I’m In Commission Based B2b Sales And Got Tired Of How Much Time Prospecting Takes. Curious How Founders Handle This.

I work in commission based B2B sales, and one thing that kept slowing me down was prospecting.

Not the outreach or the conversations. Just the upfront work of figuring out which businesses actually make sense to go after.

Every new idea would start with something like: “We should target this type of company.” “In this market.” “For this use case.”

Then someone has to turn that into a real list. Googling, copying, cleaning things up, trying to figure out whether the market is even big enough to justify the effort. It always took longer than it should have.

I didn’t want to keep doing that manually, so I built a tool for myself that lets me hone in pretty quickly on a specific type of business in a specific area and turn that into a clean list of real companies. Not contacts yet, just the businesses. Enough to answer the question of whether something is worth pursuing.

I use it constantly now to sanity check ideas before spending time on outreach. It has made me realize how often this part of the process is either rushed, half done, or quietly painful for a lot of teams.

I’m curious how other founders handle this:

• How do you usually validate a target market before going after it?
• How long does it take you to build a list you actually trust?
• Do you do this yourself, delegate it, or just accept that it’s messy?

Not selling anything here. Mostly trying to understand whether this is a common bottleneck or something most people already have figured out.

If anyone has strong opinions on this, I’d be interested to hear how you approach it.