How to check a B2B prospect list: an industrial sales checklist

Write down the activity, territory, business role, exclusions, evidence requirements and accepted record unit. Use the same brief for every row. If a criterion changes, version the brief and recheck the affected records rather than quietly changing the denominator.

Fictional brief FIC-BRIEF-01, version 1: an invented component supplier wants company accounts that manufacture complete food-packaging machinery at production facilities in the Republic of Ireland. Resellers without machinery production, businesses with only an Irish sales office, existing accounts and agreed channel conflicts are outside this exercise. The batch, answer key, schema and policy carry that same brief version; the teaching ruleset is OG02-HOLD-FIRST-1.

• Accepted unit: one resolved company, not a brand, group or site. Keep its relevant facilities as supporting detail.
• Required evidence: company identity, attributable activity and production location, completed exclusion checks, and a resolved source/customer-use posture.
• Additional signal rule: an invented statement proposing additional production or assembly space qualifies as a signal only after company fit passes.
• Not required for account inclusion: an active project. Equipment compatibility, buying need, procurement authority and package availability remain unknown.

This is an analyst-authored exercise policy, not a universal industry standard or an agreed commercial specification. For discovery and list-building, use the Irish manufacturing account-research guide. This page starts with a supplied batch and asks whether its handoff counts can be defended.

1. Preserve the input. Assign a stable row ID. Keep the original batch, supplied label, unit and evidence card; record the resolved company separately. A brand-origin or site-origin row can later anchor an attributed company without changing its original supplied unit. Do not guess its operator or carry earlier activity, location or exclusion passes onto a newly resolved company without rechecking them.
2. Resolve within-batch duplication. Choose one company anchor after reviewing all related rows. Each confirmed surplus row points directly to that anchor with the evidence for the relationship. A second site stays attached to the company; it does not add an account. Shared group membership or similar wording alone is insufficient to merge companies.
3. Consolidate evidence before classifying. A duplicate may add a useful site or expose a contradiction. Retain the original cards and document the consolidated assessment separately. Gate cells on linked rows represent that same consolidated assessment, not independent votes. A stale mismatch is a validation error, not permission to discard evidence. If FIC-R03 adds an unresolved activity contradiction, mark both activity and evidence consistency as conflict across FIC-R01–03 and give FIC-R01 the next check: the anchor is held, while the two identity-confirmed surplus rows remain duplicates. If identity itself becomes uncertain, withdraw the duplicate assertion and hold the affected unresolved candidates instead.
4. Apply the hard gates. Check identity, activity, territory, exclusions, intended source use and material consistency. Under this conservative exercise rule, any unresolved material gate means hold, even if another gate fails. Once uncertainties are resolved, a positively failed criterion means reject. All gates passing on a company anchor means include.
5. Keep the policy local to this exercise. Hold-before-reject is a deliberately conservative teaching choice, not a universal instruction to spend time clearing every already-excluded candidate. Real briefs must specify their own stopping and rejection rules. Do not mix decisions from different policies or brief versions in one count.
6. Classify only included anchors. Use industry-matched for account fit without a qualifying signal, and opportunity-signal only with the additional signal evidence. A priority score cannot fill missing evidence, rescue an excluded company or manufacture a signal.

Duplicate

A confirmed surplus reference to a retained company anchor. It is neither another included account nor another rejected account.

Include

A unique company anchor meeting every required account gate in this exercise. This is not delivery, marketing or contact permission.

Hold

An unresolved candidate, with a concrete next verification question. It may not yet represent a distinct company.

Reject

A retained candidate with a positively failed brief criterion after material uncertainties are resolved. Keep the reason; the failure is specific to this brief.

The deduplication boundary here is this supplied batch only. Existing-account exclusions are a separate check against the buyer's agreed records. A clean batch is not a claim that no duplicate exists elsewhere in a CRM or licensed platform.

All rows below are fictional. Download the full fictional batch to inspect each invented evidence card and gate. Source-use passes stipulate simulated internal review, retention and customer-facing summary sharing; they grant no real permissions. Internal access alone is insufficient, as FIC-R11 demonstrates. Company-specific exclusions remain unknown while the operator is unresolved in FIC-R09 and FIC-R13. Source URLs and source dates are blank because no real sources exist.

On a small screen, scroll the table horizontally or focus its region and use the arrow keys to read every column.

Three decisions worth challenging

Why is the second workshop not a second inclusion? FIC-R03 supplies another site of the already counted FIC-C01. The company-level handoff keeps both FIC-S01 and FIC-S02 under FIC-R01. If the buyer needs a facility schedule, add that separate view; do not relabel a site total as companies.

Why are B and C not merged? The invented evidence identifies FIC-C02 and FIC-C03 as separate companies. Shared FIC-G01 group membership does not undo that distinction. The unit is company, not corporate group.

Why hold H rather than reject it? Its evidence does not establish machinery production, but also does not positively establish an excluded business role. The next question is whether this company manufactures complete food-packaging machinery at the identified Irish workshop. A persuasive description or high score would not answer it.

The editable answer key gives every row's reason, duplicate pointer, class and next check. Hold questions cover operator identity, production activity, permitted use and contradictory location evidence; they are not instructions to contact a person.

Use this identity only when the dispositions are mutually exclusive and cover every supplied row:

Supplied rows = duplicate rows + included company anchors + held rows + rejected rows.

For this fictional batch: 14 = 2 + 4 + 5 + 3. Setting aside two confirmed surplus references from the company count leaves twelve retained candidate rows—not twelve verified companies. Keep all fourteen input rows in the audit trail. Some held rows still lack a resolved company identity. Check row IDs as well as totals: omitting one row and repeating another can leave the arithmetic balanced but the audit wrong.

The included view contains four distinct company keys: FIC-C01, FIC-C02, FIC-C03 and FIC-C12. Its classes reconcile separately: 4 = 3 industry-matched + 1 opportunity-signal. Duplicates, holds and rejects carry no included research class. These are exercise inclusion counts, not records approved for delivery.

FIC-R01 and FIC-R14 are not assessed for projects because that is not required. FIC-R05 has a bounded fictional review with no qualifying signal identified; that does not mean no project exists. FIC-R04 has an invented proposed expansion, not a verified purchase requirement. These distinctions follow the research-class definitions.

This deliberately mixed-quality teaching batch does not represent the service's 90/10 offer-mix target. That target is not a guarantee, and the exercise must not be reclassified to imitate it. Neither these counts nor any derived fraction is a vendor quality benchmark.

Keep buyer-owned effort separate from acceptance

The blank worksheet leaves nonnegative review and correction time for you to supply. Label each as measured or estimated in its separate basis field; any estimated input makes the total estimated. Total effort is their sum only when both inputs are known. Minutes per included company is total effort divided by the included-company count only when that count is greater than zero. With an unknown input or no included companies, report not calculable, not zero or infinity.

These are workload-planning inputs, not ROI, conversion forecasts or a claim that one sourcing approach always wins. For the broader choice, compare licensed platforms, in-house work and analyst research against the same written brief.

The fictional result is a candidate included view of four companies plus unresolved work, not a verdict that an entire commercial order has been fulfilled. No minimum batch size, correction allowance or acceptance threshold is assumed. Agree those terms separately.

• Included view: one row per company, source-supported inclusion reasons, project status and unresolved non-gating questions; preserve linked sites.
• Duplicate trail: every surplus row, its anchor and same-company evidence. This keeps the supplied total explainable.
• Hold queue: the missing or conflicting fact, next verification question, internal role owner and buyer-chosen review trigger. Do not silently move holds into the included total to reach a quota.
• Rejected view: the failed rule and supporting evidence. Distinguish positive failure from lack of information.
• Review record: the brief version, input version, reconciled counts, reviewed evidence and source-use boundary, and the separate release decision.

Passing the arithmetic is necessary for this worksheet, but it cannot prove that the evidence is true or permitted for the intended use. Real acceptance still requires the agreed evidence, conflict, rights and independent review checks. Account acceptance is not equipment-fit validation, GDPR clearance, permission to contact anyone or a promise of buying intent.

The single-account examples and field template show the detail inside a record. Use them alongside this batch audit rather than replacing the account evidence with a summary total.

• Wholly fictional mixed-quality batch (CSV) — input records, invented evidence and explicit gate states.
• Fictional answer key (CSV) — dispositions, rationales, classes and hold questions.
• Blank audit and handoff worksheet (CSV) — scope, reconciliation, effort and release fields with instructions, not just column headers.
• Blank fictional-practice rows (CSV) — repeat the exercise using the same field contract.
• Editable field dictionary (CSV) — definitions and permitted values.
• Fiction-only machine-readable schema (JSON) and exercise policy (JSON).
• Instructions and limitations (plain text).

Open CSV files as UTF-8, preserving identifiers as text. The batch and practice rows use a fiction-only contract: keep their labels, leave their source URLs and dates blank, and do not insert real prospects into that exercise. The separate blank audit worksheet can help define your own authorised workflow; it contains no supplied company data or automatic live-data approval.

Source and fiction taxonomy: the checklist and acceptance rules are original analyst-authored proposals; the labelled evidence cards are invented assumptions; the calculations are derived from those cards under the declared policy. Related DemandRange pages supply offer context. No competitor text, registry records or third-party data are reproduced in these downloads.

Discuss a company-research brief

Specify the activity, territory, company-versus-site unit and exclusions you need. Counts, evidence fields, class treatment and any acceptance terms remain subject to written scope. No active project is needed for the core account-research brief.