The Pain of B2B Prospecting
If you’re in the B2B space, you already know how exhausting and time-consuming prospecting can be. It’s not just about finding people—it’s about finding the right people. First, you have to define your ideal audience. Then, track them down across the internet, research their companies, qualify whether they’re a good fit, and finally, dig up their contact details. And that’s just for one lead.
Now imagine doing that again. And again. And again. Not for ten. Not even for a hundred. But for thousands.
It’s a never-ending grind of clicking, searching, verifying, and organizing. And unless you’ve already built a system around it, this process eats into your time, drains your energy, and slows down your growth.
The VA Illusion: Outsourced Doesn’t Mean Solved
At some point, every founder or sales leader hits the same wall and thinks, “I’ll just outsource this.” And sure, on paper, handing off prospecting to a virtual assistant seems like the perfect fix. You don’t have to do the grunt work yourself, and someone else is handling the daily research grind. Easy win, right?
Well… not exactly.
Even if you have a VA doing all the work, the problem isn’t gone—it’s just hidden. Prospecting is still a boring, repetitive, soul-crushing process. It’s just not your soul anymore. It’s someone else’s.
Now imagine you're that VA: living halfway across the world, getting paid the bare minimum to repeat the same process every single day. How much do you care about the quality of the leads? About the growth of the business you’re helping? Be honest—would you?
When someone is underpaid, overworked, and disconnected from the mission, quality slips. They start to move faster, but not smarter. Corners get cut. Old lists get reused. Research gets sloppy. And before you know it, your pipeline is filled with noise instead of opportunities.
The harsh truth? Outsourcing doesn’t eliminate the problem—it just masks it. If the system is broken, putting another person in the loop won’t fix it.
Lead Lists & AI Tools: Expensive Band-Aids
So you’ve realized that manually prospecting—or paying someone else to do it—is a nightmare. You look for shortcuts. What’s the next best option?
For most people, that means buying lead lists or jumping on the latest AI tool hype.
But here’s the thing: lead lists are the oldest scam in the B2B book. They’re often recycled, filled with outdated or irrelevant contacts, and sold at premium prices. You might get thousands of names, sure—but how many are still in the same role? How many matches your ICP? How many even exist anymore?
Still, you’re thinking, “Okay, I won’t fall for the lead list trap. I’ll build something smarter with AI tools.”
And honestly, some of those tools are solid. They’ve got sleek interfaces, clever workflows, and useful features. But the pricing? It’s pure greed.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by ChatGPT or other public models under the hood. What you’re really paying for is a shiny wrapper—sometimes with a little automation added on top. But then they hit you with insane markups for something that, in reality, isn’t that complex to build yourself.
These platforms know the market is hot, and they’re cashing in on the hype. They’re not priced for sustainability. They’re priced for FOMO and short-term gain. And if you’re trying to scale or use them at volume, that cost stacks up fast.
At some point, you realize: you’re not paying for innovation—you’re paying for convenience. And overpriced convenience isn’t a growth strategy.
Why I Built My Own Prospecting AI Workflow
At some point, you have to ask yourself: Is this a partnership, or just a transaction?
Because let’s be honest, most of the tools and services out there aren’t built to help you grow. They’re built to extract as much money from you as possible, as quickly as possible. Whether it’s selling the same recycled lead lists from 2013 or slapping outrageous price tags on simple wrappers around ChatGPT, it’s not about creating value. It’s about making a quick buck.
That’s not a partnership. That’s opportunism.
And that’s exactly why I decided to build my own AI workflow—to take control of the process and eliminate every repetitive, mind-numbing part of prospecting.
No more hours wasted Googling. No more scraping contact info or guessing email formats. No more chasing decision-makers across platforms. No more sorting through irrelevant companies just to find a maybe.
Instead, I built a system that handles all of that automatically, so I (or my VA) can focus on what matters: strategy, personalization, and closing deals.
When you strip out the busywork, everything gets better. You move faster. You get higher-quality leads. You stop burning money on “convenience.” And you start building something sustainable.
If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, I walk through the whole process in Episode 1 of my tutorial series, where we build this AI workflow together, step by step, from zero to hero.
AI Workflow Preview 👉 Read it here.
Stop grinding. Start automating. – Mr. Automator