The filter, the export and the personalisation step that turns a list into a pipeline.

Founders run cold outreach the wrong way around. A list of thousands gets you nowhere; the numbers game doesn’t work in SA – you need a list of warm sales prospects first.

Naison Pillay is a senior GTM engineer who’s built 85+ custom AI sales systems for SA businesses, achieving lead-gen that drives 300% increase in qualified enquiries in 90 days. And he runs it all through Apollo.

An Apollo search can return 100,000 leads. Most of them are useless to you. The work happens before you ever send a message, narrowing the list to the few hundred people who actually match your ideal customer profile.

“You populate it according to your ideal customer profile. But a search can return over 100,000 leads, many of them not warm. So you don’t work the raw list by hand.”

Before you open Apollo, write down who you’re looking for. Job title, company size, industry, location, market segment. The more specific, the smaller the eventual list; and the higher the reply rate.

“Head of operations at SA logistics companies with 50 to 200 staff.” That’s a profile. “Decision-makers at growing companies” isn’t.

In Apollo, the filters do the work. Job title, company headcount, industry, location, etc. With the paid version, you also get a revenue range, which further sharpens the list.

Start tight: If your filters return 50,000 results, keep narrowing until the list is small enough that each name on it is genuinely a fit; hundreds, not thousands.

A tight list is necessary but not sufficient. The reply rate comes from the message landing like it was written for one person, not blasted to a thousand.

For each prospect, look at their website, their recent posts or anything they’ve published. Find one specific thing to reference: A blog post, a hire, a launch, a problem you can see they’re working on. That’s the opener.

“Make them super personal. It tells the person this isn’t just a blast — someone has taken the time to read up on them.”

Then structure the message: Opener, the reason you’re reaching out, a credibility marker, and a call to action. A short Loom attached to the email works better than another paragraph of text.

A small, tightly filtered, personalised list outperforms a big, sloppy one every time. Fewer messages out, more replies in means the pipeline stops being a numbers game and starts being a quality game.

It takes an afternoon to filter properly. It saves you the weeks of silence that come from blasting the wrong list.

This filter is one piece of Automating Your Sales Funnel, Naison’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session shows you the end-to-end system that takes a filtered Apollo list and turns it into personalised cold outreach at scale:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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