📖 Business
Prospecting Discipline
Kazanjy treats prospecting as the most critical and most neglected discipline in founder-led sales. Prospecting is the systematic process of identifying, researching, and qualifying potential customers before investing time in outreach or meetings. The core principle is ruthless qualification using publicly available information — company size, industry, technology stack, job postings, funding stage, and organizational structure can all be assessed before making a single call. Founders who skip this discipline waste their most precious resource (time) on prospects who were never going to buy. The output of strong prospecting is not a long list of names but a short, prioritized list of high-probability targets with enough context to personalize every outreach.
2
Minutes
2
Concepts
+45
XP
1
How It Works
  1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — Before prospecting, define your ICP with specificity: company size, industry, technology stack, buyer persona (title, role, responsibilities), and qualifying signals (recent funding, job postings for relevant roles, technology adoption signals). Vague ICPs produce vague prospect lists.
  1. Publicly Available Qualification — Kazanjy emphasizes using free or low-cost sources to qualify before investing effort: LinkedIn (org structure, headcount, titles), company websites (tech stack, case studies), job boards (what they are hiring for reveals priorities), Crunchbase (funding, investors), and social media (pain signals, complaints). This pre-qualification eliminates 60-80% of time waste.
  1. Tiered Prospect Lists — Organize prospects into tiers based on fit and likelihood to buy. Tier 1: perfect ICP match with active buying signals. Tier 2: strong ICP match without active signals. Tier 3: adjacent fit worth testing. Invest outreach effort proportionally — Tier 1 gets personalized, researched outreach; Tier 3 gets templated volume outreach.
  1. Prospecting as a Daily Discipline — Kazanjy insists that prospecting must be a scheduled, recurring activity, not something done "when I have time." The founder should block time daily for prospecting and treat it with the same discipline as product development sprints. Pipeline dries up 30-60 days after prospecting stops.
  1. CRM Hygiene from Day One — Every prospect interaction must be tracked in a CRM (even a spreadsheet at the earliest stage). Without systematic tracking, you will re-contact people who already said no, forget to follow up with warm prospects, and lose visibility into your pipeline health. CRM discipline is non-negotiable.