How to automate B2B prospecting with Claude, connectors and MCP

Once you have a plan with a profile, signals, tools, criteria and openers, there are two realistic ways to make it run without you. The first is an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT with connectors to your tools. The second is a purpose-built platform that watches signals on a schedule and pushes qualified companies to you. Most businesses should start with the first and graduate to the second when volume justifies it.

1. 01Create a Claude Project and paste your plan as the project instructions. The studio's Claude agent brief is written for exactly this: it contains the profile, signals, tools, criteria, dossier fields and openers in one prompt.
2. 02Connect the tools that offer a connector or an MCP server. Apollo, several CRMs and a growing list of data tools do. Companies House has a free API that a small MCP server can wrap.
3. 03Ask in plain English: find me ten companies in my profile showing a timing signal this week. Qualify them against my criteria. Fill the dossier for the top three. Draft an opener for each.
4. 04Review, edit, send. Keep a human on the send button until you trust the output.

This route costs a subscription and an afternoon. Its limit is that it runs when you ask it to. It does not watch anything overnight.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets an AI assistant call external tools and data sources directly. A tool with an MCP server can be queried inside a Claude conversation the same way you would ask a colleague to look something up. For prospecting, that means live company data, live contact lookups and live CRM updates without copying and pasting between tabs. Where a tool only has a REST API, a thin MCP server can wrap it, which is a small piece of work for a developer.

A platform runs the plan on a schedule: it polls the sources for each signal, deduplicates, qualifies against your criteria, enriches the dossier, drafts openers and drops the result into your CRM or inbox every morning. It is the right answer when you have more than a handful of signals, when timing matters by the day, or when several people need to work from the same queue.

• Expect the planning and consultancy work to matter as much as the code. Signals, criteria and connections need to be specified precisely before anything is built.
• Budget for the unglamorous parts: deduplication, rate limits, retries and a log of what was checked and when.
• Insist on a plan you can read. If the specification is not something you understand, you cannot tell whether the platform is doing the right thing.

Whichever route you take, the plan is the specification. Run the Claude route for a month, keep notes on what the assistant gets right and wrong, refine the signals and criteria, and only then decide whether a platform pays for itself. Sales Architect Studio keeps the plan editable so the specification and the system never drift apart.

How stage three works Build your plan free