📖 A practical playbook

Build Your Own
Outreach Machine

How any professional services firm can build a fully custom prospecting, enrichment, and outreach system — using AI tools and a few affordable APIs — without buying a single list or expensive platform.

⚡ Before you start

You need two answers first.

Everything in this playbook depends on knowing exactly what you do and who you do it for. Without a clear niche, you can't define search terms, evaluate prospects, or write outreach that resonates. This isn't new advice — but it's the reason most marketing efforts fail before they start.

Once you have those two answers, building a targeted prospect list becomes straightforward. Without them, no tool or technique in this playbook will help.

Service WordPress websites
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Audience Museums & historical societies
=
You can build a list Every US museum with a website → your prospect database

Read more about finding your niche →

The 6-Stage Process

Each stage builds on the last. Hover over any stage to get a quick feel for what's involved, then click to go deeper.

Stage 1
🗂️
Build the Account List
Find every company in your target market
Start by gathering every company that matches your target market into a single spreadsheet. Use Google searches, industry directories, government databases, and LinkedIn — all city by city if needed. You're building the foundation that everything else sits on.
Stage 2
🔍
Enrich the Accounts
Find their websites, size, and LinkedIn
Once you have a list of company names, you need to fill in the blanks. What's their website? How big are they? Do they have a LinkedIn company page? This stage uses automated tools to research each company overnight so you don't have to.
Stage 3
👤
Find Your Contacts
Identify the right person at each company
Companies don't buy things — people do. This stage identifies the specific person at each company you want to reach (owner, founder, marketing director) and finds their email address and LinkedIn profile. Again, automated overnight.
Stage 4
📊
Your Data Explorer
A custom CRM built for your workflow
Instead of forcing your data into an off-the-shelf tool that doesn't quite fit, you build your own. A simple web interface that lets you browse, filter, sort, and update your prospect database exactly the way you think about it.
Stage 5
📧
Email Outreach
Send targeted campaigns at pennies per email
With a clean, enriched list and the right contacts in hand, you can send personalized email at scale. Your own campaign system — no Mailchimp subscription, no per-seat fees. Just Amazon's email service and a custom interface built around your process.
Stage 6
🔗
LinkedIn Outreach
Run connection funnels on your own terms
LinkedIn is the dominant B2B channel, but its native tools for managing outreach are terrible. This stage shows how to build your own LinkedIn workflow — connection requests, follow-up messages, and even a feed that surfaces what your prospects are posting so you can engage with them first.
How this playbook works

Three levels. You choose how deep to go.

Every concept in this playbook has three levels of detail. Start at the top and go as deep as you need — or hand the deeper levels to someone more technical.

Skim

What is this and why does it matter? A paragraph, plain English. No jargon.

Swim

The actual steps involved. What to do, in what order, clearly explained. Still no tech-speak.

Dive

The exact tools, prompts, and technical details. Accounts to set up, prompts to give Claude Code, gotchas we learned the hard way.

Example: "Find Your Contacts"
Skim
Companies don't buy things — people do. This step finds the right person at each company and gets their contact info.
Swim
1. Decide who you're looking for (owner? marketing director?)
2. Visit each company's website to find their name
3. Search for their email and LinkedIn profile
4. Score and rank by likelihood to respond
Dive
Tools: Jina Reader, Claude Haiku, Serper API, Unipile
Prompt: "Scrape the /team page and extract the Executive Director's full name and email..."
Accounts needed: Anthropic API ($5 to start), Jina free key

What you'll have when you're done

All of these tools are custom-built, owned by you, and tailored exactly to your workflow. No recurring software subscriptions. No vendor lock-in.

📋

A clean prospect database

Thousands of companies in your target market, with websites, company size, and contact info — ready to use.

🖥️

Your own data explorer

A web app you built yourself that lets you browse, filter, sort, and manage your entire prospect list.

📬

An email campaign system

Send personalized emails to segments of your list for about $0.10 per thousand. No monthly platform fees.

🔗

A LinkedIn outreach funnel

A custom interface to manage connection requests, follow-up messages, and track who's accepted.

🤖

Overnight automation

Routines that run while you sleep — enriching records, polling for new connections, and keeping your data fresh.

📰

A prospect activity feed

A live feed of what your top prospects are posting on LinkedIn so you can engage before reaching out.

This is your workflow, not ours. Everything shown here is one implementation — the one we built for a web design firm targeting museums. Claude Code can rebuild any of it to match how you think and work. The tools, the layout, the fields, the scoring logic — all of it is just a conversation away from being different.

Ready to start?

Start at the prerequisite — nailing your niche — then work through the stages in order. Each one builds on the last.

Start at the beginning →

Built with Claude Code. Every tool described here was built in real conversations — no pre-existing codebase required.