Are you net-fishing or spear-fishing?
Corey Quinn
Founder, Deep Specialization™
How smaller lists generate bigger results in agency outbound...
The biggest mistake agencies make with outbound:
Starting with the wrong list.
When I was building Scorpion from $20M to $150M, we discovered that most outbound campaigns fail before they even begin—because they target too many of the wrong prospects.
I call it "net fishing" vs. "spear fishing":
Net Fishing:
Get a list of 10,000 potential clients
Send them generic emails
Hope for a 0.1% response rate
Burn your domain reputation in the process
Spear Fishing:
Identify just 20-30 perfect-fit prospects
Research each one deeply
Send them highly personalized gifts
Follow up with precision
The net-fishing approach treats your total addressable market (TAM) like a commodity to be blasted. The spear-fishing approach treats them like human beings worthy of your attention.
With gift-based outbound, your ROI comes from quality, not quantity. We spent $25-75 per gift, which means we couldn't afford to waste them on poor-fit prospects.
The perfect outbound list is small enough that you can give each prospect your full attention, but large enough to hit your growth targets.
Quality over quantity. Always.
CQ
About Corey Quinn
Founder, Deep Specialization™
Corey helps founder-led agencies scale through Deep Specialization™ and programmatic M&A. Former CMO of Scorpion ($20M to $200M). Author of "Anyone, Not Everyone."
