My deal outreach automation attempt

January 22, 2025

by a searcher from Marquette University in Louisville, KY, USA

There seems to be interest across the board on how to automate outreach for a proprietary search so I thought I'd socialize my results for the benefit of the community. Here goes:

1- I gained access to a proprietary tool to scrape the Secretary of State in Kentucky where I live. My primary goal of that data was to access the names of registered officers, date of incorporation and if they were in good standing.
2- I used Chatgpt to reformat the excel sheet to break out data points (like officers) that had multiple entries in a single cell. For example, 5 officers in a single cell which represent 5 unique potential contact points and should have their own row and data set.
3- Fumbled with multiple enrichment tools like Apollo.io et al before landing on Lutra.ai. I used this to find the website and linkedin profiles of individual officers as well as industry information and employee range. The LinkedIn profile url enrichment had moderate success but might be due to officers no longer being active with the company
4- Enrich with Apollo.io and Coldlytics for email information.

What I'd like to do next:
- confirm data with Google maps for location and social media sites
- build some form of sequencing for search to fill in data that the first tool was not able to garner.

The above 4 steps got me to a usable data set from which to start an outreach campaign. I'll post my luck with the outreach automation process once complete along with an idea of total cost. I've also been coming across platforms built by entrepreneurs to try and solve for the incredible amount of time wasted in a search, proprietary or otherwise. Seems like a burgeoning opportunity for Agent AI.

I'd love feedback from the community on this for the benefit of all. Thanks.

Reply by a searcher
from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA

Interesting, I like the approach. Some questions:

1. What was the name of the tool (if you don't mind) for the Secretary of State website?

2. Did you do any filtering by industry, # of employees, revenue, etc...or just pull al the available information? My guess is it would be too much data otherwise.

3. How much did it cost you just to get the point where you have a list?

Even the brokers I've spoken to don't really have a good sense of how to build their pipelines through proprietary outreach. Agree that it could potentially be a huge opportunity whether through AI or something else.

Reply by a searcher
from Marquette University in Louisville, KY, USA

SoS tool was built locally and doesn't have a name although I've tagge the project as "Tirekicker"... get it? Industry, employee range are enriched. revenue is less meaningful to me as that is typically a crack in the dark from something like Pitchbook et. al. I'm going to do the cost analysis this week if I can find the time. My initial POC was on a limited data set to simply prove the process and toolset. Happy to have a call if you like.

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