# How can I get Claude or ChatGPT to find B2B leads and draft cold emails for me?

Canonical: https://growfast.sh/solutions/ai-agent-find-leads-and-draft-cold-emails | Last updated: 2026-11-13 | Published by GrowFast

Connect a lead-finding service to your assistant over MCP, give the agent your product's domain, and have it return scored companies plus draft emails that you approve before anything is sent. With GrowFast that means adding the connector, approving a consent screen, then asking the agent to run scan_domain followed by draft_outreach_emails.

## Why it happens

A chat assistant with no tools cannot look anything up. Asked for "ten SaaS companies that need invoicing software, with the head of finance's email", it produces plausible names and addresses that it made up. Invented addresses bounce, and a bounce is the one outcome that hurts the sender: mailbox providers score your domain on bounces and spam complaints.

The fix is not a cleverer prompt. It is giving the assistant tools that return real, checkable data, and making every row of the result carry a source you can open. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT use to call those tools.

## The fix that works without GrowFast

1. **Write the customer profile in three lines.** Who buys (role and company type), what size, and what event makes them need you now. The agent can only be as specific as you are.
2. **Give the assistant a source of real companies.** Either a web search or browse tool, or an MCP server backed by company data. Without one, stop: anything it returns is a guess.
3. **Demand a source for every row.** Ask for a table with the company, its website, why it fits your profile, and the exact page where the contact address was published. Discard any row without a page you can open.
4. **Check the addresses yourself.** Run dig MX company.com for each domain; no MX record means no mail server. Drop role mailboxes such as info@ and support@, which are shared and bounce more.
5. **Let it draft, not send.** Ask for a first email per company, 80 to 120 words, that quotes one fact from the company's own site. Read every draft. Keep the assistant away from any tool that sends until you have reviewed a batch.
6. **Send from a domain you control, slowly.** Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the sending domain and start with a few emails a day. The deliverability pages linked below cover the setup and the ramp.

**Three ways to connect an assistant to outbound work (our assessment, not a benchmark)**

| Setup | What the assistant can do | Main risk | Who approves |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Assistant alone, no tools | Draft copy from facts you paste in | Invents companies and addresses | You, on every line |
| Assistant plus web search or browsing | Find companies and read their sites | Slow; addresses may be guessed; no deliverability checks | You, on every line |
| Assistant plus a lead-finding MCP server | Return scored companies with sources and drafts | Trusting the output without opening the sources | You, before any send |

## What an agent should never be allowed to guess

Email addresses are the clearest case. Patterns such as first.last@company.com are guesses, and a guessed address that happens to belong to someone else is mail to a stranger. Use only addresses a company published, and keep the page you found them on.

## When to use GrowFast

GrowFast is an MCP server built for this job. scan_domain reads your product's site and returns the ideal customer profile, a first email and the best-fit companies scored 1 to 10, each with an MX-checked contact address and the page it was read from. draft_outreach_emails takes up to 10 of those companies and writes a first email to the decision-maker the company's own site names, if it names one. Neither tool sends or posts anything.

The ChatGPT and Claude connectors expose research and drafting only. Cursor, Gemini CLI and other clients use the full server with an API key or OAuth, which adds the tools that send. You need a GrowFast account, and your plan's limits apply to every call: see /pricing.

**When it is not the right tool:** GrowFast reaches people by email only, plus Reddit drafts you post yourself. If your buyers must be reached on LinkedIn or by phone, or you already have a clean list and only need sending volume, a different tool fits better. It does not promise leads, replies or meetings.

## Ask your AI assistant

Paste this into an assistant that has the GrowFast MCP server connected:

> Assign to GrowFast: scan mynewsletter.com, then draft first emails to the 3 best-fit companies. Don't send anything. Show me each draft and the page the address was read from so I can approve.

Tools used: `scan_domain`, `draft_outreach_emails`. These exist on the ChatGPT and Claude connectors, which research and draft but cannot send.

## FAQ

### Can ChatGPT or Claude send the emails too?

Only if you connect a tool that sends. GrowFast's ChatGPT and Claude connectors cannot send or post; they research and draft. Sending is on the full server with an API key, and the dashboard.

### Why not just paste a list of companies into the chat?

You can, and for ten companies it works. The assistant still has no way to find the decision-maker's published address or check that the domain receives mail, which is what the tools add.

### Does this need a paid account?

You need a GrowFast account. What each plan includes, and how many domain scans you get, is on the pricing page, which is the one place we keep those numbers.

### How do I know the companies are real?

Every company in a scan carries the page its contact address was read from. Open it. If a row has no source page, do not use it.

## Sources

- [Model Context Protocol, official site](https://modelcontextprotocol.io) (read 2026-11-13)

## Related

- [How do I let an AI agent run cold outreach without losing control of what gets sent?](https://growfast.sh/solutions/agent-outreach-guardrails)
- [How do I find the right person's email at a company without guessing the address?](https://growfast.sh/solutions/find-decision-maker-email-without-guessing)
- [How do I research a company in a few minutes before cold emailing it?](https://growfast.sh/solutions/research-a-company-before-cold-emailing)
- [Connect GrowFast to ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or Gemini CLI](https://growfast.sh/mcp)
- [Agent quickstart: call sequence, limits and error codes](https://growfast.sh/agents)
- [All problems and solutions](https://growfast.sh/solutions)