The Problem: Every List Took an Hour, and the Roster Kept Growing

Dynamic Search Consulting works both sides of executive search. They place executives into companies, and they help executives find positions when they are contemplating moving on. Either they have a candidate and need the right company, or they have the company and need the right candidate. Both directions start with building a list.

As the client roster grew, that hunt started eating the week. “We were just spending a ton of time on list building. You know how that is. It can be extremely time consuming, doing it manually.”

Around an hour a list, many lists a week, and the work scaling with every client they signed. The ordinary answer to that is to hire someone to build lists.

David Kant hired a GTM engineer instead. Justin Hanson of Honed Insight came in to rebuild the infrastructure underneath the outreach, on the theory that predictable list building should not be a role at all.

That bet only pays off if the tooling can be trusted to run alone, and the stack in place could not be. DSC had been on Seamless, which Justin inherited and never developed confidence in. They considered Apollo. They tested Smartlead’s data product across a number of lists and set it aside. Many of the alternatives had volume without control. “The filters and stuff are just not as easy and simple to use, and they’re usually more cumbersome to use from an API perspective.”

The constraint was never whether the data existed. Every list needed a person to build it, and every batch of emails needed a person to check it before anything went out.

The Fix: Data He Stopped Checking, on an API He Could Build On

Start with the part that made the rest possible.

“If it says verified, I have so much confidence in it that I don’t even really verify anymore. I always start with Prospeo as that saves DSC the most resources.”

Justin Hanson (Honed Insight), GTM Engineer, Dynamic Search Consulting

Verification is a paid step and a human decision. Justin removed both from the Prospeo half of his pipeline. Records that come back without an email go into a Clay waterfall, and every one of those he still verifies, every time.

A pipeline you have to inspect is not automated. That is why the next two things mattered.

• An API built for people building automations. The detail Justin keeps returning to is the JSON preview. “You can click a button and see the JSON for the API. That feature is so nice when you’re building automations, because you can actually see what the software needs when you’re inputting the JSON.” No guesswork, and no searching through API documentation.
• Filters precise enough to define an audience once. Exact job titles or similar titles, industries, recent funding, bulk import of title lists instead of typing them in. “You can tell you’ve worked with GTM engineers and lead gen people to find the categories that are most important.”

Then he walks away from it. “I just start it, I close Clay, and I work on other stuff.”

Prospeo is DSC’s main B2B database, so local businesses and anything outside B2B get sourced somewhere else. Everything DSC sells into is B2B, so it has not come up.

The Results: An Hour to 15 Minutes, Zero Verification, No Additional Hires

Asked what an hour of old-fashioned list building costs now, Justin put it at around fifteen minutes from start to finish, and said it twice. “If you really had your stuff together and you wanted to do it fast, you could probably do it in under 15 minutes of total attention for established ICPs.”

He credits the whole system for that, the Prospeo API together with the automations he built on top of it.

The figure covers the whole pipeline, not just Prospeo. Records Prospeo does not return an email for still go through Clay verification, so both are in the number. Either way, strict bounce rate has stopped being a variable Justin tracks for the most part. “I don’t really worry about that anymore because it’s so low.” What he watches instead is sender reputation, infrastructure and inbox management, and he explains the reallocation in the sharpest line of the interview.

“If you’re at a 9.8 with one aspect of your process and the others are nowhere near that, you’re obviously going to focus on the stuff that needs to improve.”

Justin Hanson (Honed Insight), Dynamic Search Consulting

DSC pays for Prospeo and Clay, and allots essentially no budget to list building.

“You want your software to become another person, and that’s what Prospeo basically did. It allowed us to save money, save time, and not have to hire another person to worry about things that software and automations can take care of.”

Justin Hanson (Honed Insight), Dynamic Search Consulting

What’s Next

The hours that went into list building now go into scraping, signal detection, testing and campaign work.

“If I were making and verifying lists all day, I wouldn’t be able to create a lot of the automations I’m currently creating for scraping and finding information and doing really remarkable and fun things within the actual email campaigns.”

Justin Hanson (Honed Insight), Dynamic Search Consulting

He still watches copy. He still watches sender reputation and infrastructure, because those are the parts that need constant tweaking. For the bulk of his campaigns, data quality is not on the list, and has not been since the day he stopped verifying data from Prospeo.

His advice to anyone choosing a data foundation:

“The best software is one you buy and it works so well you forget about it. When I get in my car, I don’t want it to have issues. I want to enjoy driving and not be awake at night thinking about my car. That’s what Prospeo does. I don’t think about it. If you want to mess around and potentially worry about list building, then don’t go with Prospeo.”

Justin Hanson (Honed Insight), Dynamic Search Consulting