3. Setup: Your Target List

Steps 3 through 7. Building a list of companies you have never spoken to, and finding the right people at each one. This is the cold outbound path only.

What this page is for

This is the cold outbound path. You need it when you want to reach companies that are not in your CRM and have never heard of you. If you have not exhausted the warm plays yet, come back later. Everything in the Play Library groups 1 and 2 works without any of this, and works faster.

Why it takes five steps

You are going from "companies like our customers" to "these named people with verified email addresses." A few separate jobs, in order, because each one needs the output of the last.

1. Find companies that look like the ones you win

2. Rank them, so you know where to focus

3. Find the right people at them

4. Check you can actually reach them

The two extra steps (4 and 6 below) exist because ranking and people-finding run as automations, and an automation has to be created before it can run.

The number gets smaller than you expect

Worth seeing before you start, because it explains why the first list needs to be big.

Every stage loses some. If you start with 50 companies you finish with 30 contacts, which is not enough to learn anything from. That is why the guidance below says 200 to 500.

Read this before you start

Steps 4 and 6 save automations as drafts, and a draft cannot run. If you skip publishing them, steps 5 and 7 will refuse to run and the error will point at the step that failed rather than the unpublished automation causing it. This is the single most common place people get stuck.

You need the descriptions from the Setup: Your Knowledge Base article first. These steps read them and will stop if they are missing.

Creating automations needs workspace admin access. If you do not have it, someone who does has to run steps 4 and 6. It takes them two minutes.

Step 3: Find companies

Type find target accounts. You will be asked two things.

How many

200 to 500 for a first list, for the reasons in the table above. Lightfield will look at two or three times that many candidates before screening, so this takes a while. Let it run.

What to name the list

Name it something you will recognize in three months. Every step after this one asks which list to use, and "Untitled list 4" will cost you time later.

You can also tell it to create a Target Account List, and it will move the list under Demand. If it does not land there, right-click the list and make it a Target Account List. That switches on the columns you need later: score, status, contacts, and signals.

What happens

Lightfield searches for companies matching your ideal customer description, checks each one, and throws out only the obvious mismatches. It deliberately keeps borderline companies. A weak company that ranks low later costs you nothing, while a good company thrown out early is gone for good.

Companies already in your CRM are detected and skipped, so you do not end up with duplicates. New ones are marked as never having touched your product.

When it finishes, read the list of what it rejected and why. If it threw out companies you would have kept, or kept ones you would have cut, your ideal customer description needs adjusting. This is the cheapest possible moment to discover that, and almost nobody checks.

Step 4: Set up scoring

Type create the score prospect account automation.

This builds the thing that scores one company against your criteria and records three pieces of information: a number out of 100, a set of labels describing what is notable about them, and a short written explanation of the score.

It saves as a draft. Open it, run it once, check the output, publish it. Step 5 cannot use a draft.

Step 5: Score the list

Type score the target account list and name the list.

Why bother scoring at all

Because you cannot work 400 companies with equal attention. The score ranks them so you know which to work first, and gives you a score, a status, and signals to sort and filter by. That ranking is what turns a flat list of 400 into a worklist.

It runs in three stages, on purpose

Scoring is expensive, so Lightfield checks in with you rather than spending it 400 times on a broken set of criteria.

Stage A is one company. Read the score and the written explanation. Does the score match your own read of that company? If not, stop and fix your criteria before continuing. The written explanation is the useful part, because it shows you whether Lightfield is actually reasoning about the company or just matching on a couple of fields. Do not wave this through. This stage exists specifically so you do not scale a mistake.

Stage B is the next ten. Look at the range of scores. If everything comes back between 70 and 75, your criteria are not distinguishing between companies, which makes the ranking useless. Go back to step 2 in the Setup: Your Knowledge Base article and put more weight on fewer things.

Stage C is the rest, in batches of 100.

Step 6: Set up people-finding

Type create the find contacts automation.

This builds the thing that finds the people at a company who match your buyer description and adds them as contacts.

Draft again. Publish it before you go on. This is the one that catches everyone. Step 7 will not run until this is published, and the message you get talks about step 7. If step 7 says it cannot run, the answer is almost always here.

Step 7: Find the people

Type find target contacts. This is where a list of companies becomes a list of people. You will be asked two things.

A list to put the people in. New or existing. Name it clearly.

Which company list to work from. The one you just scored.

It then finds people at every company on the list, roughly five each, and collects them into your contact list. Work the highest-scoring companies first.

Sequence two or three people per company, not one. If you bet a company on a single inbox you will lose some of them to someone being on holiday, or having left, or simply not being the right person after all. Multiple contacts is how you keep the company in play.

The step with no number, which matters most

Verify that you can actually reach these people, before you write a single email.

Ask the agent to run a verification pass across your contact list to confirm email addresses and LinkedIn profiles. Coverage is best when the list was built through the steps above, where enrichment has the account context to work from. A list you assemble somewhere else and bring in to enrich cold will usually come back thinner, so build it here rather than importing a raw one to fill in.

Checklist

• Company list built, 200 to 500, clearly named, set as a Target Account List

• Rejection reasons read, and they match your judgment

• Scoring automation published, not left as a draft

• Whole list scored

• People-finding automation published

• Contacts found, highest-scoring companies worked first

• Two to three people per company

Where to go next

Write and send it: the Building Sequences article. Before you send anything cold, read the Sending Safely article. If you're doing a very high volume, your sending domains need to have been warming for several weeks by the time you reach this point, so if you have not started that, start it today and run warm plays in the meantime.