Method, not
marketing.
How to define a market that returns companies worth calling, how evidence should be scored and dated, and what this category quietly gets wrong. Written by the people who build it.
What a subject access request costs when you bought the list
Provenance is not a field you can backfill.
The clock is one month, the first copy is free, and you have to say where the data came from. That last requirement is the one that cannot be met retroactively — and a €220,000 decision in Poland shows what happens when a company decides the alternative is too expensive.
Read it“Verified” email is a category error
Verification asks a receiving server whether an address exists. Catch-alls answer yes to everything, greylisting answers not now, and enterprise gateways refuse to answer at all. The word promises knowledge the check cannot produce.
6 min readThe AI Act probably does not regulate your lead scoring
Annex III lists eight areas of high-risk AI use, and sales prospecting is in none of them. The obligation that does land on a go-to-market stack is smaller, more specific, and mostly about the chat widget — while the law that actually governs scoring people is seven years old.
6 min readDeliverability is a precondition, not a tactic
Since the bulk-sender rules came into force, an unauthenticated send is not a worse send — it is a rejected one. The requirements are short, public and testable, and most of the work happens weeks before the first email.
6 min readCold email into the EU: what legitimate interest actually covers
Legitimate interest is a real lawful basis for B2B outreach in most of Europe. It is also not the only law that applies, and in two countries it does not help you at all. Here is the map, and the paperwork that has to exist before the first send.
6 min readHow to write an ICP that returns companies worth calling
Most ideal customer profiles are demographics with a logo attached. Here are the four parts of one that actually filters — and why anti-signals do most of the work.
8 min readWhat actually counts as evidence for a buying signal
Three tests a claim has to pass before it earns a place on a list: a date, an openable source, and a stated link between them. Everything else is a guess with formatting.
6 min readWhy most intent data is noise, and what to keep
Topic surge scores rest on two assumptions that stopped holding: that an IP identifies an employer, and that reading about a subject predicts buying it. Here is what survives.
5 min readThe anti-signals worth disqualifying a company on
Every team can list what a good prospect looks like. Almost none can list what a bad one looks like before the call. That second list does more work than the first.
5 min readHow to map a buying committee without guessing
Most committee maps are org charts with adjectives. Here is what can genuinely be established before first contact, what cannot, and how to keep the two apart.
5 min readThe best thing a chat widget can say is “I don’t know”
An answer nobody can check is worse than no answer at all. What it takes to build site chat that cites its sources and refuses cleanly when it has none.
5 min readFirst-party analytics: what to actually track
Most analytics setups collect hundreds of events and answer none of the questions anyone asks. A smaller schema, built backwards from the decisions it has to support.
4 min readVisitor identification: what is legal, what is possible, what is neither
The pitch is that you can learn who visited your site without them telling you. Three separate claims are bundled in that sentence, and they have very different answers.
5 min readOutreach that survives the first three seconds
The reader decides before they finish the first line. What has to be in it, why the second sentence is where most emails die, and how to test whether yours is doing any work.
4 min readA signal from March is not a signal in July
Most lead scores only ever go up, so they end up measuring database tenure rather than relevance. What it takes to make a score that fades the way the evidence does.
5 min readNo-shows are a qualification problem, not a calendar problem
Reminder emails recover the people who forgot. Most no-shows did not forget. What the show rate is actually telling you about the booking that produced it.
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