaving it empty asserts you checked everything; make sure that is true.
• source_tool — what you actually searched with. If you used a fallback, say so here.

Append if the file exists. Never overwrite.

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Step 5b · Draft the top three — from the evidence, not from a template

Write leads/drafts-YYYY-MM-DD.md: three short outreach drafts, for the three highest-scoring rows whose evidence you could actually resolve. Not the top three by score — the top three you can stand behind.

Each draft opens with the thing you verified. That is the whole rule. If evidence_claim says "80+ patents", the opener refers to the patents. If the only verified fact is a funding round, the opener refers to the round. A draft whose opener is not traceable to that row's evidence is a template with a name pasted into it, and it will read as one.

## <name> · <company> · score <n>
**Verified:** <the evidence_claim, and the link>
**Could not verify:** <the unsourced list — do not write around it, write within it>

<3-4 sentences. First sentence names the verified fact. One ask at the end.>

Three constraints, each of which exists because its opposite has been measured to fail:

1. Never open with a compliment about the company. It is the most common opener and it is indistinguishable from every other one they received this week.
2. Never write "no pitch" or "just sharing, no agenda". Saying it signals a pitch; a real outreach test killed that phrasing three times over.
3. Do not claim what you could not source. If you could not verify their size, the message must not imply you know it. The unsourced column is a list of things you may not assert.

⚠️ Draft only. Never send, never schedule, never open a mail client. The human sends, or does not.

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Step 6 · File what you could not source → signals/targeting/

A criterion you could not source for most leads is a finding about the ICP, not about those leads. It changes who you go after, so it belongs in signals/targeting/.

Write signals/targeting/icp-gaps-YYYY-MM-DD.md:

# ICP gaps — YYYY-MM-DD

**Query run:** [the ICP as searched]
**Searched with:** [tool] · **Candidates seen:** [N] · **Survived verification:** [M]

| Criterion | Sourced for | Proxy used | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| [criterion] | [2 of 12] | [what stood in, or —] | **proxy · call · delete** |

**Therefore, per criterion:**
- **proxy** → name the proxy, where it lives, and what it gets wrong
- **call** → it is a qualification question, not a targeting criterion. It belongs in the first call.
- **delete** → it did not discriminate. If it passed everything it touched, say so.

**Also learned:** [anything about the segment itself — thinner than expected, consolidated,
no buyer at this size, titles differ from assumed]

Then tell the user which criterion to delete from CLAUDE.md section 1, and offer to edit it. A signal that never changes the contract is a diary entry, not a loop.

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Step 7 · Report

• the three file paths you wrote, with row counts
• which criteria could not be sourced — this is the headline, not the leads
• the single lead to contact first, and why
• anything you flagged as ambiguous and did not resolve

Never claim you verified something you inferred. «Скажи, чего ты не знаешь» applies here more than anywhere: at outbound volume, a confident wrong row costs a person you cannot approach twice.