Building your first agent

An agent works one market. It finds real companies there, checks the addresses it found actually exist on domains that accept mail, and records why it thinks each one fits what you sell, so you can disagree with its reasoning rather than take the list on faith.

Open Agents and choose New agent. The wizard asks a handful of questions: what to call the agent, your company, what you sell, which market, and who buys it if you know. Answer the way you would say it out loud. The brief is a description, not a form.

Then put it to work. Buyers appear as it finds them, and it keeps going in the background if you close the window, so you do not have to sit and watch.

The brief decides everything

This is the part worth ten minutes. Three things that make the difference, from running these on a real export business:

• Be specific about the product. “Single estate extra virgin olive oil, bulk and private label” finds better companies than “olive oil”.
• Name the buyer type if you know it. Importers, distributors, delis, private label packers, food service. Each one is a different company and a different email.
• Say what disqualifies a buyer. Telling it what you do not want, for instance “not the national supermarket chains”, saves you reviewing companies that were never going to be a fit.

One agent per market works best. A second market deserves its own agent with its own brief, which is what the larger plans are for. A single agent asked to cover four countries writes a vaguer brief and finds vaguer companies.

How many buyers, and how often

On a paid plan each agent finds 30 sendable buyers a week. Not a list of thirty thousand you will never read: 30 researched companies with a reason attached. If a week finds more than that, the extra is held over and spent first the following week rather than thrown away.

On the free trial an agent finds 10 a week and you can open the contact details for 5 of them. Everything else about a buyer stays visible: the company, the country, the buyer type, why it fits and how it answered the qualification. That is enough to judge whether your market is there.

Some weeks come up short, and when that happens the agent says so rather than padding the number with companies it does not believe in. A thin market is information about the market, and it usually means the brief is worth widening.

Finding is not permission to write

Nothing your agent finds is emailed to anybody. Buyers wait for you to read them and decide, and the emails wait again after that. That is the next article.

Next: Your first outreach