When I was a kid, we took a field trip to a water filtration plant. After lunch, a guide gave us a cut-open plastic bottle and had us build our own water filters out of gravel, sand, and charcoal.
When I was writing my last post, I was thinking about that field trip and building that filtration system. It maps surprisingly well to prospecting. I promise I’m not grasping at straws here. Hear me out. Finding the right companies and people at those companies is basically like building a filtration system.
The gravel
The gravel comes first because it catches all of the bigger stuff. In prospecting, those are the hard nos, the rules that immediately disqualify a potential prospect. Wrong size, wrong market, already a customer, whatever I’ve decided is a non-negotiable.
A hard no is a no. There’s no weighing it against anything else, and nothing further down the filter can undo it.
The sand
Once a company passes the obvious tests, I need to know whether it’s actually a good fit.
This is where the details matter. The economics. Who’s their customer? Are they currently using a product like the one I’m selling? And does what I actually sell make sense for their business?
I try not to think of fit as pass or fail. That’s what the gravel does. Mine works more like weighted tiers. Some fit factors are going to carry more weight than others, but enough smaller fit factors could potentially outweigh one larger one.
The charcoal
And then we get to the charcoal, which is to me the most interesting part of the system.
Gravel and sand filter by size. They physically trap whatever’s too big to pass through. Charcoal works differently. It filters by adsorption, smaller stuff actually sticks to its surface. This is my signal layer.
What’s happening at this company that gives me a reason to talk to them right now?
Maybe they’re hiring, maybe they’ve launched something new, maybe they’re expanding, maybe there’s a problem that’s visible from the outside. It could be job postings, customer complaints, changes happening within the business, or something else that gives me actual evidence of a problem or a reason why now.
The three questions
Boiled down, each layer is answering a different question:
Gravel — Can I sell to them? Hard eligibility.
Sand — Should I sell to them? Structural fit.
Charcoal — Why should I talk to them now? Observable signal.
By the time a company makes it all the way through the three layers, I don’t just have a company that fits my ICP. I have a company that passes my hard rules, that I actually know is a fit, and I actually have a reason to reach out to.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read: The List Is the Problem, Not the Message