What a commercial prospecting platform actually does

Prospecting software is sold on pipeline and bought on hope. The demo always works, because the demo is run on a market the vendor chose, and your market is the one they did not.

I have watched enough of these evaluations go wrong to think the problem is rarely the product. It is that nobody agrees what the product is supposed to do.

Three different jobs in one box

Almost every platform in this category is doing some mix of three things:

• Finding the businesses. Given a unit and a market, which companies plausibly want it. This is a matching problem, and it is where most of the differentiation actually lives.
• Finding the person. Inside that business, who decides on new sites. A brand with 200 stores has a real estate team; a two-site franchisee has an owner with a phone.
• Making contact. Drafting, sending, tracking, following up.

A tool that is excellent at the third and mediocre at the first will produce a great deal of activity and very little interest. That combination is common, because outreach mechanics are easy to build and matching is hard.

The test that tells you something

Do not trial these things on a live vacancy. You have no ground truth, so every output looks plausible and you learn nothing until the quarter is gone.

Run it backwards instead. Take a unit you filled in the last year. You know who signed, you know who else viewed, and you probably remember two or three who nearly went for it. Give the tool the unit as it was before the deal, and see what comes back.

1. Did it surface the business that actually signed? If not, ask why. Sometimes the answer is fair, because the tenant came from a relationship nothing could have predicted. Often it is not.
2. Did it surface the near-misses? These matter more than the winner. They are the evidence that the matching understands your category, rather than having got lucky once.
3. How much of the output was noise? Count it honestly. A list of 200 where 15 are plausible is not a 200-lead list, it is a 15-lead list with a filtering job attached.
4. Were the contacts still real? Sample ten. Check the names against current company sites. The decay problem is covered properly in retail tenant databases.

Questions vendors find awkward

These are not gotchas. They are the things that determine whether the product works on your portfolio rather than on the one in the demo.

• When was this contact last verified, and how? A date and a method. “Continuously” is not a method.
• What happens in a market with thin data? Secondary cities are where most vacancies are, and where most tools quietly degrade.
• What does it do when it does not know? A system that returns a confident wrong answer costs more than one that returns nothing, because you act on it.
• Who owns the outreach? If the platform sends on your behalf from a shared infrastructure, your reputation is pooled with everyone else’s. Worth knowing before, not after.

What to compare the price against

The instinct is to compare a subscription to other subscriptions. The number that matters is the one in your own portfolio: what an empty unit costs you per month, multiplied by the weeks you think the tool removes.

If a unit carries at $4,000 a month and the tool plausibly shortens a search by six weeks, that is roughly $5,500 of value on one deal. Against that, per-seat pricing is usually not the deciding factor, and a tool that shortens nothing is expensive at any price. We worked through where the weeks actually go in how long a vacancy should take.

The part software does not solve

No platform knows that the tenant three doors down is unhappy with their landlord, or that a local operator has been looking for a second site for eight months and has not told anybody. That information lives in conversations.

What good tooling does is buy back the hours you currently spend assembling lists, so more of the week goes into those conversations. That is a real gain and it is worth paying for. It is a smaller claim than most of the category makes, and it has the advantage of being true.

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