I was on a call with a CMO this week who runs a private group of growth leaders.

He sits with them every week and hears what they do.

He told me the market has not just slowed, but stopped moving.

The businesses that need solutions have quit buying. They’ve stopped bringing in outside help, and they still haven’t shrunk the teams they know are too big.

“Th…

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Every day, your future customers tell LinkedIn they’re trying to solve a problem. They just don’t tell you.

• Someone in your market clicks “attend” on an event about the exact problem you solve.

• Someone else comments on a post about it.

• A third adds a “hiring” badge that says they’ve got a gap and a budget.

Each one is a person looking for a solution to their problem, in public, where you could see it. Most people walk straight past.

In case you’ve walked past them you’ve sent the messages. Built the list, right titles, the people you’d actually want as customers.

But almost nothing comes back. So you assume the copy’s wrong and rewrite it.

The problem was never your message, but reaching the right people at a random moment.

So even a perfect message goes nowhere, because the person reading it isn’t thinking about the problem you solve.

Why timing beats volume

Many chase the loud signals. A company raises money, a company posts a job, and everyone piles in at once.

The quiet ones are better, and barely anyone watches them. They’re the small things people do on LinkedIn every day without thinking twice.

Less obvious, less crowded, and just as much a sign that someone’s in the market.

Too many names, too little time

Collecting these signals is easy. The list just comes back huge and mostly useless.

Pull 500 event attendees and maybe 40 are real buyers. Grab everyone who commented on a post and most are fans and job seekers.

Then you’d have to read all 500 by hand. That’s hours nobody sustains, which is why these signals stay theoretical for almost everyone.

That’s the part Claude takes off your hands.

Two steps: grab the list, then qualify

Two jobs, two helpers.

1. Grab the names. A LinkedIn automation tool collects everyone who showed a signal, in bulk. You can use HeyReach for this. It’s quick at gathering, which is all you need it for. Check my previous walkthrough of how to do this exactly.

You don’t have to pay for one, though. Claude in Chrome reads the same lists straight off the page, pulling the names into a clean list for you.

2. Sort and rank. Claude reads that messy list, drops everyone who isn’t really your buyer, and ranks the rest by how interested they look, telling you why each made the cut.

Where to start

Four signals, and they’re not equal. Work them in this order:

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A few years ago I almost ran my business into the ground, on a good week.

I was drowning in client work and got complacent. Booked solid, delivering, busy in the best way. And because the pipeline was full, I did the laziest thing a founder can do.

I stopped feeding it.

No outbound, no prospecting. Why would I, with more work than I could handle?

For months…

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I’ve been sitting on this one for a few years.

Every time I thought about publishing it, I hesitated. It’s the kind of play that stops working the moment too many people know about it.

But it’s the most direct way to source leads I’ve come across, and it belongs with the readers who’ll actually use it more than it belongs in a drawer. So here it is.

One caution before we start. The less your competitors know this is possible, the longer it keeps working for you. So keep it to yourself.

The first time I ran this, I’d set the filters, pulled a list, and started reaching out. It worked faster than anything I’d run before.

Then a competitor messaged me on LinkedIn:

“hey man! are you trying to poach my clients?”

Whoops. I hadn’t touched his CRM or broken into anything. The filters were sharp enough that I’d pulled his leads, and some of his freshest actual clients with them.

The highest-intent signal in B2B

Think about what has to be true for someone to connect with your competitor, this week.

Often, they’re not just browsing. People don’t usually connect with a vendor in your category for nothing.

Many are researching the space, sizing up a provider, or already mid-conversation about buying the kind of thing you sell.

The connection is the visible residue of an active buying process.

A fresh connection to your direct competitor isn’t an inference. It’s often a person who has taken a deliberate step toward buying what you sell.

There’s almost no warmer public signal, because there’s no closer proxy for intent than someone walking toward your competitor’s front door.

No list was ‘stolen’ really. The buyer showed their hand, and you read it before anyone else did.

What you need

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Required. The filters that make this work don’t exist on a free or Premium account.

• A way to export the leads. Either Claude in Chrome, which reads the list and pulls it for you, or a lead-enrichment tool with a Chrome extension like Apollo, which is faster and can attach emails as it goes. Pick one.

• Claude (Chat or Code). For the cleanup and enrichment pass after export. Code only if you want the weekly routine on top. For a one-off, chat is fine.

The system

Step 1: Build the search and save it.

In Sales Navigator, run a lead search with these filters:

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Every LinkedIn guide tells you the same thing: Post consistently, comment daily. Build an audience. Feed the algorithm and wait for the inbound to come. That’s a full-time job, and likes don’t pay the burn rate.

There’s a different way to pull pipeline off LinkedIn, and it needs zero posting or ads.

No content calendar, engagement farming, or showing up every morning to perform in public. You read the signals already sitting in the platform, and you act on them directly.

The signals are public. They’re dated. And almost nobody acts on them properly, because everyone’s too busy chasing reach.

Here’s how to turn them into a scored list of leads, using three tools:

• Claude Code

• Claude in Chrome

• LinkedIn Premium Account, ideally Sales Navigator (free trial via the link)

A job post is a signal

When a company hires a role related to your solution, they’ve just told you they have the problem you fix. For instance:

• A company hiring a Head of Sales has a sales-scaling problem, right now.

• A company hiring three customer success managers has an onboarding or retention problem, right now.

• A company posting for a RevOps lead has a pipeline-visibility problem, right now.

The hire is the company saying, out loud: “This is the thing we’ve decided to spend money on solving.”

That’s a better trigger than any firmographic filter. “Companies with 50 to 200 employees in fintech” tells you who might fit.

“Companies that posted a Head of Sales role last week” tells you who’s in pain today.

One is a guess about fit. The other is a dated signal of intent.

The setup

Here’s the constraint that shapes everything, and the thing teams often get wrong on their first try.

Claude Code cannot read LinkedIn.

LinkedIn sits behind your login. It’s session-gated, which means the page only exists inside your authenticated browser. Claude Code works off-page, on files and the open web, so it never sees what’s on your LinkedIn screen. Point it at a LinkedIn URL and it gets a login wall, not your jobs feed.

So this runs two tools doing two different jobs.

1. Claude in Chrome reads what’s on the screen. It lives in your browser, inside your logged-in session, so it sees exactly what you see: the jobs feed, the search results, the profiles. It’s the eyes.

2. Claude Code does the thinking off-page. It takes the raw data Chrome pulls and qualifies it, scores it, and works out who to actually contact. It’s the brain.

Code thinks, Chrome reads, and the four steps below move between them. Each step ends with a clear output the next one picks up.

You need both tools on a paid Claude plan. Claude Code runs on your machine. If you’ve followed my earlier guides you already have it set up; if not, the Claude GTM Starter walks you through it.

Claude in Chrome is the part that reads LinkedIn. It’s a browser extension. Open Chrome, find Claude in the Chrome Web Store, click Add to Chrome, sign in with your account, and pin it.

A Claude icon lands in your toolbar, and clicking it opens a side panel that stays open while you browse. That panel is where the Chrome prompts will run.

Once one of the Chrome prompts below works well for you, save it as a shortcut. Type “/” in the panel, pick it, and it runs again instantly, no pasting.

The two tools are built to work together by design, Code in the terminal, Chrome in the browser, so you’re not bolting together a workaround. You’re using them exactly as they’re meant to pair. That’s the whole kit.

And Claude Cowork? It could stand in for Claude Code, and for the off-page thinking it works just as well. We focus on Code because it’s on every paid plan, it remembers your setup week to week, and the steps are identical either way.

Step 1: Code builds the search string

Off-page text work, so this is Claude Code.

Before you touch LinkedIn, you need a precise search that pulls only the roles that signal your buyer. LinkedIn’s job search runs on boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, quotes, parentheses), and getting it right is the difference between 25 clean signals and 300 rows of junk.

The biggest noise source is staffing agencies, the firms that post these exact roles constantly because recruiting is their business, and this prompt strips them out from the start.

Run this in a Claude Code session:

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A bootstrapped fintech founder I met last week has closed deals most companies never see in a decade.

No outside money and no sales team. He sells through a few senior people with thirty years of relationships each, himself included.

On paper, sales is handled. Then he said the thing that gave it away:

“We have either no business outreach, or a very senior business outreach. Nothing scalable in the middle.”

A brilliant top end, an empty bottom, and nothing in between.

When a senior relationship closes, it’s enormous. But when it doesn’t, there’s nothing underneath to catch the quarter.

No steady flow of smaller, reachable companies keeping the pipeline warm between the big wins.

His product is built. It works. And the entire middle of his market has never heard of it, because reaching them was never anyone’s job.

A strong network feels like a sales engine, right up until the month it goes quiet. Then you find out it was never a system.

It was a few brilliant people and their address books, and address books run out.

This can’t be fixed with another senior hire. You need to build the repeatable layer underneath the relationships, so the pipeline stops living or dying on whether this quarter’s introduction came through.

So here’s a tool that builds the first piece of it:

Give Claude one deal you won through your network, a warm intro, a relationship, anything that didn’t come from cold outreach.

It works out what really made that company a buyer, then finds ten more in the same situation that you can reach directly, no introduction needed.

That’s the missing middle, found in a prompt:

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Last Thursday, I built an outreach system live at the Half Baked webinar. No slides, just Claude Code, a connection to Apollo, and a real client to demo-prospect for.

The client was Half Baked themselves. I asked the system to build a targeted account list, find the right people inside those companies with their details, and write an email to each one. All in one session.

Two moments stuck with me. When the list came back, their founder (Darragh Lucey) spotted two companies on it that were already their clients.

The system had never spoken to him (it was a demo), it just read their ICP and found companies that fit.

Here’s the recording of the full build:

The question Darragh asked me live is worth answering before you watch: “Why Claude Code, and not just normal Claude chat?”

Because Claude Code doesn’t just tell you things. It runs the operation. It connects to Apollo through an MCP server, takes on larger multi-step processes, and fixes its own errors mid-run.

For a twelve-minute demo I built a list of ten leads. If you want to build a list of a hundred, or a thousand, you need Claude Code, because that takes real brain power.

It’s an agentic way of working, not just a conversation with a few basic actions. That’s the difference between a chatbot that helps you think and an agent that runs a go-to-market operation.

If you read the my previous article, you already have the prompt for step one. This is the rest of the system it belonged to.

The whole thing runs in three steps:

1. Build the account list. Claude Code searches the web for companies showing a real signal, then falls back to Apollo to fill any gaps.

2. Enrich the list. Through the Apollo MCP connection, it finds the right buyer inside each company and pulls their verified email.

3. Write the outreach. It writes one personalised email per contact using my YYY framework, the same structure I’ve tested across thousands of cold emails.

I ran all of that live with three prompts, on top of one CLAUDE.md file holding the context. Below is the full walkthrough: the three exact prompts, how each one ran, and the output.

The full build, with all three prompts

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Everyone’s racing to plug AI into their GTM. New tool, new integration, new automation, every week.

But almost none of it fixes the thing that actually breaks it.

I've spent over a decade watching outbound campaigns fail, and the cause is almost always the same. The people on the list were rarely in a position where the email mattered to them when it landed.

No tool fixes that, because the tool runs after the targeting decision’s already made. Point a faster engine at the wrong accounts and you reach the wrong people quicker.

The tool’s the last 20% of the job. The first 80% is deciding who belongs on the list and why now.

Get that right and a plain text email beats a polished sequence sent to a list built from a job title and a headcount filter.

That’s what I’m showing this Thursday, live.

The session

I’m co-presenting a session with Andy McCotter-Bicknell from Apollo, hosted by the Half Baked newsletter.

To save your spot, use the link below 👇🏼

One thing to be clear about before you sign up: This is the lean build. No Clay tables, fifty-step automations, or GTM-engineer setup that takes a weekend to wire together.

Andy and I are both building from inside Claude, with nothing you need a technical background to follow.

If you’ve ever read an outbound thread and thought half of it was written in a language you don’t speak, this session’s the opposite of that.

Andy takes the product path. He builds a list, creates a sequence, and hits go, all from inside Claude using Apollo’s new integration. He’s debuting their build-sequences-from-Claude feature, and it’s impressive to watch.

I take the foundations: the targeting and the messaging. In 15 minutes, I build a signal-driven account list, find the right person at each company, then write the copy for every contact using the YYY messaging framework.

Together it’s the full picture. Andy shows you how easy the tools have become. I show you how to think about who you point them at, so it produces replies instead of faster rejection.

What you’ll walk away with

The three-step workflow I run, start to finish:

1. Claude builds an account list from signals.

2. Apollo finds the right person to contact at each account.

3. Claude writes a YYY email for every contact.

Step one’s the part that decides everything. A perfectly enriched contact and a beautifully written email are worthless if the company wasn't living the problem you're describing when it landed.

One thing worth saying: this prompt runs best on top of a properly set-up Claude project. If you haven’t built one yet, the Account List Builder walks you through the whole setup, the project folder, the CLAUDE.md, the signal scoring, in about an hour.

The prompt slots straight into that system. You can run it without the full setup, but you’ll get more out of it with the foundation in place.

Power Prompt: The Signal-Driven Account List Build

On Thursday I’ll show you how to build the list when you already know the problem to look for.

This prompt does the harder thing. It works out the problem for you, by reading your own best customers first, then finds the companies living that exact problem right now.

It’s the half most teamsget wrong, and it’s the half that decides whether any of this works.

Two stages in one prompt. Find the pattern, then find the companies.

Run it inside a Claude Code session. Before you start, drop two or three of your closed-won deal notes, call summaries, or even a short paragraph on each of your best customers into a folder called /customers/ inside your project.

If you don’t have written notes, the prompt will ask you questions instead. It works either way.

Here’s how it runs:

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The founder of a US B2B fintech told me this back in March. Eight people, healthy ARR, decent retention:

“Time is our enemy. We know what we should be doing. We just never get to do it properly.”

They had already done what most teams are still trying to do:

• Claude Code installed

• A clean ICP document

• A Clay subscription running for over a year

• Apollo credits sitting unused at the end of every month

This founder is ahead of 90% of bootstrapped founders. The stack is in place, and the posts have been read.

There is just no time to use any of it properly.

The bottleneck has often nothing to do with knowing about sales tools. It is simply finding 90 minutes a week to actually use them.

And 90 minutes a week, every week, is harder to defend than a single Saturday afternoon of setup.

So I created a Claude prompt to fix the time problem instead of the knowledge problem. It runs every Monday, and takes about 10 minutes.

Last Monday it produced this:

THIS WEEK’S FIVE

Row 1: A Series C in DACH. Hired a new VP Finance announced on LinkedIn 17 May. The funding round three months ago combined with this hire confirms the breaking point window is open. Strongest move today.

Row 2: A French spend management platform. Posted three Controller roles in the last five days, two in Paris and one in London. Multi-entity scaling pattern confirmed. Reach out before the roles get filled.

Row 3: ...

Across the last few weeks of these Monday lists, he sent 60emails. Five turned into replies, two into calls.

That’s the output. Below is how to build it: the prompt, the CLAUDE.md rules that keep it consistent every week, and the trick that makes it sharper the longer you run it.

The Monday Refresh Prompt

Below is the prompt that you can run every Monday. Paste it into your Claude session inside your gtm-list-builder project folder.

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The majority of founding teams running their Go-To-Market through Claude are using maybe 10% of what it can do.

It’s not because a lack of effort. They just haven’t used Claude’s Skills properly.

Skills have been available since October 2025 and most teams are still missing them, which is why every Monday morning still feels like rebuilding the system from memory.

Once I created my first one, building a fresh prospect list took ten minutes instead of ninety.

Writing a world-class cold email took two minutes instead of fifteen.

Reviewing six months of closed deals to find what my best clients had in common happened in a single command, instead of an afternoon with a spreadsheet.

The thinking happened once, when I wrote the Skill. Every run after that was simply execution.

Quick Note On What This Covers

Skills work in both Claude and Claude Code in your terminal. The file format is identical, but what each one can do is different.

Skills in Claude run inside the chat: research, drafting, single-company briefs.

Skills in Claude Code run on your PC they read your CSVs, update your CLAUDE.md, call MCP servers like Apollo and Brave Search, and save files back to your project folder.

This article and every GTM Skill in Founder’s GTM focuses on Claude Code. If you have not set it up yet, the Account List Builder walks you through it first.

What a Skill actually is

A Skill is a saved workflow that lives in a folder inside your Claude Code project.
It tells Claude exactly how to do one specific job: which files to read, which steps to follow, what to output, what to skip.

You write it once. Every time you want Claude to run that job again, you type one command and Claude follows the instructions.

The clearest way to understand a Skill is to compare it to the two things you are probably already using if you’ve played with Claude Code:

• A prompt is a one-off. You type it, Claude does the work, the session ends, and the instructions are gone.

• A CLAUDE.md is your project’s permanent operating manual that loads automatically in every session: your ICP, your no-go list, your rules, the background context that applies to everything you do in that folder.

• A Skill sits between them. It loads only when you ask for it, or when Claude decides it is relevant to the task at hand. One specific job, one specific output, available on demand.

Without Skills, every workflow lives in your head or in a notes file you copy and paste at the start of each session. With Skills, every workflow lives in a file Claude reads automatically when you call it.

The Account List Builder uses a Skill called /list-builder. Every system in the Founder’s GTM System Library ships at least one. Each one is a folder, each one is a file, and each one runs identically every time.

The Anatomy Of A Skill

Here’s what a Skill folder actually looks like on your PC:

.claude/skills/quick-brief/
├── SKILL.md              ← the instructions
└── references/
    └── good-briefs.md    ← optional supporting material

Only SKILL.md is required. Everything else is optional. Reference files, examples, templates, anything you want Claude to read when running this specific Skill lives in subfolders and loads only when needed, which keeps your session lean.

The SKILL.md itself has two parts:

• A short YAML frontmatter block at the top (description).

• Plain markdown instructions below.

The frontmatter tells Claude what the Skill is called and what it does:

---
name: quick-brief
description: Produce a one-page outreach brief for a single company. Pulls recent news, hiring signals, and the most likely person to contact.
---

The description matters more than it looks. Claude reads it at the start of every session to decide whether to load this Skill automatically when relevant.

A weak description means the Skill never gets used. A sharp description means Claude finds it for you the moment a related task comes up.

Everything after the frontmatter is your instructions in plain English: the steps Claude follows, the inputs it needs, the outputs it produces, the edge cases it should handle.

Why This Matters For GTM

Three reasons Skills change how founders run outbound: repeatability, compounding and speed.

The first is repeatability. Every prospect list scores the same way, every email follows the same logic. The output last Monday and the output this Monday are produced by the same instructions, which means your system stops being something you “do well when you have time” and becomes something that just happens.

The second is compounding. Each Skill you write makes the next one cheaper. Reference files get reused across multiple Skills. The signals you document for the list builder feed into the hook writer. Three months in, you have a library that works for your business specifically, not a generic GTM stack lifted from someone else’s playbook.

The third is speed. A workflow that took ninety minutes the first time runs in ten once the Skill exists. The system survives a busy week, which is the only kind of week founders have.

Build Your First GTM Skill In 15 Minutes

This is a working Skill you can paste into your project folder today, called Quick Brief.

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A few months ago I cancelled my Clay subscription. When I wrote about it, the pushback came fast.

“Sure, fine. But what about the email enrichment waterfall?”

“What about running thousands of rows?”

“What about the table view?”

Fair points, and here’s what they have in common: None of them are about enrichment.

All of them are about the same thing: workflo…

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Two agentic coding tools launched within two months of each other last year.

Both run locally in your terminal. Both support MCP servers and maintain persistent project context. The difference:

OpenAI’s Codex CLI is open-source under Apache-2.0.

Claude Code is not. At the foundation layer, they are otherwise functionally similar.

But here is where it gets interesting for B2B founders: Your GTM motion defines which one you pick.

The short version: Codex builds your product. Claude Code sells it.

Let’s dive in.

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Four founders running outreach on LinkedIn sent me their numbers. Different offers, different markets, but the same pattern.

The only thing they had in common was this: before they used a system, their DMs were getting ignored. After the system, conversations started happening.

This edition breaks down the friction that kills conversations and shows the 3…

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I cancelled my Clay subscription three months ago. My verified email hit rate barely moved.

That surprised me, because Clay had always felt essential. Then MCP came along and the thing Clay was doing for me turned out to be a single command.

Here’s what changed and how to run the same test yourself.

What MCP actually did

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, tur…

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Last week I spoke with an agency owner who had spent two hours tweaking a prompt, trying to get Claude Code to produce a better prospect list.

Different phrasing, different structures, longer instructions. But nothing really worked.

I asked him what he had loaded in before the prompt ran. He looked at me blankly.

There is a difference between prompt engine…

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There’s a direction problem at the heart of today’s outbound prospecting.

You start by describing who you want to find. Industry, company size, job title, geography.

Then you run it through Apollo, or you use Ocean’s lookalike feature to find companies that behave similarly to your best customers.

Your list looks right on paper, but the close rate tells a …

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A few days after last week’s Warm Intro Guide went out, replies started coming in.

Most were variations of the same question:

• “What about enrichment? “

• ”What about contacts who are not in my LinkedIn connections? “

• ”What happens when someone changes jobs and I miss the window?”

Fair questions. The network audit maps what you have. The cross-connector matchi…

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Last week, I sat down with Claude and my full LinkedIn data export, just to finally see what my network actually looked like.

One hour later I had an entire map of every warm path to every ICP-fit prospect I could reach through just six people I already trusted.

The data baffled me:

• 1,382 founders and CEOs I had never spoken to, one introduction away from …

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A few months back, a founding team asked me for feedback on their email campaigns.

Six replies from ~ 2000 emails. They had already rewritten the subject line three times, swapped the hook, tried a shorter version, tried a longer version, and run the whole thing through Claude twice to make it sound less salesy.

They thought the copy was the problem. I as…

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How come Clay is valued at $5B... when Claude Code exists?

Tim Soulo did not ask that question by accident.

When the CMO of Ahrefs publicly wonders, he is not making a product comparison, but pointing at something structural: a company whose entire value proposition sits between you and data you could access directly.

Rather than a $5B moat, that is a $5B …

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