167 verified leads and a coverage report for an EU AI compliance partner

The situation

Arcus LLC, a firm working on AI compliance in the EU, needed a list of companies and contacts that would actually respond, not a spreadsheet of names scraped from a directory. The firm and Cliqom had agreed to work together, and the lead batch was the first deliverable under that partnership.

The constraint

European data rules. Every contact had to come from publicly available business information, be a role that the firm could legitimately approach, and carry nothing that should not have been collected. And the firm needed to know not just who was on the list, but who was not, and why.

What we built

A pipeline that gathers candidate companies from public sources, checks each one against the firm's criteria, finds the right role, verifies the contact, and writes the result to a shared sheet the firm already used. AI does the reading and the first pass of matching; a person checks every row before it is called verified.

The delivery was 167 leads, each with a source, and a coverage report: how many candidates were considered, how many were excluded and on what grounds, and where the criteria produced no result at all.

How we handled the hard part

The temptation in lead generation is to fill the gaps. If a contact cannot be found, invent a plausible one, and the number at the bottom of the sheet looks better. We did the opposite. Where a company met the criteria but no verifiable contact existed, it went into the report as a gap, with the reason. The firm got a smaller number it could trust instead of a bigger one it could not.

What changed

The firm received 167 leads it could act on, and a written account of the ground the list did and did not cover.

What we would tell the next client

Ask for the coverage report before you ask for the number. A list of 500 with no account of how it was made is worth less than a list of 167 with one. The report is what lets you decide whether to run the same search again, or change the criteria.