How ScoutedLead checks every lead.
Every lead is only as good as the reason behind it. Here's how we decide what's true about a business, and what we do when we can't tell.
No sales sequence. A person reads every message and replies.
The five steps
- Find
A search for the kinds of businesses in your playbook, in each neighborhood or city you sell to. Chains, directories and excluded types are dropped.
- Check
The homepage is loaded like a visitor would load it. Booking and registration systems, payment systems and contact pages are followed.
- Record
Every fact is yes, no or unsure, with the evidence and the date.
- Qualify
The playbook’s rules pick the leads and the reason for each. Unsure is never pitched.
- Deliver
Leads, evidence and drafts go where your team works.
Why a real browser
Many small-business websites build their pages with JavaScript. A booking button from a scheduling service, a page made in a site builder or a phone layout added by a script doesn’t show up in the raw page a simple scraper downloads. A check that reads only the raw page will say “no online booking” about businesses that plainly have it.
So ScoutedLead loads the page in a headless Chrome browser, on desktop and as an iPhone, and looks at what a visitor would see. Certificate warnings are judged by Chrome itself. When we can’t load a page properly, because of a bot check, a parked domain or a timeout, the answer is unsure and no claim is made.
Yes, no or unsure
Every fact we record has three possible answers, not two. “Yes” comes with the platform or the page that proves it. “No” is only recorded from a fully loaded page with none of the signs. Everything else is “unsure”, and an unsure fact is never used as a reason to contact a business.
This costs us leads. We’d rather lose a lead than tell a business owner something about their own website that isn’t true.
Tested before it sends
Each playbook has a test set: businesses in its vertical that a person has loaded in a browser and labeled by hand. Every change to the checks runs against every test set, and a playbook only sends when its answers match. Our first test set has 278 local business websites, each with a screenshot.
Re-checked before reuse
Websites change. A business that had no booking last month may have added it. Findings carry the date they were checked, and a lead is checked again before it’s reused. When a business says a finding is wrong, we fix the lead and the finding becomes a new test case for every playbook.
What we follow
We read robots.txt and skip any site that asks crawlers not to visit, and we keep requests to a few pages per business with pauses between them. Businesses can ask not to be contacted, and that request applies to every customer. We never send cold text messages.