Prospecting - how to acquire business customers automatically, regularly and cheaply?

Prospecting, or how to acquire business customers in today's world?

When acquiring business (B2B) customers, prospecting is crucial - and has been for thousands of years. After all, the idea of "first find and then go to your client with the perfect offer and proposal" has been the basis of trade and doing business since forever!

Today we can do it faster, more efficiently and based on automation.

Below you will receive a practical guide: from personas and UVP, through message templates and follow-up sequences, to legal compliance and email deliverability.

What is prospecting?

It's actively reaching out to people and companies who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) but don't know you yet - via email, phone, LinkedIn, SMS

It comes from the English "prospect" - it's simply someone who meets the criteria of an ideal client who has not had contact with you.

Where does prospecting work and where does it not?

Where it works: B2B

Prospecting works with any type of B2B cooperation: both small companies and large corporations.

In corporations, to win large contracts, you need to have a brand and industry position - but even the largest organizations regularly buy smaller services from small companies. And this is our chance not only for now - it is 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. with photovoltaics) to random people are over - today it is a recipe for penalties.

At this point, Big Tech advertising systems (Facebook, Google, TikTok), SEO and building organic reach in social media work much better in B2C.

What is the most important principle 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!”

It doesn't matter whether new tools will appear in the future - this approach simply converts and brings results. To succeed here, 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 write down what specific solution we have for a specific type of client. Importantly, one that we can also earn as a company.

How to create personas? Real knowledge is the basis.

Personas must result from our business model and market realities.

Regularly collect and update customer data: from marketing, sales, support and service. Combine them into one coherent picture (in accordance with the principles of knowledge management). It is very important that this information is real and true.

There are many patterns for creating personas, but the most important are:

Demographics: age, place of residence, gender.
Psychographics: personality, values, interests, motivations, lifestyle.
Professional situation: type and size of company, position, industry, etc.
Goals/needs: what is the real need of the organization and the individual.
Problems: what irritates, 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 us to acquire such a customer in total? We include the salesperson's work, marketing, prospecting tools, etc.
LTV (customer lifetime value): estimate net revenue over the customer relationship and separately calculate delivery and servicing costs. For acquisition economics, use the customer contribution after these costs, with an explicit time horizon and assumptions.
Acquisition ROI = (customer contribution before acquisition costs − CAC) / CAC × 100%. This simplified measure concerns acquisition spending, not the company’s overall margin. Hypothetical example: net revenue of PLN 10,000, delivery and servicing costs of PLN 6,000 and CAC of PLN 1,000 leave PLN 3,000 after these costs, giving acquisition ROI of 300%. This is not company net profit: remaining overheads, taxes and the timing of future cash flows still matter.

💡 What's important - you don't have to force it all. If we don't know something, we don't enter it on a whim. It's better to have an empty space than to enter made-up information - which may later be duplicated by people in our organization.

How many prospecting people should you have?

In many industries, 3-4 people are enough.

It happens that in companies with tens of millions of zlotys in turnover, there is only one.

💡The most important thing - it's not worth creating personas for the sake of creating personas. This is not a college assignment.

Creating and sending messages in prospecting

Development of values

UVP (Unique Value Proposition) is a unique set of features of your brand that are valuable to the customer and are offered by no one else on the market.

A strong UVP is stronger than the most creative campaign - it is what causes people to choose your brand in a saturated market.

According to Millward Brown research, over 10 years:

with a similar scope of activities and marketing budget, brands with strong UVP grew by 168%, while those with weak UVP only grew by 27%.
brands with poor marketing activities still grew by 76% if they had good UVP

There is more about this in this article:https://www.jakubgolebiowski.pl/post/uvp-usp-unique-selling-proposition

Development of the offer

Once we know our customers, it is worth preparing an offer for them with an ideal solution, but also told in their language. This is called mimicry.

A subtle reflection of the client's posture, gestures and language builds a sense of understanding. Research showed that waiters who repeated what guests said when ordering received higher tips. Retail salespeople achieved better conversions when they subtly adjusted the way they spoke and gestured.

It's not magic, it's a neurological signal: "he is like me and understands me."

The communication examples below apply only where you have a lawful basis for that contact. Switching channels or personalising a message does not replace required consent. See the legal section below.

Shipping: 4 main approaches

Spray and pray – you sow widely and pray. This is a situation where we present the offer very broadly: we set large target groups and broad personas in prospecting tools. This is a poor strategy because anti-spam filters (today powered by AI) learn and analyze content quickly, so a large volume ends up in spam. In addition, the accuracy of the message 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, proposal in the first message. In an e-mail, text message or on LinkedIn, we write briefly: what we deliver, what the business effect will be and whether the recipient wants to talk immediately. Often, 3-4 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 because they do not have the time or inclination for small talk - this approach speeds up decisions and gives a quick "yes" or "no" answer.
Kissing – presence first, message later. First we follow on LinkedIn, comment and get associated, and only then we write a DM. This works in many industries, especially when the list of accounts is short, but it can be unscalable and time-consuming - so it's not for everyone.
Prospecting + marketing - the perfect duo. For me this is the optimal approach. First, we collect interest in content and campaigns (e.g. by directing people to the website), we catch purchasing signals, and then we contact these people in prospecting. Leads can be additionally "warmed up" with advertisements on LinkedIn and Facebook - precisely by positions and even specific companies. First, advertising builds awareness, then comes direct messaging.

Operate omnichannel, i.e. send wherever and whenever possible.

Omnichannel is simply a multi-channel operation.

E-mail alone is not enough these days - it is just one of the elements. That's why we operate multi-channel in prospecting: e-mail, text messages, LinkedIn. We also make phone calls and then ask: "Hi, you received a message from me - I would like to talk about possible cooperation."

Generally, people have a very short attention span and there is no reason to expect that someone will be interested in our services after one text message or one e-mail. This is rare. Usually you need to remind yourself. The more meaningful reminders

the better. The better tailored to the customer's needs, the better.

Follow-up, i.e. we are pushing ourselves to the end

One message is not enough. Good communication sequences are often 8-12 messages over a 21-30 day period.

Example:

Email (day 1)
LinkedIn + follow (day 2)
SMS/Whatsapp (day 4)
Email no. 2 (day 7)
Comment/reaction (day 10)
Telephone (day 14)
Email no. 3 (day 18)
Final follow-up (day 25)

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).

Nowadays, anti-spam filters are surprisingly smart, they have AI implemented and quickly detect repetitive messages. To improve this, it is worth considering:

Get technical about your domain configuration: SPF + DKIM + DMARC.
Add "one-click unsubscribe" in the headers (List-Unsubscribe + List-Unsubscribe-Post according to RFC 8058) - today required for mass senders via Gmail/Yahoo and enforced (requirements from 02-06.2024).
Limit the number of messages you send. Send only to those who really show promise.
Slowly increasing shipping. Launching a campaign on a fresh domain en masse is a recipe for a spam filter. The boxes look at: daily volume, growth rate, complaints, rebounds.

There are a few more tricks and I talk about them in more detail during prospecting training: www.jakubgolebiowski.pl/szkolenie-prospecting.

What else is important in prospecting?

Lead qualification

Qualification is a simple check of the client: whether we can help them and whether we can make money from it. Not everyone who has money is your customer. At the same time, the ideal client without money is also not promising.

Therefore, it is worth introducing even simple scoring (customer value assessment system).

The simplest example:

Scale 0–100:
Company Alignment (0-40) + Role (0-20) + Timing (0-20) + Intent Signals (0-20).
The threshold for sending an offer and starting work for 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 it's worth segmenting. This allows you to scale personalization without writing 500 unique messages.

The most important thing in segmentation is to define specific target groups - people in business who will like our solution and from whom we can make money.

We divide it into groups. Then we write and prepare one type of content for one group, and another type of content for the other group. It is very important in segmentation to really respond to customers' needs and to ensure that the content is precisely written for their situation.

It's good to have a separate landing page, separate offers, separate marketing materials, separate automations.

This allows you to "surround" 500-1000 customers with the same offer and maximize your activities in relation to the time needed to produce results.

Research on purchasing signals

These are signs that someone is looking for something - preferably services like yours. These are not only website entries, but also: funding, recruitment, staff changes, website technologies, lists of event participants, social media, etc. 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),
lists of event participants.
participation in fairs
social media.

What are the prospecting tools?

CRM - an absolute must-have.

Without a decent CRM (segments, contact statuses, integrations), prospecting turns into chaos. A notebook or Excel wastes time and energy.

Any good CRM will do - 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 that's great, but sometimes you can also do it with Zapier.

Important: proof and materials!

Before you start prospecting, before you start sending information to people, it is worth preparing a template for them to make decisions.

Often, the people we write to do not make decisions. They have to take our offer further and ask the manager's superior and the board.

If we do not have a good website that serves as a basis for what we do, we do not have case studies, we do not have video materials explaining, for example, how our service works, how it can benefit and help our client, then even when we get a good lead, even when we give it to him and convince him, we will not give him the tools to go to his superiors and advertise us, he will simply sell us.

Many people nowadays, before making a decision in B2B, spend 70-80% of their time researching information on their own and only then contact us. We have to be ready for this.

Process and consistency are the key

Business is all about delayed gratification. What we do today translates into months and years ahead. What we don't do - too.

Think like this:

The hunters caught the game and immediately had food.
The farmer had to sow, take care of it, and wait for months for the result.

Who built our civilization? Farmers. It's the same in business - those who only think "here and now" usually don't build great things.

It's the same in sales: a message today may pay off in a month, a quarter or a year. It is important to be "on the radar" in times of need and decision.

How to calculate conversion from contact to customer

Define the denominator for every percentage. Here is a hypothetical example for 1,000 contacts you have a lawful basis to approach with marketing:

Replies: 10% of all 1,000 contacts = 100 people.
Conversations: 40% of the 100 respondents = 40 people.
Proposals: 80% of the 40 conversations = 32 proposals.
Contracts: 25% of the 32 proposals = 8 customers.

Overall conversion is 0.8% of contacts. Email opens may be monitored separately, but are not the denominator here or proof of interest. This is illustrative arithmetic, not a forecast. A larger list may fit less well and the team’s capacity may limit results.

Is prospecting legal?

Researching companies and assessing fit are part of prospecting. Before marketing outreach, check the lawful basis for contact, the channel and the rules in the relevant country.

In Poland, Article 398 of the Electronic Communications Law requires prior consent for using the communication means it specifies to send commercial information, including direct marketing. A B2B recipient or a generic company inbox does not automatically remove this requirement.

What should you check before contacting someone?

The purpose for which the address was provided. Article 398(2) permits consent through providing an electronic address for receiving commercial information. An address on a contact page does not by itself imply consent to any marketing.
The agreed scope. A request for a proposal or follow-up should be handled within that request. A business card, previous purchase or profile follow does not automatically authorise an unlimited message sequence.
Personal data obligations. A GDPR basis for processing personal data is distinct from consent required for communications. Legitimate interest under GDPR does not replace required PKE consent.
Withdrawal and records. Record the basis and scope of contact, meet information duties and respect withdrawal or objection. An unsubscribe link does not make an initial message lawful if prior consent was required and absent.

Do not plan a campaign around the assumption that a relevant offer will not upset anyone. Enforcement can include administrative proceedings, not just a recipient’s lawsuit. Have the specific campaign checked, particularly across countries or channels. These are general pointers, not a legal opinion on an individual campaign.

Sources: Electronic Communications Law, Article 398; GDPR, particularly Articles 6, 13–14 and 21; an example of UKE administrative enforcement under the preceding legislation.

Summary

Prospecting is a great tool, but it must be implemented wisely. Today - thanks to many tools available in the SaaS model, as well as thanks to AI - you can do it really well and cheaply.

It allows you to acquire great business customers at a low cost, so you can grow your business.

What I wish for both myself and you.

Frequently asked questions

What is B2B prospecting?

Prospecting systematically identifies potential customers who fit an offer and develops opportunities for cooperation. It includes research and qualification, while communication must comply with rules for the relevant country and channel.

How do you define an ideal prospect?

Connect the problem you solve with the company type, decision-maker and economics of working together. Validate criteria using real conversations and sales outcomes rather than an imagined profile.

How should you write an initial prospecting message?

Where contact is permitted, briefly explain the reason, potential value and one next step. Avoid artificial personalisation and claims you cannot substantiate.

How can you plan follow-ups without becoming intrusive?

Each message should add context or useful information rather than merely demand a reply. Use a limited sequence and respect objections, opt-outs and channel rules.

Does a public company email address permit unsolicited offers?

Publication alone does not automatically establish marketing consent. In Poland, Article 398 of the Electronic Communications Law and the purpose of publication matter; relevance or a B2B label does not by itself make contact lawful. Art. 398 PKE.

How should prospecting performance be measured?

Track qualified responses, conversations, proposals and won contracts together with labour costs. Compare segments and contact sources; message volume alone does not establish profitability.

Prospecting - how to acquire business customers automatically, regularly and cheaply?

What is prospecting?