The Morning 500 Became 453
After every trade show, the attendee list arrives as an Excel file. Picking out the real purchasing contacts from hundreds of names used to mean someone reading every job title by hand.
Before: A human scanning a 500-name list, checking title, country, and industry one by one. Even a full day of this leaves you exhausted halfway through.
So we handed the first pass to Claude Code. The rule was simple, keep any title containing 「Sales」, 「Purchasing」, or 「Import」, drop the rest.
The run finished with 500 names trimmed to 453. At a glance, it looked like a clean filter.
Counting the 47 Who Disappeared
After (the problem surfaces): Reopening the 47 filtered-out names, we found real buyers who had actually placed orders before, mixed in with the noise.
The cause was the job title. Some buyers listed themselves not as 「Sales」 but as 「Procurement Manager」, or simply 「Manager」. The filter only reacted to specific words, so genuine buyers with different phrasing slipped through the cracks.
Robo added a second verification layer. First, filter by title keywords, then cross-check the excluded names again against company name and country. Ambiguous cases are no longer auto-deleted, instead they get tagged 「needs review」 for a human to check.
Where We Are Now
The filter still runs automatically, but cases as ambiguous as those 47 no longer vanish quietly. They stay tagged and wait for a short review.
When a small team leans on automation instead of manual labor, what it actually needs is not a smarter filter, but one simple rule: when unsure, do not delete.