Prospecting & Qualification on FirstQuadrant

Before you can run campaigns or handle actions, you need an audience — and not just any list, but one that’s been enriched, filtered, and qualified so every contact is worth emailing.

The primary way to build an audience is through our Apollo.io integration. Apollo has over 100 million contacts, and we built a prospecting tool that lets you search through them without leaving FirstQuadrant. Filters include company headcount, HQ location, industry, revenue, funding rounds, technologies, and open positions on the company side, plus job title, management level, previous employers, and department on the contact side.

For teams with existing lists, we built CSV import supporting over 50 columns — everything from basic contact info to company funding data, social URLs, and tech stack. Each row goes through enrichment and shows a clear status: Successful, Skipped, or Failure.

We also built integration audiences — a Zapier connector and a Campaign API with public fqa_pub_ keys, so leads can flow in programmatically from forms, webhooks, or CRMs.

The most powerful feature was AI Qualification. Using LLMs, we’d analyze each contact against default criteria (company name known, website active, email verified) plus custom filter questions like “Does this company offer remote work?” For each question, the AI conducts web searches per contact to find the answer — computationally expensive, but the targeting precision was remarkable.

We later added audience segmentation — creating new audiences from segments of existing ones based on qualification results. This enabled campaign chaining: run a broad campaign, segment the non-responders who met some criteria, and hit them with more targeted messaging.