Agencies that resell lead generation live or die by scope. The work itself is not complicated, but the ambiguity around it destroys margin. One vague brief can turn a two day job into a two week dispute.

This checklist is the one I would put in front of every project before accepting it.

Before the project starts

  • Written target definition — titles, industry, company size, location, and the disqualifiers
  • Agreed volume — a number, not a range, and a rule for what happens if the market is thinner than expected
  • Delivery format — Google Sheets, Excel or CSV, with the exact column list
  • Definition of verified — syntax only, syntax plus MX, or full mailbox probe
  • Revisions policy — what counts as an error you will fix for free

If any of these is missing, the client will define it later — usually in their favour and usually after the work is done.

During the project

  • Send a sample early, not at the end. Ten rows resolve eighty percent of misunderstandings.
  • Track the source of every row so any error can be traced and corrected
  • Deduplicate by domain and by person, not by name alone
  • Log assumptions in the file notes so nothing is implicit

At delivery

  • Clean headers, one row per person, no merged cells
  • A short summary: volume, sources used, verification rate achieved
  • Confirm the import worked in the client CRM, not just that the file was sent

The margin rule

Never commit to a deadline before you have inspected the data sources. Roughly half of all data problems are discovered in the first hour of the job, and each one costs time that was never quoted.

Price the work on effort, not on row count. A two thousand row list from a clean directory can take an afternoon. The same volume scraped from a JavaScript-heavy site with no API can take two days. Quoting by rows alone guarantees you will lose money on exactly the projects that are hardest.

A short note on quality

Deliver the rejected rows in a second sheet with the reason attached. Clients trust the second sheet as much as the first, and it ends the conversation about whether the list is really verified. Transparency is cheaper than a revision round.