Prospecting for small sales teams without per-seat pricing

What changes when there are three of you

A solo seller can keep everything in their head. Once a team has three or four reps, new problems appear:

• Two reps email the same prospect with different pitches.
• One rep's idea of a good lead is not another's.
• Tool costs scale with headcount, so adding a rep means renegotiating software.
• Nobody knows which lead source actually produces meetings.

The fix is less about finding more leads and more about shared definitions and shared numbers.

One profile, one line

Agree a single customer profile, written in plain words, that everyone scores against. Sluice asks three typed questions per person: fit from 0 to 100, worth approaching or not, and whether what they said suggests they have the problem now. 70 is the line for "worth contacting". When a rep disagrees with a score, the answer is to edit the profile for everyone, not to work around it.

Insights then show reply rate by predicted score. If 80s reply no more often than 60s, your profile is wrong, and you will see it within a month or two. Are your lead scores honest? explains how to read it.

Split sources, not territories

Rather than dividing by region, a small team can divide by source. Each rep owns a channel and gets good at it:

The directory's "Hiring for" filter is a good fit for Rep 3: it finds people at companies hiring for a role, which is the closest Sluice comes to a growth signal (event signals such as "raised money" are not available yet). See also job changes for the manager's list.

Example signal phrases for a team

Each signal is a phrase of at least three words, with its own record of searches, people found and how many cleared 70. A team selling, say, field service software might run:

• "scheduling our engineers is"
• "looking for job management software"
• "our technicians use paper"
• "switching from [competitor] to"

Review the records together once a fortnight and switch off the dead ones.

Costing a month for three reps

A worked example. A team of three plus a manager picks Working at $39 a month, which carries 5,000 credits in the first month (one cent each), with lookups at supplier cost plus 50%.

1. Sourcing. Each rep's searches show their worst-case price before running, and a pass is capped at 25 people enriched by default. Say the team agrees a budget of 1,000 credits per rep: 3,000.
2. Reveals. Directory previews are free. Say 240 people score 70 or more and are revealed at 5 credits each: 1,200 credits.
3. Reserve. 800 credits for email lookups and reruns. Misses are not billed.
4. Sending. Three reps connect their LinkedIn: 3 x $10.80 = $32.40.

First-month total: $39 + $32.40 = $71.40, with no seat fees. From month two the plan carries 3,900 credits. If the team runs through credits, one-off packs and automatic top-ups exist; if you outgrow Working, Agency at $149 carries 14,900 credits a month and cheaper lookups. See what a lead actually costs for the full maths.

A shared standard for first messages

Teams drift into templates. Sluice drafts first messages from each person's own words and scores every draft, including one a rep writes, with a reason, before it can be queued. Use the reasons as coaching material: if one rep's drafts keep scoring low for "generic opening", that is a five-minute conversation. Follow-ups are rendered per person, weak template follow-ups are held for review, and a "no thanks" adds the person to the do-not-contact list.

Where Sluice is the wrong fit

• No dialer. Phone-heavy teams will need another tool.
• HubSpot only; no Salesforce yet.
• Public-post sources depend on platform access, which can change.
• It is new and not proven at large volume. Run it alongside your current tools for a month before switching.

Which plan?

Working at $39 for most teams of two to five: Autopilot, signal performance, company and email lookups and LinkedIn sending. Agency at $149 when you need several profiles (for example, two products) or want to bring your own data key. Compare plans on pricing.