Introducing Stage 1

Stage 1 is live. It's the sales tool I wanted for 25 years and never had.

It watches your target accounts, tells you who's ready to talk and why, and helps you reach them the way senior buyers want to be reached. It's built for services firms. Consulting, engineering and agency firms selling $50K to $500K engagements to a committee of senior buyers.

Why I built it

Most quarters in services are lost before the first meeting. Not in the proposal or the negotiation. In the first stage, where you decide who to call, when, and what to say.

The tools on the market didn't help much with that. Contact databases gave us names with no reason to call. Sequencers gave us volume we couldn't afford in a small market. And the AI SDRs that showed up next made the volume cheaper and the messages worse.

So I spent years teaching the same method by hand. Research before reach. Lead with a hypothesis. Reach the committee. Own every send. Warm before cold.

It works. But it's slow by hand. Watching a few hundred accounts, reading filings, checking who moved into which seat, and writing three openers per account is more than any rep can do on top of a full calendar. So the research got skipped, and the outreach went generic.

Stage 1 is that method, built into software. The method itself is published in full.

It watches for the ten signals

Stage 1 watches your target accounts for the ten buying signals that matter in a services sale. An RFP or vendor search. A new leader in the buying seat, or your champion leaving. Business pressure like margin squeeze, cost programs and legacy systems. Hiring for the problem you solve. Engagement with you, or with a competitor. Funding and deals. Tech stack. Topic. Influencer engagement.

It reads LinkedIn for posts, jobs, new seats, champion moves and reactions. It reads SEC filings, news, public tenders on SAM.gov, and events.

Signals roll up to the account and stack. Each one loses weight as it ages, and by default its weight halves every 14 days. That's a starting assumption you can tune, not a law.

The result is the Board. Your accounts, ranked by how much fresh signal is sitting at each one. You open it in the morning and know where to spend the day.

It finds the warm path first

Before Stage 1 drafts a cold note, it looks for a warm one.

It checks your own LinkedIn connections for someone who knows the buyer. This needs LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator. If it finds a path, it drafts a short ask your connector can forward.

If the intro doesn't happen, you go direct. Warm first, cold second.

It writes the opener, you own it

For each account, Stage 1 does 3x3 research. Three sources, up to three facts each, from the public record, social context and the market.

Then it writes a Hypothesis Opening for three people. The economic buyer, the champion and the technical lead. Each one gets a research hook, a personal trigger, a misery hypothesis and a binary exit, written for their seat.

You approve every send. Nothing goes out without a human reading it. Stage 1 sends from your own LinkedIn and email, so the message comes from you and sounds like you.

When replies come in, the Desk sorts them and drafts answers. Replies are where a lot of meetings get lost, and the Desk keeps them from sitting.

Behind all of it is the Brain. It learns how your firm sells from your website and your documents. So the research and the drafts sound like your firm, not a template.

Setup takes about two minutes

Sign up with your work email. Confirm your company. That's it.

Stage 1 builds your first Board on its own, with accounts that fit your firm and their filings and news already checked. You see ranked accounts and real signals on day one, not after a month of configuration.

Three plans

Starter is $79 a month. Team is $249 a month for up to five seats. Partner is $2,500 a month, and Inversion CRO runs the playbook with you.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial. No credit card. Full details are on the pricing page.

Stage 1 is built by Inversion Systems, LLC. It's the method I've sold by for years, now running on your accounts four times a day.

Start your free trial and see which of your accounts are moving this week.