List building is the modern-day equivalent of striking gold.

This guide is your treasure map, and we're handing you the pickaxes to dig up those valuable nuggets.

When you hit a gold vein, you’ll recognize it instantly.

Even though some lead databases come with a hefty price tag, leads remain one of the most undervalued assets in the B2B world.

One quality lead can translate to $10K-$100K for high-ticket B2B offers.

We'll explore some of the major players in the lead database market and reveal lesser-known strategies and databases that will give you a competitive edge.

Like any worthwhile venture, the key is to consistently test various angles and databases because, at the start, it's a guessing game.

Sometimes you’ll strike gold immediately; other times, it takes sifting through 10+ different databases and target groups.

For best results we recommend using our free Ideal Customer Profile Swipe File

In the cold emailing game, accumulating a vast number of leads within a few months is inevitable. Staying organized from the beginning is far better than sifting through hundreds of lists later on. Good organization not only helps in reusing lists for different projects or clients but also simplifies outsourcing lead mining when you already have a well-structured setup.

Steps to Organize Your Lead Lists:

Naming Lead Lists:

Use a clear and descriptive naming convention to make lead lists easily identifiable. A suggested format is:

Apollo.io is an affordable and efficient lead source, making it an excellent starting point. It provides a solid foundation that you can build upon with more advanced lead sources discussed later in this guide.

Key Points:

When you login to your account, click on Search tab and then on People tab.

On the left-hand side of Apollo.io, you'll find a list of highly useful filters that can help you fine-tune your search and reach your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by adjusting various values. We'll cover each of these filters in detail in this guide.

The filters you will use most frequently are:

Step-by-Step Guide to Using Filters:

You can exclude the specific titles by clicking on "Advanced Search", and switching on the "Is not any of" button, then typing in the titles and hitting Enter after each one of them.

Apollo allows you to search with Boolean Operators too. Not all filters have it, but these are usually available in the "Advanced Search" function.

Next, you want to set the location of your contacts. Bare in mind that there are separate location filters for both contact and company. You can use one or the other, or both.

You can enter the location as broadly as the continent or a region, or as specific as a city. By clicking on Exclude locations you can list the countries that you don't want.

#Employees filter allows you to choose the size of the companies that will appear in the results.

Industry filter allows you to choose the specific company industry/industries that you want to see in the results. These industries are similar to the ones on LinkedIn, but they are not so specific and therefore there are fewer of them on Apollo.

If you need a very specific industry, you need to include some of the keywords in your search which can be combined with the industry too.

Here’s an example of creating a filter for a mobile app company. The most probable industries for this kind of business are IT services and Internet. In the keywords section we can type "mobile app", "ios app", "android development", "android app". This search will bring the results of all the companies listed on Apollo that have these keywords in their profile description.

Technologies filter includes all the tech that the company is using online. It can be e-commerce, CRM, HR tech, etc.

If your ICP is an e-commerce business, you want to start typing "e-commerce" and choose all the tech that applies.

If you are targeting only Shopify stores, it is enough just to type Shopify and select it from the drop-down list. Bare in mind that only the most popular technologies on the market will be listed here.

Revenue filter allows you to include the companies with a certain revenue. Thing to consider here is that there is not enough revenue data for all the companies so the number of results will be considerably lower if you turn this filter on.

Sometimes it is better to use the Employee filter instead, which is more accurate and it is available for majority of accounts listed on Apollo.

After you've applied all the filters, you want to save the contacts to a list that you will later export.

My plan allows me to select 25 contacts per page, so I will have to go one page at a time until I save enough of contacts.

Click on the checkbox above the Name column and choose Max people per company 1, apply selection, so you will be downloading only one contact per given company.

Then, click on Lists and Add to Lists.

After you created your list and added the first leads to it, you need to reload the page for changes to take effect. You can continue adding the leads by moving to the next page, and by selecting the newly created list.

Another useful feature of Apollo is enriching the company domains and finding the contacts for those domains.

You can upload the whole CSV with domains that you want to enrich.

Go to the Search tab, and click on Company. On the right-hand side, go to Import and find the file that contains your domains by clicking on Bulk Import From CSV.

Select the CSV file, and map the columns by selecting the account websites and names. Then scroll down and click on Import.

The companies with the domains that you have imported will appear in the next list.

Click on Saved, and select all companies.

The people profiles associated with the selected companies will be loaded, and from there you can do any filter and proceed with adding the leads to the list just like with the usual search.

You got your list ready, now you need the csv.

Go to the Lists tab and find the list that you created. Click to open it, select all the people and click on the Export button.

Keep the selection on Export all emails because they still need to be verified by the email tester tool. Click on Start Export and then Download.

Once you've exported your csv file, you want to verify the leads by using one of the online email verifiers.

In this section, I'll introduce you to three different LinkedIn scrapers. Test each one to determine which works best for you, as they all offer robust performance. Mastering Boolean Search on Sales Navigator will enhance the accuracy of your targeting when using these tools. Using quotes, NOT, OR, AND, or parentheses () in your search terms can significantly impact your lead mining results.

Evaboot is an advanced AI-powered LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper that extracts and enriches data based on your LinkedIn searches, exporting the results to a CSV file. Note that you will need a Sales Navigator account to use Evaboot or any other LinkedIn scraper.

Getting Started with Evaboot:

In the Company section, you want to apply filters such as Company headquarters, Company Headcount filter to search by size, or the Company Type filter to focus on public, privately held, and other statuses.

In the headquarters filter, you can include and exclude the locations for your search.

Role filter allows you to choose position, seniority and years in the current company/position of the contact.

You can use the exclude function for almost every filter on Sales Navigator.

Spotlight filter is a neat feature to find people based on their LinkedIn activity. if you are sending personalized messages, you can use some of the insights for creating ice-breakers.

For example, “Congrats on your new position at {{companyName}} - well deserved :)” when scraping the leads with the filter Changed jobs in last 90 days.

Posted content filter allows you to search for people who post articles about certain topics or problems that you have solutions for.

Personal filter helps you focus your targeting on the personal information, such as connections, location, years of experience, etc. You can also search by School or the groups that the person is a member of.

Have in mind that Geography in a personal filter applies to the contacts location, and Headquarters apply to the Company. You can use one of these or both.

Workflow section allows you to import already saved lists of leads or accounts, and enrich them with filters.

To create an Account list, go to the Accounts tab, and filter the companies.

Account related search:

Company attributes help you narrow down your search by using filters from Annual revenue to Technology used. The Technologies Used filter allows you to search a list of software and apps, so you can easily find businesses using tech similar to or competing with yours.

Spotlight filter lets you search for companies that are currently hiring on Linkedin or have had a recent change in their senior leadership and funding events in the last 12 months.

Workflow filter displays all the companies that you have saved before.

You will be asked to confirm the email extraction:

Evaboot automatically checks if the leads match the search filter you added in Sales Navigator. Normally around 20-30% of leads won’t completely match the targeting (see column “Qualified”).

You can choose to download All leads, or the leads that only match the filters - Qualified leads.

Once confirmed, the process of enriching the leads begins. When done, the green status will appear Search ready for download. Click on the Download button to get the CSV file.

The emails will be added in a new column of the CSV file.

You can now proceed and verify the list with one of the email verifiers (one of the latter chapters of this document).

Leadhype is a solid lead source that gives you A LOT of data for cheap. They also give you personal email addresses of profiles but personally I wouldn’t recommend sending to personal email addresses. Only send to business email addresses.

Their built-in feature allows you to scrape data from Sales Navigator so you don’t need to buy a separate Sales Nav subscription. You can also use a Sales Navigator search link that you've created, and the tool will scrape the data for you.

When you log in to your account, the first thing you see are the remaining credits for the day. These reset each 24h, however, in the meantime, you can create searches that will be completed once you get your credits for the next day.

To create a search, you want to start with Sales Navigator. Login to your Sales Navigator, or, use the Leadhype feature:

Start by applying the basic filters, and then tweak them until you are happy with your targeting. Sales Navigator has over 30 filters, some of them apply to the company and others to the person.

In the Company section, you want to apply filters such as Company headcount, Company headquarters.

In the headquarters filter, you can include and exclude the locations for your search.

Role filter allows you to choose position, seniority and department of the contact.

You can use the exclude function for almost every filter on Sales Navigator

Spotlight filter is a neat feature if you are sending personalized messages. you can use some of the insights for creating ice-breakers:

Personal filter helps you focus your targeting on the personal information, such as connections, location, years of experience, etc.

Workflow lets you import the lists from your Sales Navigator and use them in the search. For instance, you can create a thorough Account search and save the results in the list, then import that list into Leadhype using the Workflow filter.

Then, in just a few steps you can create a filter for your ideal prospects by applying some of the job filters and personal filters.

Once you are happy with your filters, you can copy the Sales Navigator URL and use it to build your list.

Open the Dashboard, choose Sales Navigator as your tool, and paste your link.

Toggle the switch button to exclude personal emails (only business emails will be provided in this case).

Click on Launch.

You can access your list from the History tab. It will be marked as pending for half an hour or so. When the process is completed, you can download your CSV list.

Findymail is an up and coming tool in the B2B data space. Valentin who built it really knows his stuff. And the good thing is they will only give you leads that are already actually verified. So any leads you get from Findymail you don’t have to run through Bulkemailchecker or Millionverifier before sending.

Follow these steps to scrape the leads from Sales Navigator:

All emails found by Findymail are already verified so you can go ahead and import them into your pipl.ai

Scrapybird is a tool that helps you find b2b leads on Twitter. This allows for highly targeted and relevant outreach campaigns.

Some ideas:

This is also where the Avatar Cheat sheet comes in handy. You will know your target audience on a deep level and know who and what they follow - so you can target them and bring them into your funnel.

Let’s get into the step-by-step…

With Scrapybird, you can scrape and extract data from Twitter automatically. It is simple to use and it can be configured in just a few steps.

After you're done verifying the leads, you can start uploading your leads to your pipl.ai campaign.

Builtwith lets you build lists based on what technologies certain companies are using. It’ll show you which sites use shopping carts, analytics, hosting and many more. Filter by location, traffic, vertical and more.

Let’s say you developed a Wordpress plugin and want to reach out to Wordpress websites to pitch your idea. Or you build an analytics & tracking tool then scrape the domains and enrich with Apollo or Findymail.

Or let’s say you’re an ecommerce email marketing agency, then you will want to know all websites/stores that use Klaviyo (a common ecom email marketing software) and reach out to them.

Other ideas:

Or if you have a cheaper/better alternative for an existing software, you can export all the websites using your competitors inferior product and reach out with a no-brainer offer.

See below for our guide on how to use Builtwith. Like I mentioned earlier, in the beginning of using a tool it’s always good to build a couple of lists yourself and understand everything a lead source can do and filter for. Once you know that, then you can proceed to delegating that to someone on your team.

You will be taken to the results page, and if the data for your search term exists, it will show up here. You can download the list of the websites by clicking on the link:

Another way to get the tech info is by browsing technology categories from https://trends.builtwith.com/ and selecting a group or subgroup.

You can then choose the tech provider on the left side to get all the live websites that use it, or you can filter the search by specific location.

Your data will be in a CSV file and will contain account specific information - domain, company name, social network profiles, sales revenue, etc. Easy way to enrich these is by using Apollo.io to import the domains and company names and search for people inside these companies, as shown above in the Apollo section. Remove the first row and save the file, so you can import the data to Apollo, or any other tool for enrichment.

Crunchbase is a good lead source. If you just need specific data sets, there’s plenty of freelancers out there that already have access to a Crunchbase subscription. Just tell them what type of filters you want to apply and they’ll build the lead list for you and send it over. That way you don’t have to pay for a subscription yourself. Just sign up for a trial account and check what type of filtering options they provide to get some targeting ideas!

Last time we used this lead source we booked 83 discovery calls in one month just from Crunchbase leads.

Let’s get into the SOP…

Here is an overview of Lead filters available on Crunchbase to get the creative juices flowing:

Go to the main page and choose the category that you want to research. You can create a search for Companies, Contacts, People, Investors, Funding, Acquisitions, Schools or Events, but the most important ones are Companies, Contact and People.

On your left hand side, you can choose from specific filters to refine your search.

For example, if you are looking for SaaS companies with recent funding, just type SaaS in the industry filter and specify the Last Funding Date

Add multiple filters to get to your target audience. Use Company Headquarters for location, number of employees, etc.

If you look into Contacts tab, there are similar company filters, but also personal filters that include Job title, Seniority, Location, etc. You can only search the contacts that have email listed on Crunchbase, or you can collect all the leads and then enrich them in some other tool.

To save Contacts to a list, Select a page, then click Select all results, and then go to Save to List:

In case you want to find the leads email before saving it to a List, you will have to manually click on each lead to get the email address.

Your Saved Lists are located here https://www.crunchbase.com/lists

To export them, open a list and click Export To CSV

Emails exported from Crunchbase will need to be verified with Bulkemailchecker or MillionVerifier. You can enrich companies list by uploading the list to Apollo, or by using any other third-party app.

Launch Gravity is an interesting lead source I discovered just recently. They provide signal-based data of recently funded companies in various industries. Always a good idea to pitch a service or product to recently funded companies - because they have money to spend and are looking to reinvest into growth and utility.

They also provide reports and data about Inc. 5000 (fastest-growing companies), Y combinator batches, Companies founded by former Facebook employees. Having this type of fresh and segmented data also is a great way to do generic personalization/ice-breakers at scale, e.g. “Congrats on getting funding for {{companyName}}!”, “Congrats on your recent ProductHunt launch!”

There are a few different data segments on Launch Gravity which get updated monthly: YCombinator lists, New Founders, Companies funded just recently, etc.

The overview of all the data is on the Data Feeds tab:

You can access the lists by clicking on the list name and you can save it to your lists by clicking on Add to my lists.

Some of the contacts in the lists already have an email address, which will be visible when you download the CSV file. You can enrich other contacts with no emails by using Apollo.io or similar tools.

By clicking on coloured filters, you can filter data by Founder DNA, Experience, Gender, Country, Industry, etc.

Export the data by clicking on the Export button:

The lead lists from Launch Gravity will need to be verified before importing them into your campaign.

Niche-Specific Databases are one of the best sources for leads if you find a database exactly made for your niche.

It just takes a quick Google search “NICHE lead database” to see if there are any out there.

If you can find one - it’s usually a goldmine because 99% of your competitors are just using mainstream databases like Apollo. Which is fine but if you want to make the big money you will have to do things nobody else is doing.

But like with any good thing, it won’t last for a long time because these databases are usually smaller. Because they’re more limited we recommend a more personalized approach instead of sending 1K generic emails a day to a database of 5K.

Some examples

You want to target SaaS:

https://getlatka.com/saas-companies

You want to target startups and get insights to funding:

https://www.crunchbase.com/

Ecommerce Leads:

https://storeleads.app/

Scrape the domain names and later enrich them to get the email addresses.

Although valuable - lead mining can easily be outsourced after you know how it works.

Once you’ve figured out a lead database that works for you, getting more leads means usually just clicking buttons.

You can easily find ~$5/h VAs to do this for you so you can focus on higher leverage activities that are harder to outsource like Copywriting or coming up with targeting ideas.

Also, like I mentioned before, if you don’t want to pay for expensive subscriptions you can hire people that have access to those lead databases. For example, Builtwith costs $495/month which isn’t cheap and maybe you only need 5-10 specific lead lists from there so you can find somebody who already has access and pay them just for the data one time. Which sometimes will be cheaper than getting the subscription yourself.