A note before the story starts. I'm writing my next book in this newsletter, one chapter every Sunday. It's called Stop Selling Cold, and it teaches my Cold 2 Warm system the way I'd want to learn it … through a story.

If you're new, or you want to get back up to speed, Chapter 1 is in the archive, free: https://the-sovereign-seller.kit.com/posts/stop-selling-cold-chapter-1-the-dashboard-lies.

The Sovereign Seller #42: Three Hundred Names

October 2026

7:11 AM

Indianapolis, IN

Stop Selling Cold

Chapter 2: Step 1 … Identify Your Ideal Prospect

Why a Company With Money Is Not a Prospect

Scene 1: The Three Gates

Mike McDaniels pulled the first yellow sheet back toward himself and uncapped his pen.

“Step 1 starts right now. Tell me who your ideal prospect is.”

Kasey Browne had answered that question in two budget presentations and a job interview. “Any business in East Central Indiana with the money to sponsor us. Local, regional, has a marketing budget. We go after the ones that fit.”

“That’s a market,” Mike said. “I asked for a prospect.”

He wrote a number at the top of the page and turned it so Kasey could read it. $2,000,000.

“Here’s what you’re going to learn this winter, Kasey. Prospecting is money and labor spent before anybody buys. Every name Gabe calls costs you his hour. Every letter you mail, and you’re going to mail letters, costs postage and whatever you put inside the envelope. Point that money at a company that can’t pay, or won’t buy what you sell, and the rest of the system runs on an empty tank. So before you build a list, before you write a word, you decide who is worth the money.”

He drew a line down the middle of the page.

“Three gates. A company has to clear all three or it doesn’t go on the list. Not maybe. Not ‘we’ll see.’ Doesn’t go on the list.”

He wrote the first one.

“Gate one. Can they afford you. I mean comfortably. What you’re eventually going to charge these people is going to land somewhere around ten thousand dollars a year, and the business has to be able to say yes to that without a board vote and without sweating payroll. In this market that’s a company doing at least a million in gross revenue. Below that, you’re selling to people who can’t write the check, no matter how much they love the football team.”

“Gate two. Are they already spending money on growth. I want to see twenty thousand dollars a year, minimum, going out the door on advertising and marketing. Radio, billboards, newspaper, digital, a booth at the home show, I don’t care. If they already buy attention, you’re a new place to buy it. If they don’t, you’re a missionary. You have to convince them that advertising works before you can convince them that yours does, and that is the longest, most expensive sale there is. Let somebody else run that crusade.”

“Gate three. What is one customer worth to them. If one new customer is worth five thousand dollars or more, then one or two customers out of the deal pays for the whole sponsorship. That’s an easy yes. If one customer is worth forty dollars, they need a few hundred of them just to break even, and they know it, and they’ll say no.”

He turned the pad around. Three lines. Three numbers.

“That’s your ideal prospect. A company that can pay, already buys attention, and gets paid back by one or two customers. Everything else is somebody who has money. Having money doesn’t make you a prospect for anything.”

Kasey read it twice. “That’s going to cut my list way down.”

“That’s the point. You’re going to spend real money on these people. The shorter the list, the more you can spend on each name. We’re going to build it this week … and when I say build, I mean from scratch. Don’t let anybody hand you one.”

Kasey didn’t understand the warning until the next morning.

Scene 2: Three Hundred Names

The binder hit Kasey’s desk with a thud.

Mark Vance stood over it in his shirtsleeves, and for the first time since the budget meeting, he was smiling.

“Three hundred names, Kasey. Fresh from university procurement. Every vendor, contractor, and service provider doing more than fifty thousand dollars a year with ECI. Construction. Electrical. IT. Janitorial. Millions of dollars a year flowing out of this institution and into their pockets. There’s your pipeline.”

Kasey opened it. Midwest Industrial Roofing. Wabash Valley Electrical Supply. Cornerstone Campus Facilities Management. Riverside Managed IT. Page after page of companies that had won their university business through sealed bids and purchasing committees.

Twelve hours earlier he would have called it a gift. He had three numbers in his pocket now.

“Mark … I appreciate this. But this isn’t a prospect list.”

The smile went away. “They take millions of our dollars every year. They owe us.”

“They don’t owe us anything. They won a bid. These are B2B contractors, Mark. They got the work by coming in lowest on an RFP, which means they live on thin margins, which means they don’t have an advertising budget to speak of. And their customers are purchasing departments. A facilities manager at ECI doesn’t pick a roofing company because he saw their logo on the videoboard. Not one of these firms clears gate two.”

“Gate two?”

“They don’t buy attention. They’ve never run a radio spot in their lives because their buyers aren’t listening to the radio. They’re reading bid documents. The only name on this list that might buy a sponsorship is the beverage company with our pouring rights, and that’s because they sell to the students, not to the university.”

Vance planted both hands on the desk. “Sales is a numbers game, Kasey. Three hundred warm contacts who already do business with this university. Gabe calls every one of them, closes ten percent, that’s thirty new sponsors. You said yourself the pipeline was dead.”

“They’re not warm. They know the purchasing office. They’ve never heard of Gabe. That’s three hundred cold calls to businesses with no marketing budget and no reason to buy, and the ones who take the call will take it because they’re afraid of losing the contract. That’s not a sponsor. That’s a hostage.”

He closed the binder.

“I can show you a list that’s worth the calls. Give me until Friday.”

Vance looked at him for a long moment. He was not a stupid man, and he was not wrong about the number. He was wrong about where it would come from.

“Friday,” he said, and left the binder where it was.

Kasey slid it into his bottom desk drawer. He never opened it again.

Scene 3: Drive Time

Tuesday afternoon, Kasey left the office at 4:30, which he had not done since August.

He wasn’t going home. He drove the loop … the bypass, 38th Street, the stretch of I-69 between the Marion exits … with the radio on the local stations and a legal pad on the passenger seat. Every time a local business ran a spot, he wrote the name down at the next light. Every billboard with a local name on it went on the pad. He did it again Wednesday morning at 7:00, on the other stations.

Then he sat down with the Sunday paper, the regional business weekly, and the Chamber of Commerce directory, and did the same thing on paper. Who is buying attention in this market, right now, with their own money.

By Wednesday night he had one more thing to check. He pulled every sponsor ECI had signed in the last five years and sorted them by what they’d paid. Mike had told him what he would find. He found it. The top fifth of the list had produced most of the money, and that top fifth fell into six kinds of business.

Hospitals and orthopedic groups. Credit unions and the commercial banks. Auto dealers, by a wide margin the biggest spenders on his own radio log. The heating, roofing, and plumbing companies that sold to homeowners. Law firms, accountants, and the wealth managers who sold to the owners of all of the above. And the high-volume retailers … the farm equipment dealer, the powersports store, the restaurant groups.

Six categories. He laid his radio log and his billboard log over the top, kept every name that showed up in one of the six and was visibly spending, and ran each survivor against Mike’s three gates as best he could from the outside.

A little over a hundred names.

Thursday morning Gabe stood in his doorway and read the pad upside down.

“That’s the list?”

“That’s the start of it. Everyone on here is already buying advertising. We’re not going to have to explain what it’s for.”

Gabe read for a while. “Where’s the trucking company out on the east side? They’ve been a sponsor four years. I’ve never heard them on the radio in my life.”

Kasey looked at the pad. They weren’t on it. Neither was the industrial supplier that had bought a hospitality package two seasons ago, or the packaging plant that had come to them on its own. Companies that grossed tens of millions and never bought a billboard, because their customers weren’t driving past one.

“They don’t advertise to consumers,” Kasey said slowly. “So a consumer media audit can’t see them.”

“So we’re missing the big ones.”

“We’re missing the invisible ones. The ones who clear all three gates and never show up on the radio.” He picked up the pad. “That’s Step 2. This is Step 1. First we decide who’s worth the money. Then we go find the rest of them.”

Friday morning he put a blue folder on Vance’s desk. One page of criteria. Three gates, three numbers. Behind it, a hundred and some names, every one of them a company already spending money to be known in East Central Indiana.

Vance read the criteria page twice. “So this is the list.”

“This is the aim. The list comes next week, and it’ll be shorter than three hundred.”

Vance didn’t say it was good. But he didn’t reach for the binder, either.

Chapter 2, In Brief

Why it matters: Prospecting is money and labor spent before anyone buys. Spend it on a company that can’t pay, or doesn’t already buy attention, and every step after this one runs on an empty tank. That’s true whether you sell sponsorships, staffing, or steel.

The trap: Mistaking a company with money for a prospect for your offer. A vendor list, a customer list from another department, a trade-show badge scan … any list somebody hands you … is the purest form of it.

Your move: Three gates, in your own numbers. Can they afford it without a board vote. Are they already spending on growth. Is one customer worth enough that one or two pay for the whole thing. Then look at who is visibly spending in your market before you buy a single name. Expect that look to miss the invisible buyers; the next step finds them.

Bottom line: Having money does not make a company a prospect. Already spending it on what you sell does.

Next Sunday: Chapter 3, and Step 2 … building the map, from a database you already have free access to and have probably never used.

To your success,

Shane

P.S. Missed Chapter 1? Here: https://the-sovereign-seller.kit.com/posts/stop-selling-cold-chapter-1-the-dashboard-lies?​