119: Don't Start Outbound Until You've Done This

Read time: 4min

Welcome back to The Practical Prospecting Newsletter.

There’s a built-in problem with my business. Clients pay us to generate leads—but outbound takes time to work.

So early on, it feels like they’re paying for nothing. And I used to lose clients because of it. I’ve seen teams abandon outbound entirely for the same reason.

The truth is, most people have unrealistic expectations and little patience for outbound.

But instead of trying to change the customer’s mind, I found a better fix.

That’s what today’s newsletter is about.

And if you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a 5-minute recap video:

Agenda

• You’re Missing Tons of Interested Leads

• How to Find Them

• What Tools To Use

• Final Thoughts + Checklist

You’re Missing Tons of Interested Leads

Every company has some level of brand awareness.

Whether you spend $0 on marketing or $1M…

• Someone’s talking about you.

• Someone’s following your team on LinkedIn.

• Someone just clicked on your site, saw the homepage, and bounced.

And if you do spend on marketing? Then the awareness is even stronger—you just don’t know where it’s going.

Most teams overlook this. They go straight to scraping lists and blasting cold messages to strangers.

But brand-aware leads (even if they haven’t raised their hands) are low-hanging fruit waiting to be converted with a human touch.

And everyone’s got ‘em.

How to Find Them

Here are just a few places where brand-aware leads already exist:

• Your employee network: Chances are, your team is already connected to people in your ICP from past roles or experiences.

• LinkedIn (and other social media) engagement: Likes, comments, profile visits from titles/companies that look a lot like your best customers.

• Website traffic: Anonymous hits from the right companies that never fill out a form.

• Competitor engagement: People referencing your competitor’s brand or interacting with it in communities you’re not tracking.

• Customers who changed jobs: People who used to work for one of your customers who now work somewhere else.

These are people who already have context. They’ve heard your name or are at least familiar with your niche. They’re not ice-cold.

Now you just need the tools to find them.

What Tools To Use

Here’s a list of tools that make this kind of prospecting possible:

For social + website signals

• Common Room

• Warmly

• Vector

• RB2B

• Trigify

For mapping relationships + intent

• Sales Navigator (filter 1st-degree connections)

• The Swarm

• Clay.com

You don’t need all of these. Start with one or two.

The key is to stop treating everyone like a stranger when they’ve already bumped into your brand.

Final Thoughts + Checklist

When I onboard a new outbound client, we always run these “brand-aware” plays first.

We identify the top tools and channels to find leads who have already interacted with their brand in some way—directly or indirectly.

Then we write messaging that reflects that familiarity. No generic intros.

Just: “Hey, saw you checked out [product] last week—curious what caught your eye?”

In the beginning, it’s not just about getting meetings. It’s about getting momentum.

Because cold outbound takes time.

There’s list building, domain warmup, copy testing, etc.

Results compound, but they don’t spike overnight.

Brand-aware outreach helps fill that gap while the machine spins up.

By the way, if you’re a B2B company and want my team to set this up for you, reply to this email or book time here. 

Thanks for reading,

Jed