Find the right companies to contact

The problem

Most outbound fails at the list, not the message. Time goes into writing a good email and none into deciding who receives it, so a well-written message reaches people with no reason to care. The response rate is then read as a copywriting problem, and the next attempt improves the wrong thing.

Building a good list by hand is genuinely slow. You have a rough idea of who fits, and turning that into names means searching, opening company sites, checking whether they match, finding the right person, and recording it. An hour produces maybe fifteen usable rows.

The second failure is staleness. People change jobs constantly, so a list built three months ago is partly wrong, and nothing tells you which parts.

What AI can actually do here

Enrichment is the mechanical win: start from a company name and fill in size, sector, location, technologies and the relevant contact, without opening a browser. That converts a list-building afternoon into a review of rows someone else assembled.

Qualification is where a model earns more. Reading a company’s own site and answering a specific question, such as whether they run their own delivery fleet or whether they mention hiring, produces the signal that decides whether they belong on the list at all. That is the step most people skip because it does not scale by hand.

Signals are the timing layer: something changed at the company recently. Timing beats persuasion in outbound more often than people expect.

Two cautions. Enriched data is confidently formatted and sometimes wrong, so anything you put in a message should be checkable. And this is personal data with legal obligations attached, which the tooling will not remind you about.

How the tools differ

Clay is the enrichment engine. The free plan gives 500 actions and 100 data credits per month, up to 200 rows per table, with no phone enrichment, signals, CRM integrations or webhooks. Launch is from $167 per month billed annually or $185 monthly with 15,000 actions and 2,500 credits. Growth is from $446 per month annually or $495 monthly. Watch the credit model rather than the seat price, because that is what runs out.

Semrush is not a prospecting tool, and it is genuinely useful here for a different reason: understanding a target’s online presence before you contact them. Free gives 1 demo project and 10 daily reports. SEO is $117.33 per month billed annually, Starter $165.17, Pro+ $248.17. Only worth it if you sell something where their search visibility is the problem you solve.

folk is where the list becomes a set of relationships rather than a spreadsheet, with a LinkedIn extension for adding people as you find them. No free plan, two-week trial. Standard is $24 per member per month billed annually with 500 email enrichments and 2,000 AI magic fields, Premium $48 with 1,000 and 5,000.

When you don't need a tool

If your work comes from referrals and you have never sent a cold email, start by asking existing customers rather than buying enrichment credits.

If you have fewer than fifty target companies in total, build the list by hand. You will know each one properly, which is worth more than automation at that scale.

And if the list exists but nothing happens after the first message, the gap is follow-up, not sourcing. See follow up with leads without being annoying and run cold outreach at scale.