How to build new logo pipeline for R&D tax credit studies

At a company with a finance function, the signer is the CFO or the controller. Below about 40 people it is the founder, and the founder is usually the person doing the engineering too, which matters because they are the one who has to sit for the documentation interviews.

There is a second person in the room who is not the buyer but decides whether the buyer says yes: the outside CPA. The CPA either already claims a credit for the company, usually thinly, or has told the company it is not worth the audit exposure. Either way, writing to the CFO as though the CPA does not exist is the most common mistake in this niche. Write as the specialist who will hand the CPA a study they can attach to the return, and half the resistance disappears.

The federal government publishes a list of companies it has just paid to do research. Most firms in this niche buy contact lists instead. Six sources, in rough order of how well they convert.

• SBIR and STTR awards. Every award is public on sbir.gov with the company, the agency, the phase, the dollar amount and the date. An award is close to the government's own definition of qualified research, and the payroll behind it almost always qualifies for the credit on top of the grant. Phase II awards are the strongest signal, because they mean two years of engineering payroll at a company that may still be pre revenue.
• Patent applications. Published on the USPTO Patent Center eighteen months after filing, searchable by assignee. A patent application is contemporaneous documentation of a process of experimentation, which is the hardest part of the four part test to prove after the fact.
• Engineering hiring waves. Wages are the largest qualified expense category by a distance. A company that opened five engineering roles since spring has added qualified payroll whether or not anyone has told finance.
• Funding rounds. A raise is visible in SEC Form D filings and the usual databases, and it usually funds engineering. For a company under five years of gross receipts and under $5M in revenue, the credit can be taken against payroll tax rather than income tax, up to $500K a year, which turns a pre profit company from a poor prospect into the best one.
• The 2025 change to Section 174. Companies that were required to capitalize and amortize domestic research costs for 2022 through 2024 can now deduct domestic research immediately, and smaller companies can elect to amend prior years and recover the difference. Any company that has run an engineering team since 2022 and has not heard about this is a prospect with a refund waiting.
• New product and platform announcements. A launch press release is a company telling you it just finished a development cycle. The expenses behind that cycle are the study.

The first two are the ones to build the practice on. They are public, dated, name the company, and describe the exact activity the credit exists to reward. A firm that only worked SBIR awardees and recent patent assignees in its own state would have more qualified prospects than it could serve.

• Are they employing engineers on W2, or is everything contracted out? Contractor costs count at 65 percent and offshore contractors generally do not count at all. A company whose whole team is overseas is a small credit and a long argument.
• Are they profitable, or under five years old with under $5M in gross receipts? Either can use the credit. A company that is neither, meaning an older unprofitable company, has a credit it cannot use yet, which is a weaker conversation.
• Is the work technological in nature? Software counts, hardware counts, process development counts. A marketing agency that calls its campaigns research does not, and you will spend the engagement arguing about it.
• Does the trigger have a date in the last year? A 2021 patent publication is a company that has either claimed the credit since or decided not to.

Lead with a finding about their situation, not with the existence of the credit. They know the credit exists. What they do not know is what their specific award, filing or hiring pattern means for it, and that is the sentence that gets read.

Each of those contains a fact they can verify, a consequence they had not connected to it, and an offer of something small. None of them mentions a fee. None of them says "leaving money on the table," which is the phrase that identifies a cold caller in four words.

• "You could be missing out on thousands of dollars." Every CFO has heard this sentence forty times from people who had not looked at their company. It is the sound of the script.
• Contingency pricing in the opener. It frames you as a fee, and the reader will compare you to the last person who offered a lower one.
• "Everything qualifies" or any form of guarantee. Anyone who has been through an examination knows that is false, and it marks you as the kind of firm that creates the exposure the CPA warned them about.
• Audit fear in either direction. Do not threaten them with it and do not wave it away. The honest position is that documentation is the defense and a study is the documentation.

Our CPA already handles it. Sometimes true. Usually what the CPA handles is a number computed as a percentage of engineering payroll with no business component documentation behind it, which is precisely the claim that fails on examination.

Do not argue with the CPA. Ask one question: did the study identify the business components and the uncertainty for each, the way Form 6765 now asks? If the answer is a pause, the conversation is about strengthening what the CPA files, not replacing the CPA, and the CPA becomes an ally because the exposure was theirs.

The second objection is we heard the credit triggers audits. The IRS has increased scrutiny, the form now requires far more detail, and amended claims have had to include specific supporting information since 2022. All of that is true and none of it is an argument against the credit. It is an argument against the thin version of it. Say so, and you have separated yourself from the firms that caused the problem.

• Study fee: commonly a fixed fee in the $8K to $25K range for a company under 100 people, or a contingency of 15 to 25 percent of the credit. Fixed fee is easier to sell to a CFO and easier to defend to a CPA.
• Credit size: a 20 to 50 person software company with a real engineering team often lands between $50K and $250K in federal credit, with state credits on top in the states that have them.
• Cycle: two to six weeks, tightly tied to the filing calendar. The engagement closes fast in January and does not close at all in April.
• Signer: the CFO or controller, with the CPA consulted. The founder at small companies, with the CPA still consulted.
• Expansion: this is an annual engagement by nature. Add state credits, the Section 174 amended returns, the payroll offset election, and the cost segregation study for whatever building they bought when they scaled.

The annual recurrence is the whole economics. A $15K study that repeats every year for a client that adds engineers is worth far more than a first year number suggests, which is what makes a trigger based program affordable in a niche where most firms rely on volume.

• Weekly, pull new SBIR and STTR awards in your geography or the industries you know, and new patent publications by assignees in the same set. Under an hour once the saved searches exist.
• Monthly, pull engineering hiring growth in the same set from Sales Navigator account alerts.
• Qualify against the four checks. Expect to keep a little over half; this niche has cleaner signal than most.
• One message per account, written from the trigger. Twenty five accounts a week is a full program for a small firm.
• Three touches over two weeks, each carrying a different fact. Stop at three.
• Concentrate the sending in November through February and June through August. The calendar is doing half the qualification for you.

The firms that dominate this niche do so with call centers. The way to beat a call center is not a bigger call center. It is a note about their Phase II award, arriving in January.

Everything above is about who and what. This is about how, and it is where most outbound in this niche quietly dies. Seven rules. None of them are optional.

None of this is specific to your niche. All of it is specific to whether anyone ever reads the angle you spent an hour getting right.

That is what we do. ExpertLayer runs this exact loop for expert led firms: the weekly award and patent pull, the qualification, the angle per account, the sending across warmed mailboxes, and the reply reading. You take the conversations and do the study.

The first step is free and it is the same research described above. Send us your website and we will come back with 10 companies that hit these triggers right now, with the award or filing, the contact, and the opening line for each.