Reaching the person who can sign

A target list of well-matched companies is a good start, but it does not produce any data on its own. Every dataset depends on one person at the company agreeing to a licence, and that person is usually busy, hard to reach and not looking for this conversation.

For AI labs sourcing company data, the bottleneck is rarely finding companies that fit. It is getting a real conversation with someone who has the authority to say yes.

A data licence commits company assets and touches confidentiality, privacy and customer relationships. That puts the decision near the top of the organization. At an operating company, the signer is usually the CEO or founder, sometimes with the CFO, COO or general counsel closely involved.

At a company that is winding down or already closed, the picture shifts. A director, officer, liquidator or assignee with authority over company assets can sign. We request the authority document up front, so there is no question later about who agreed to what. Payment always goes to the company entity, not to an individual. We go deeper on this in who can sign a data licence when a company is closing.

This is general information, not legal advice; who has authority depends on the company and its jurisdiction, and each side should involve its own counsel.

The people who can sign are not the people who show up in obvious places. The workspace admin who manages Slack cannot license the company's data. Neither can the head of engineering who owns the code host, or the data team that runs the warehouse. They can be helpful later, but they cannot start the process.

Inbound channels do not reliably reach the right person either. A form on a marketplace waits for someone to find it, which means it only hears from companies already looking to sell. Generic inboxes route to whoever triages them. And for companies that are winding down, the founder may have moved on, the domain may be lapsing and the board may have handed authority to a liquidator who has never heard of data licensing.

There are a few predictable failure modes:

• The message reaches someone without authority, who forwards it nowhere
• It reaches the right person, but reads like spam and gets ignored
• It reaches a liquidator or assignee who does not know the data is an asset
• It arrives after the workspace has been cancelled and the history is gone

Martal Group has done B2B outbound for 17 years. More than 200 onshore sales reps across the US, Canada, the EU and LATAM have prospected across 24 industries, using cold calling, email and LinkedIn together. For data sourcing, that same muscle is pointed at a different question.

Calling does most of the heavy lifting. A power dialer lets reps work through a list efficiently, and signal-driven prospecting helps them prioritize: a company that just announced a wind-down, a founder who has posted about next steps, a recent change in leadership. Email and LinkedIn support the call by giving the signer something to read and a name to recognize. We cover that channel more fully in cold calling as a data-sourcing channel.

Onshore reps in the signer's region matter more than they might seem. A conversation about licensing company data needs to sound credible in the first thirty seconds, in the right language and the right business norms, at a time of day when the person picks up.

The goal of the first call is not to close a licence. It is to earn a 15-minute intro call, and to make sure the person on the line can actually sign.

That means explaining the idea plainly. The company licenses anonymized operational data for AI training and evaluation, not for marketing or people search. The seller sets scope and exclusions, which are annexed to the contract before any data moves. The evaluation is read-only, and the whole process takes about an hour of the seller's time. Anonymization happens in-house, no third party touches raw data, and the raw archive is deleted within 30 days of sign-off with a deletion certificate.

Signers ask sensible questions, and the rep needs to answer them without overselling. What is it worth? There is no firm number before counting, but typical licences range from $20K to $400K+. What about our employees? Every person becomes a consistent token, HR, payroll, medical and privileged folders are excluded by default, and buyers may never contact or re-identify anyone. What about clients? They can be excluded.

When the person on the phone is not the signer, the job is to find out who is and how to reach them, whether that is a co-founder, a board member or the firm handling the wind-down. A warm handoff from someone inside the company usually lands better than a second cold approach, so reps ask for an introduction rather than just a name.

For a lab, the value is a sourcing process that does not stop at a list. You send a brief covering sector, headcount, tool stack, years of history, regions and operating versus winding down. We build the target list, our reps call the people who can sign, and data from companies that agree is evaluated, anonymized and delivered on a rolling basis.

The result is coverage shaped by your brief rather than by whoever happened to come forward. If that is the kind of supply your team needs, send us a sourcing brief.