Proprietary Deal Flow / Lead Gen Resource

professional profile

March 13, 2025

by a professional from INSEAD in Denver, CO, USA

Hey all -

I've had a ton of people ask about lead gen and generating deal flow through outreach, so I threw my brain into a PDF for you all to use. It has instructions on setting up domains, finding leads via multiple data sources, and putting it all together into campaigns (with instructions for custom videos for the overachievers). We're working with a search fund right now and got 14 interested sellers in the last 10 days for them. $99 a pop but it supports my own entrepreneurial/business ownership endeavors :)

https://www.dealbuff.co/proprietary-deals-guide

I'm happy to do "office hours" for anyone on here who needs an extra hand implementing this stuff too.

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commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA
That makes sense—focusing on what’s within your control. I have mixed feelings about reply and interest rates overall. My approach has been much more targeted (~250 leads over 3 months), but my reply rate is also significantly higher (~24%).

Even with this approach, I’ve found that interest alone doesn’t equal a good fit. I’ve had to pass on more than half of my leads based on size alone, even after an initial call. I can only imagine that this challenge would be even more pronounced with a volume-based approach, where you’d have to sift through a much higher number of misaligned leads.

I also think it depends a lot on the industry—some industries naturally have more potential sellers, making high-volume outreach more viable. But in others, it can dilute efficiency and create more work filtering out leads that were never a real fit in the first place.
commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA
I've seen a lot of good content out there on setting up email infrastructure and using tools like Apify for web scraping - my experience has been the hard part is putting it together in a way that makes sense for your specific use case and making changes when things don't work.

I'm curious, do you have any data around what an average top-to-bottom funnel (e.g., # of cold prospects in --> closed deal) looks like using your methodology? At the end of the day this is a binary process - either you acquire or you don't.

This is coming from someone who spends 90% of his day doing cold outreach, haha. I'm already bought in just interested if you have any stats/numbers.
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