Start from what you sell — not from a downloaded contact dump

List-first outbound buys or scrapes people, drops them into a sequencer, and hopes titles match. The company fit is assumed from a keyword. Peers, agencies, and wrong verticals still get the same sequence. Credits and reputation drain on contacts that were never buyers.

ICP-first prospecting reverses the dependency. You define what you sell and who buys it. You search and score companies against that brief. Only then do you reveal emails or phones. People are a consequence of fit — not the starting inventory.

Write the product in plain language: who it is for, who it is not for, industries, and sell requirements. Turn that into a scoring brief so every company is judged the same way. Search markets you actually serve. Park non-fits. Enrich keepers. Follow up from your own channels.

Signals and timing still matter — but a signal on a non-buyer is theatre. Fit is the gate; timing is the accelerator.

• Product definition before any CSV import
• Company search and AI score before enrichment spend
• CRM stages for keepers, not for the whole dump
• Revisit the ICP when win rates disagree with the brief

Under My Business you define products. Prepare with AI builds a scoring brief from your description (and optional PDF). Product warm-up scores real directory companies in chosen countries in the background so Lead Search ranks toward your ICP instead of a raw keyword sort. Live AI company validation spends credits to judge selected rows the same way.

Deep Search and enrichment unlock people at companies you already selected. Lead CRM holds the shortlist. That is the opposite of a list marketplace: software access and credits for research, not a static contact database as the deliverable.

CSV import into Lead CRM is fine when the accounts already passed your bar — event attendees, inbound forms, partner intros. Import is not a substitute for ICP. Use it after the filter, not instead of it.