Prospecting - how to acquire business customers automatically, regularly and cheaply?
- Kuba Gołębiowski
- Oct 20
- 12 min read
Prospecting, or how to acquire business clients in today's world?
When acquiring business customers (B2B), prospecting is key – and has been for thousands of years. After all, the idea of "first finding, then approaching your client with the ideal offer and proposition" has been the foundation of trade and business since time immemorial!
Today we can do it faster, more efficiently and based on automation.
Below you'll find a practical guide: from personas and UVPs, through message templates and follow-up sequences, to legal compliance and email deliverability.
🔹What is prospecting?
This is actively reaching out to people and companies who match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) but don't know you yet—via email, phone, LinkedIn, or text message.
The word itself comes from the English "prospect" - it is simply someone who meets the criteria of an ideal client who has not had any contact with you.
🔹Where does prospecting work and where doesn't it?
▪️Where it works: B2B
Prospecting works with any type of B2B cooperation: both with small companies and large corporations.
In corporations, winning large contracts requires brand recognition and industry standing. However, even the largest organizations regularly purchase smaller services from smaller companies. This is our opportunity not only for now, but it's often the first step towards larger contracts in the future.
▪️Where it works on average: in B2C.
The times of writing and calling (e.g. about photovoltaics) random people are gone – today it is a recipe for punishment.
At this point, Big Tech advertising systems (Facebook, Google, TikTok), SEO, and building organic reach in social media are much more effective in B2C.
🔹What is the most important rule of prospecting?
The most important and unchanging principle of prospecting:
💡After reading your message, the recipient should think:
“Oh, this is exactly what I was looking for, it solves my problem, I want to know more!”
Regardless of whether new tools emerge in the future, this approach simply converts and produces results. To succeed, you need to prepare the following elements:
🔹How to prepare customer personas/profiles (ICP) for prospecting?
Creating personas is crucial in the prospecting process. We need to define and document our specific solution for a specific type of client. Importantly, it must also be one that we can monetize as a company.
▪️How to create personas? Real knowledge is key.
Personas must result from our business model and market realities.
Regularly collect and update customer data: from marketing, sales, support, and service. Combine it into a single, coherent picture (in line with knowledge management principles). It's crucial that this information is relevant and accurate.
There are many ways to create personas, but the most important ones are:
Demographics: age, place of residence, gender.
Psychographics: personality, values, interests, motivations, lifestyle.
Professional situation: company type and size, position, industry, etc.
Goals/Needs: What is the real need of the organization and the individual.
Problems: what annoys, blocks, delays goals.
Decision-making process: who decides, how it happens and how long it takes.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): How much does it cost to acquire a customer in total? This includes salespeople, marketing, prospecting tools, and so on.
How much money will a customer keep with us? (LTV) How much money will a customer keep with us over the entire term of our relationship? Do we offer subscription services, one-time contracts, or annual contracts?
Return on Investment (ROI): We subtract the lifetime value of a customer (LTV) from the cost of acquisition (CAC). This tells us how much net profit we make from acquiring and maintaining them.
💡 Importantly, there's no need to force everything. If we don't know something, we don't just fill it in at random. It's better to have a blank space than to fill in made-up information, which people in our organization might later duplicate.
▪️How many prospecting people should you have?
In many industries, 3–4 people are enough.
It happens that in companies generating tens of millions of zlotys in turnover there is only one.
💡Most importantly, don't create personas for the sake of creating personas. This isn't a college assignment.
🔹 Creating and sending messages in prospecting
▪️Value development
UVP (Unique Value Proposition) is a unique set of features of your brand that are valuable to the customer, something no one else on the market offers.
A strong UVP works more powerfully than the most creative campaign – it is what makes your brand chosen in a saturated market.
According to Millward Brown research, over the course of 10 years:
With a similar scope of activities and marketing budget, brands with a strong UVP grew by 168%, while those with a weak UVP only by 27%.
brands with poor marketing efforts still grew by 76% if they had good UVP
More about it in this article: https://www.jakubgolebiowski.pl/post/uvp-usp-unique-selling-proposition
▪️Offer preparation
Once we know our customers, it's worth preparing an offer that offers the ideal solution, but also tells it in their own language. This is called mimicry.
Subtly mirroring a customer's posture, gestures, and language builds a sense of understanding. Studies have shown that waiters who mimic guests' orders received higher tips. Retail salespeople achieved better conversions when they subtly adjusted their speech and gestures.
It's not magic, it's a neurological signal: "he's like me and he understands me."
▪️Shipping: 4 main approaches
Spray and pray – you sow widely and pray. This is when we spread the word very broadly: we define broad target groups and broad personas in our prospecting tools. This is a poor strategy, because anti-spam filters (now powered by AI) learn quickly and analyze content, so a large volume ends up as spam. Furthermore, message relevance decreases – the chance that the message will perfectly meet the recipient's needs is low. I don't recommend it.
No bullshit – straight to the point, with the proposal in the first message. In email, text message, or on LinkedIn, we briefly state: what we deliver, what the business outcome will be, and whether the recipient wants to talk right away. Often, three or four sentences are enough ("Hi, we're doing X. We'll help with Y. How about a quick chat?"). Many results-oriented decision-makers appreciate this, as they don't have the time or inclination for small talk. This approach speeds up decisions and provides a quick yes or no answer.
Snuggling – presence first, message second. We follow on LinkedIn first, comment, and get noticed, and only then do we send a DM. This works in many industries, especially when the list of accounts is short, but it can be difficult to scale and time-consuming, so it's not for everyone.
Prospecting + marketing—the perfect duo. For me, this is the optimal approach. First, we gather interest in content and campaigns (e.g., by directing them to a website), capture buying signals, and then contact these people through prospecting. Leads can be further "spiked" with ads on LinkedIn and Facebook—specifically, by job title or even specific company. Advertising builds awareness first, followed by direct messaging.
▪️Work omnichannel, i.e. send wherever and however you can.
Omnichannel is simply multi-channel activity.
Email alone isn't enough these days—it's just one element. That's why we approach prospecting through multiple channels: email, text messages, LinkedIn. We also make phone calls and then ask, "Hi, you got my message—I'd like to talk about a possible collaboration."
People generally have a very short attention span, and you can't expect someone to be interested in your services after a single text message or email. That's rare. Usually, you have to remind yourself. The more meaningful reminders, the better.
the better. The better tailored to the customer's needs, the better.
▪️Follow-up, or we are reaching the end
One message isn't enough. Good communication sequences often involve 8–12 messages over 21–30 days.
Example:
Automations (e.g. Apollo, Woodpecker, Lemlist) will do it for you – but only if you have a well-defined customer profile and an efficiently implemented CRM.
▪️SPAM and email deliverability (must-have in 2025).
These days, spam filters are surprisingly smart, using AI to quickly catch repetitive messages. To improve this, it's worth understanding:
Get a technical grasp of your domain setup: SPF + DKIM + DMARC.
Add "one-click unsubscribe" in headers (List-Unsubscribe + List-Unsubscribe-Post according to RFC 8058) - today required for bulk senders by Gmail/Yahoo and enforced (requirements from 02-06.2024).
Limit the number of messages you send. Send only to those who truly show promise.
He's slowly increasing his mailings. Massively launching a campaign on a fresh domain is a recipe for spam filter failure. Mailboxes monitor daily volume, growth rate, complaints, and bounces.
There are a few more tricks and I talk about them in more detail in my prospecting training: www.jakubgolebiowski.pl/szkolenie-prospecting .
🔹What else is important in prospecting?
▪️Lead qualification
Qualification is a simple client check: can we help them and, at the same time, can we make money from it? Not everyone with money is your client. At the same time, an ideal client without money isn't a good prospect either.
That is why it is worth introducing even a simple scoring system (a system for assessing customer value).
The simplest example:
Scale 0–100:
Company Fit (0–40) + Role (0–20) + Timing (0–20) + Intent Signals (0–20).
The threshold for sending an offer and starting work by a salesperson: ≥ 60, and the rest of the customers go to the database for the future.
Data from the National Court Register, financial data, number of employees, technologies used, and recruitment activity are helpful.
▪️Customer segmentation in prospecting
It's difficult to write a separate email and offer to each person, so segmentation is a good idea. This allows you to scale personalization without writing 500 unique messages.
The most important thing about segmentation is to identify specific target groups – people in business who will benefit from our solution and from whom we can profit.
We divide them into groups. We then write and prepare one type of content for one group, and another for another. It's crucial in segmentation to truly address customers' needs and ensure that the content is precisely tailored to their situation.
It's good to have a separate landing page, separate offers, separate marketing materials, separate automations.
This allows you to "bump" 500-1000 customers with the same offer and maximize your activities in relation to the time needed to achieve results.
▪️Purchase signals research
These are signs that someone is looking for something—ideally, services like yours. These include not only website visits but also: funding, recruitment, staffing changes, website technologies, event attendee lists, social media, and so on. Many AI tools help detect such signals.
Where to look for such information?
KRS/CEIDG/GUS,
grants,
public procurement,
recruitment announcements,
personnel changes,
technologies on the website (Wappalyzer-like),
website visits (first-party),
list of event participants.
participation in fairs
social media.
🔹What are the tools for prospecting?
▪️CRM - an absolute must-have.
Without a solid CRM (segments, contact statuses, integrations), prospecting devolves into chaos. Notebooks or Excel waste time and energy.
Any good CRM will suffice - it can be of global or Polish production, but it must be integrated with prospecting tools.
Usually this can be done automatically, many tools already integrate very beautifully and it's great, but sometimes it can also be done with Zapier.
▪️Popular solutions:
Apollo (large database; no native full omnichannel),
Sales Navigator (LinkedIn) - great in its ecosystem, but single-channel,
Woodpecker / Lemlist / Instantly - email sequences,
Clay / HubSpot / Pipedrive – data connection, scoring and CRM.
🔹Important: proof and materials!
Before you start prospecting, before you start sending information to people, it's worth preparing a basis for them to make a decision.
Often, the people we write to aren't decision-makers. They have to take our offer further, asking their superiors, managers, or management.
If we don't have a good website that supports what we do, we don't have case studies, we don't have video materials explaining how our service works, how it can improve and help our client, then even if we get a good lead, even if we give them a lead, even if we convince them, we won't give them the tools to go to their superiors and advertise us, to simply sell us.
Many people today spend 70-80% of their time researching information on their own before making a B2B decision, and only then reach out to us. We need to be prepared for this.
🔹Process and consistency are key
Business is all about delayed gratification. What we do today impacts months and years ahead. What we don't do, too.
Think like this:
The hunters shot the game and immediately had food.
The farmer had to sow, care for, and wait for months for the result.
Who built our civilization? Farmers. It's the same in business – those who think only "here and now" usually don't build great things.
The same is true in sales: news today can pay off a month, a quarter, or a year from now. It's important to be "on the radar" at the moment of need and decision.
▪️Pipeline math – or how to think about prospecting as a system and equation
There's no magic. Prospecting is a game based on statistics and discipline. It works something like this:
Example with 1000 contacts
Our email opening rate is 40% = 400 contacts
The response rate from this is 10% = 100 contacts
40% will want to talk to us = 40 contacts
80% will want to get the offer = 32 contacts
Decides to cooperate and signs the contract 25% = 8 contacts
This means that to gain 8 customers with these results, you need to have 1,000 well-selected contacts and complete the full message cadence.
Taking this even further, if you want 80 clients, you need 10,000 contacts. This is just to illustrate the point; in real life, it's not quite that simple.
🔹Is prospecting legal?
In short: usually not (without consent). I'll explain.
Prospecting is generally illegal in Poland. Following changes to the law, sending unsolicited commercial offers to individuals is generally prohibited. In the West, restrictions can be even more stringent.
And now: what constitutes an "unsolicited commercial offer" is still fluid. There is no firm judicial ruling on this matter. Yet.
Gaining consent is often very difficult – and in effective prospecting, it is crucial to go beyond your own bubble of friends and clients.
But you can think in terms of probability here.
For the law to even work, someone has to take the matter to court. And for that to happen, you have to really piss someone off.
If we write to someone completely unrelated to our industry, offering them no sensible solution, and the message is completely out of the blue, there is a good chance that the recipient will get angry enough to take it to court.
But let's look at it from a different perspective. If we have a specific solution for a given industry, clearly describing its problems, and we say, "Listen, I have something that might help you," then the risk of litigation decreases. The likelihood that someone in our industry will decide to file a lawsuit is small, though still possible.
A simple real-life example: I live in a tenement building and I constantly get calls from salespeople asking if I want photovoltaics. I'm neither a decision-maker nor interested. Someone else would get angry and take me to court. I'm not at that stage yet. But if anyone reading this is building a photovoltaic system – beware 😀
▪️What are the penalties for bad prospecting?
Penalties are up to 3% of annual revenue or PLN 1,000,000.
▪️How to reduce the risk of penalties for prospecting?
The most important thing: the law is not binary and NONE of the following rules provide 100% security.
At the same time, basing your actions solely on them limits effectiveness—the essence of prospecting is reaching outside your own bubble.
Data publicly shared by the company. When a company publishes contact information for business purposes (website, industry directory), you can write without prior consent—provided the message is truly relevant to the recipient's business profile. Example: contacting a purchasing specialist with a question about the market situation related to their industry.
Follow-up after industry events. If someone provided a business card or contact information at a trade show, conference, or meeting, contact is permitted as long as it's in the subject line and consistent with the context of the conversation. Remember the obligation to provide information, and it's a good idea to thank them for their previous contact and ask if they'd like to follow up in the first message.
General company addresses (e.g., "info@," "biuro@"). PKE and GDPR permit communication to email addresses not assigned to a natural person. Such contact generally does not constitute direct advertising to an individual, provided the content is relevant to the company's business.
An existing relationship. Communication regarding products/services similar to those previously transacted may be appropriate. Always provide a simple way to opt out of further communications.
Legitimate interest in B2B relationships. A proposal for cooperation between companies that may be mutually beneficial (e.g., to a purchasing agent) is sometimes considered to be acting within the framework of legitimate interest – therefore, under certain conditions, contact may be established without prior consent.
LinkedIn is a "gray zone." It's a platform with its own rules and community practices. Sending messages is sometimes tolerated, but it doesn't formally replace the requirements of electronic communications and data protection regulations.
Transparency and information obligations. The purposes of contact data processing must be clearly stated and the recipient must be informed of their rights (e.g., withdrawal of consent, deletion of data).
Easy unsubscribe mechanisms. Every marketing message should include a clear and immediate unsubscribe process. Failure to do so increases the risk of complaints and deliverability issues.
▪️Legal basis for prospecting under the Electronic Communications Law:
The provision of the Electronic Communications Law (PKE) of November 10, 2024 clearly states:
It is prohibited to use:
automatic calling systems,
telecommunications terminal equipment, in particular as part of the use of interpersonal communication services for the purpose of sending commercial information within the meaning of the provisions of the Act of 18 July 2002 on the provision of services by electronic means (Journal of Laws of 2020, item 344 and of 2024, item 1222), including direct marketing, to the subscriber or end user, unless he or she has previously given his or her consent.
The consent referred to in paragraph 1 may be expressed by the subscriber or end user providing an electronic address identifying him or her within the meaning of the Act of 18 July 2002 on the provision of services by electronic means, for the purpose of sending commercial information to the electronic address provided by the subscriber or end user.
The use of the means referred to in paragraph 1 to send commercial information, including direct marketing, may not be at the expense of the end user or subscriber.
The action referred to in paragraph 1 constitutes an act of unfair competition within the meaning of the provisions of the Act of 16 April 1993 on Combating Unfair Competition (Journal of Laws of 2022, item 1233).
🔹 Summary
Prospecting is a great tool, but it must be implemented wisely. Today, thanks to the many tools available in the SaaS model, as well as AI, it can be done very well and affordably.
It allows you to acquire great business clients at a low cost, so you can grow your business.
Which is what I wish for myself and for you.
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