Lead pipeline that skips accounts you already have

A security company's sales team was doing account research by hand - searching maps for logistics firms, checking each one against a CRM to see whether someone had already called them, and copying the details into a sheet.

I built a pipeline that does the finding and the checking.

Search terms live in a spreadsheet: segment, keyword, city, coordinates, search radius. Sales can add a row and get results without anyone opening the workflow. That matters more than it sounds - an automation only the builder can change stops being used the moment the builder is busy.

Each row becomes a maps search, run through a scraping service and returned as roughly thirty fields per company: name, business category, website, phone, full address, coordinates, rating and review count.

Every result is checked against the client's live sales pipeline - around seventy-five companies already in active conversations. Company names are normalised first, so "Ltd", "Limited" and stray punctuation do not cause false misses.

Matches are flagged rather than deleted. The team sees them and decides, because a fuzzy name match is a suggestion, not a verdict.

The client's approved sales strategy is account-based institutional selling, and explicitly not consumer work. The pipeline follows that rather than reinterpreting it: it searches five defined market segments - asset finance and credit, insurance, fleet-heavy operators, dealers and distributors, and corporate investigations - and never individuals.

No LinkedIn scraping. It breaks their terms, accounts get restricted for it, and the client only needed company-level contact details — so the risk would have bought nothing.

The discovery and deduplication half is running and producing real leads. The next phases are contact enrichment and email verification, then a short AI-written personalisation hook merged into the client's own fixed email template.

That last part lands in a sales rep's drafts folder and is never sent automatically. A person decides every send — which is the only version of AI outreach I am willing to build.