Building a Proprietary Deal-Sourcing Funnel: 2,000 Companies → 400 Targets

Curious how others are handling proprietary sourcing at scale.

For one acquisition mandate, we recently exported -2,000 companies from Grata across several industries. We’re running a 5-day email sequence alongside LinkedIn outreach, and after applying the mandate criteria and screening the businesses, we’re down to roughly 400 targets that are actually worth pursuing.

The next step is a multi-channel approach across those 400: email, LinkedIn, physical mail and cold calling.

The bottleneck now is contact data. Grata often gives us an office number or general company contact rather than the actual owner/executive. So we’re looking at the best way to enrich the list before putting serious effort into calls and direct outreach.

For anyone in IB / PE / search / corp dev / business development, what are you using to get from company → decision-maker → direct email/phone?

Apollo, LinkedIn tools, other data providers, or a combination? And how much of a difference have you actually seen from layering cold calling and physical mail on top of digital outreach?

Would be interested in hearing what’s worked in practice.