The First List
Build the list you will actually dial, in one afternoon, using the filters that hold up across 11 coaching calls.
9 minute read. Nothing to download.
1. Pick a vertical you can already talk to
The list is the part everyone freezes on, and the freeze is usually about the niche, not the filters. Two things resolve it. First, you already know one industry from your current seat, so start there. Second, do not niche hard on day one. Cast wide, take a meeting with whoever will talk, build your talk track, then get choosy once you have a process worth protecting.
What you are looking for is a pocket of the economy with a real B2B component and an existing phone habit. Construction. Insurance for outfitters. Wealth management for doctors. Archaic industries with no outbound team. The market is big enough that two independent callers almost never collide.
Ecommerce, ERP, and commoditized offers. For ecommerce specifically, one to many advertising beats one to one calling, so you are fighting the channel.
If you want a shortcut to candidate verticals, prompt Perplexity or Claude with your model and your price point and ask which industries are most phone heavy, then research from there. Pick two or three and plan to test each for a few weeks.
Ten to fifteen real target market conversations, which is roughly 2,000 to 3,000 dials. Two bad calls prove nothing.
2. Build it in Apollo
Apollo covers 90 to 95 percent of what you need and it is very good for the price. Skip the upgrade hunt: ZoomInfo is not meaningfully better and Prospeo is worse. Beginners should run Apollo plus Trellus and nothing else until there is a client paying for more.
| Filter | Set it to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Employee count | 6 to 70 | The backbone of a contract SDR list. Founders are still the right target up to about 70, and at 6 to 25 it is usually founder led sales. |
| Email status | Verified only | Verified is the best available proxy for pickup likelihood, and it matters most on your first list. |
| Funding | Venture or Series A in the last 12 months | Signals a scaling focus, and it doubles as your opener. Seed usually just funded the initial product build, so it is a weaker signal. |
| Sales department headcount | Under about 4 | Narrows toward companies that actually need outbound help rather than ones who already run it. |
| Business development titles | 0 to 1 people | A company with no business development function is a company with no outbound engine. |
| Titles to exclude | CTO | The cofounder CTO builds the product and never touches sales. Calling them burns dials. |
| Keywords | Add software and SaaS, exclude agency, services, consulting, marketing | Catches the right companies and strips the noise. |
| Revenue | Leave it off | Apollo only returns companies whose revenue it knows and silently drops the rest, so you lose good accounts you never see. |
Shops with 1 to 20 employees pick up more often but only support roughly a $4,000 to $5,000 contract. A company needs about 20 or more employees before an $8,000 deal makes sense. Filter for the deal you want.
Build filters from scratch rather than using Apollo's personas. Save each search per vertical and reuse it: build the funded list, the construction list, the broad SaaS list once, then pull them again weeks later. Save each one into a like named list so multi client dialing and reporting stay separate. One list equals one strategy.
Apollo sometimes drops your filters, so keep your excluded keywords and company URLs saved somewhere you can paste back. And if Apollo will not load at all, clear cookies and log back in.
3. When the list is not in Apollo
Some niches are not in any database. Split your world into people you can find on LinkedIn and people you cannot. For the second bucket, scrape Google Maps and call the number listed there.
For directory style niches, Clay's free Chrome extension scrapes a directory as you scroll and costs nothing. Export to CSV, enrich the domains in Apollo, then pull contacts. Apollo dedupes on a differentiator, so every imported row needs an email, a company website, or a LinkedIn URL.
Apollo's Research with AI, top right, will read each account's website or a public database against a custom prompt and write a yes or no column, for example whether a school has over 9,000 students enrolled. Then you filter to the yeses. Other tools worth knowing: OpenWebNinja, Apify, Firecrawl, Exa for conversational multi step search, and DiscoLike, which is the best of them for niche accounts because it pulls off websites.
One more research trick that pays for itself: scrape a company's job board to see which tools they actually run, then build the message off that. A company hiring SDRs is already paying for meetings, so the posting is a budget signal, not a job ad.
4. One signal, named, reused
Do not research per company. Forty minutes on a prospect who disqualifies in sixty seconds is forty minutes you could have spent dialing two hundred people off one signal.
Instead, use a scalable signal at the sequence level. A Series A closed in the last 12 months becomes one opener for everyone in the sequence: you saw they recently finished their Series A, and you work with companies that just completed funding rounds. Name the sequence after its signal so every contact in it fits the same one line pitch. Tailor to the signal, not the company.
Maybe 15 percent of a market carries a meaningful signal, which means signals alone will never give you the volume you need. They shape the message. Volume produces the meetings.
5. Stop building and start dialing
Do not over optimize. Build 200 to 300 solid contacts and start. Execution teaches you more than another hour of refinement, and there is no secret tool or perfect list waiting to be found.
| Practice | Detail |
|---|---|
| List size | Build around 500 leads, enroll 100 to 200 at a time, and use net new to avoid resequencing warnings. |
| Dial method | Power dial the first two sequence steps, marked high priority in Apollo tasks. Parallel dial the later, lower priority steps. |
| Timing | Use the dialer's time zone filter and default to 9 to 5 their local time. Best days are Tuesday through Thursday. Worst are Monday morning and Friday afternoon. |
| Resting a list | Space attempts out. One 100 person list called five times, rested two weeks, then re dialed, produced four more meetings on the second pass. |
| Hygiene | Set an Apollo workflow so a bad or wrong number disposition auto removes the contact from all sequences and adds them to a list. Never edit an Apollo record on a referral, it changes the contact system wide. Look the referred person up and add them separately. |
800 to 1,000 parallel dials a day, and a realistic capacity of about two hours of dialing per client per day. Land your first clients on volume and execution, not on a perfect list or script.
6. What this costs you
Do not sweat credit spend. Spending $200 to $500 on data to fulfill a $5,000 contract keeps your margin above 90 percent, so tooling cost is negligible against even one client.
Waterfall enrichment is how you fix bad phone numbers: Apollo checks itself first, then providers in the order you set. Because per provider cost adds up fast, reserve it for smaller tailored lists rather than running it across everything.
A normal 1,000 person list returns roughly 10 to 15 percent P1s. A niche government data list came back at 7 percent, the lowest seen, and marketers around 9 percent. Some markets are simply hard to validate. That is the market, not your list.
Do this in the next hour
- 1Pick the one vertical you already understand from your current seat.
- 2Build the Apollo search with the filter table above. Save it, named after the vertical.
- 3Cut it to 200 to 300 verified contacts and stop refining.
- 4Pick your one signal and name the sequence after it.
- 5Put the first 100 into a sequence and dial tomorrow between 9 and 5 their time.
This is the free version. The program is where you get the lists, the scripts, and someone checking your calls.
