Outreach reasons and targets

Cold outreach isn’t a single activity. A sales prospecting note to a CFO and a press pitch to a journalist look superficially similar — short, personalised, with an ask — but everything that actually drives results is different. The target audience, the definition of a “good fit”, the message angle, and what counts as success all differ.

LeadHunter makes that explicit with a purpose on every campaign (the goal field in the API). Pick one when you create the campaign and the rest of the platform adapts: the fit criteria, the fit-scoring rubric, the message-draft tone, and the bulk-add guardrails all shift to match what you’re actually trying to accomplish.

The eleven purposes

The eleven purposes cover the reasons businesses actually do outbound. Pick the one closest to your intent; the default is Sales prospecting, which is what most outbound is.

Purpose	What it’s for	Who you’re targeting
Sales prospecting	Find companies likely to buy.	Decision-makers at companies matching your buyer profile.
Partnership / reseller	Recruit resellers, integrators, affiliates.	Companies whose clients also need what you sell.
Press / visibility	Get coverage.	Journalists, publications, podcasts, newsletters in your space.
Influencer / community	Reach amplifiers.	Creators and community leaders with audience overlap.
Investor outreach	Raise capital.	VC funds, angel investors, family offices whose thesis fits your stage.
Recruiting	Source candidates.	People matching the role’s skills and seniority.
Customer expansion	Upsell or cross-sell.	Existing clients who’d benefit from more product.
Win-back / reactivation	Re-engage lost accounts.	Former clients worth a second pass.
Event invitation	Drive attendance.	People the event is relevant to (no constraints on relationship type).
Research interviews	Recruit participants.	People whose perspective is valuable to your research.
Renewal	Lock in renewals.	Current clients approaching the end of a term.

Setting a purpose isn’t a one-way door — you can change it with Change purpose on the campaign’s Settings & costs tab if the angle shifts. Switching the purpose re-applies the new guardrails on subsequent bulk-adds; existing accounts stay in the campaign. Fit scores are kept per purpose, so the campaign then reads the scores made for its new purpose: accounts never scored for it need a rescore.

What changes when you pick a non-default purpose

Five things adapt to the purpose you choose:

1. Each purpose has its own fit criteria

Each product has one set of fit criteria per purpose. When you generate or regenerate them (in the campaign wizard, or from Settings → Products without a campaign), the AI is told what kind of target to model. For a Press campaign that means “publications, journalists, podcasts that cover our space and reach the audience we want — editorial slant matters more than company size”. For a Recruiting campaign it’s “candidates with the skills, experience, and seniority we’re hiring for”. For Partnership it’s “companies that would be strong resellers, integration partners, or affiliates”.

You still get the same fit criteria with industries / roles / pain points — but the values reflect the purpose. Press fit criteria list editorial domains as industries and roles like “Senior Editor” or “Reporter” as job titles. Recruiting fit criteria list adjacent companies and the role’s level. The structure is consistent so you can review and revise it the same way; only the content shifts.

See Fit criteria and fit score for how they’re generated, edited and versioned.

2. The fit-scoring rubric shifts

Fit scoring still produces a 0-10 number with a typed list of reasons (positives, negatives, neutral context). What changes is what is being scored against.

For Sales, the score answers “how well does this match our buyer profile?” — industry alignment, size, signals in the website that suggest the pain points.
For Partnership, the score answers “how strong a partner would this be?” — shared audience, product complementarity, credibility as a reseller or integrator.
For Press, the score answers “is this the right outlet for our story?” — editorial coverage of the space, audience size and engagement, editorial angle compatibility.
For Recruiting, the score answers “how well does this person fit the role?” — skills alignment, level, recent stack, signs of openness.

The numbers mean the same thing — 8–10 is a strong fit, 6–8 a good fit, 4–6 a weak fit, below 4 a poor fit — but the axis the score is rated against changes with the purpose. A score of 9 in a Press campaign means “highly relevant outlet, will probably take the pitch”; a 9 in Partnership means “strong shared-audience partner”.

3. The outbound message intent matches the purpose

When you draft a message, the AI starts with what kind of message it’s writing. A Sales draft is a short cold opener that introduces the product and asks for a call. A Press draft is a pitch with a newsworthy angle up front, no sales language, and a concrete offer (data, an interview, an exclusive). A Partnership draft proposes collaboration, not a sale. A Recruiting draft is a sourcing note specific to the role with a low-friction next step.

You’ll see the difference even with identical product context and the same target account. The tone, the call-to-action, and the opening hook all shift to fit the purpose. You can still translate, edit, or rewrite — the AI is giving you a starting draft that matches the purpose, not a final message.

See Messaging for the full conversation log.

4. The add-to-campaign guardrails flip

LeadHunter’s guardrails — the rules that decide who’s allowed into this campaign — depend on the purpose. A few invariants survive everything:

do_not_contact accounts are always blocked. This is a hard GDPR / opt-out rule. No purpose, no flag, no flow can override it. To re-engage someone on DNC, change their status manually first.
personal_network accounts are always hard-blocked. Bulk-blasting your warm personal contacts through a campaign is always the wrong move — that’s what a one-off intro is for. No purpose flips this.
competitor accounts are hard-blocked for most purposes, but admitted for press / event / research. A trade publication that covers your competitors is still a valid press pitch target; a roundtable invites peers; market research routinely interviews competitor employees. For the other purposes (sales, partnership, investor, recruiting, expansion, win-back, renewal, influencer), competitors stay hard-blocked.

Everything else flexes per purpose:

A Sales campaign soft-blocks supplier / investor / press / analyst / candidate / influencer / community / event organizer accounts — they’re not buyers, you can override per type if you really want. Investor, recruiting, customer expansion, win-back and renewal campaigns soft-block influencers, communities and event organizers the same way (see Marketing partners).
A Press campaign admits press and influencer accounts by default — they’re the target. It still soft-blocks suppliers and candidates.
An Influencer / community campaign admits influencers, communities and press. A Partnership campaign admits partners, affiliates and communities. An Event campaign admits event organizers.
A Recruiting campaign admits candidate accounts and blocks the others.
A Customer expansion or Renewal campaign treats clients as the target audience — they’re not blocked, they’re who the campaign is for.
An Event or Research campaign has no soft-blocks at all — anyone might attend or be interviewed.

When you bulk-add accounts to a campaign and the guardrails block some of them, the UI tells you exactly which accounts were skipped and why — DNC, client status, competitor, supplier, and so on — with a “flip this flag to include them” message where overrides apply.

5. The “what’s success” semantics adjust

For a Sales campaign, success is the account became a client. For Press or Influencer or Investor, success is they replied — coverage and meetings come from there. For Partnership, success is they became a partner. For Recruiting, they engaged about the role. For Win-back, success is again became a client (after having been lost). For Renewal, it’s they renewed (stayed a client through the renewal date).

The funnel on Insights → Funnel routes the closed event per purpose:

Sales, customer expansion, win-back, renewal close when the account transitions to status=customer — the legacy meaning, unchanged.
Partnership, press, influencer, investor, recruiting, event, research close when the account first replies. For these purposes “they replied” is the success metric — a journalist replying is a press hit; a candidate replying is a recruiting win.

So a press campaign that gets one outbound + one reply shows responded=1 and closed=1 (they are the same event for press). A sales campaign with the same shape shows responded=1 and closed=0 until the account also transitions to client. The initiated and responded columns are universal across purposes; only closed adapts.

Partnership and customer-expansion currently use the inbound-response signal as a proxy — the cleaner signals (partner relationship-type acquired, client usage expanded) aren’t tracked in audit-log form yet.

Picking a purpose

A few rules of thumb:

If it’s sales, pick Sales. It’s the default for a reason. Most outbound is sales.
If it’s not sales but you want to reach a company (not a person at a specific role), pick the closest match. Partnership for resellers/integrators; Press for media; Investor for funds; Event for invites; Research for interviews.
If it’s not sales but you want to reach a person in a specific role, pick Recruiting. Influencer / Press also reach people, but they’re targeting publications or creators with platforms — Recruiting is for the candidate-as-individual case.
For existing clients, pick Customer expansion (upsell) or Renewal (lock-in). They differ in the message intent — expansion leads with new value, renewal leads with a soft “still on track to renew?”.
For lost clients, pick Win-back. It’s tonally different from a fresh sales pitch — leads with what’s changed since you parted ways.

If your intent doesn’t fit cleanly, start with the closest purpose and switch later if needed. The cost of switching is one click; the cost of using “Sales” for everything is a long tail of messages and scores that don’t match what you’re actually doing.

A worked example: three campaigns on one product

Same product, same project, three different purposes:

Campaign A — Sales prospecting. Fit criteria: directors of marketing at B2B SaaS companies with 50-200 employees. Scoring rubric: rate fit as a buyer. Message intent: cold opener proposing a 15-minute call. Blocked: clients, suppliers, press, investors, analysts, candidates, influencers, communities, event organizers.
Campaign B — Press / visibility. Fit criteria: tech publications and podcasts covering go-to-market / sales tooling. Scoring rubric: rate fit as a press outlet. Message intent: pitch a newsworthy angle (new launch, surprising data, fresh perspective). Blocked: competitors, personal network. Press accounts are the target, so they pass.
Campaign C — Customer expansion. Fit criteria: existing clients using the basic plan with growing team size. Scoring rubric: rate expansion potential. Message intent: friendly account-management nudge mentioning a specific upgrade fit. Blocked: nobody who’s not already a client matters here.

Each campaign uses the same Product (same description, same example URLs) but produces completely different fit criteria, score reasons, message drafts, and audience lists — because the purpose sets all of that.