How to build a B2B lead list that's worth emailing.

1. Define your ideal customer profile

A B2B lead list is only as good as the description it was built from. Before you open any tool, write down your ideal customer profile (ICP): the kind of company that gets the most value from what you sell, and the people inside it who decide to buy.

Split it into two parts. The company part describes the account. The person part describes who you will actually write to.

Company attributes

• Industry or category: “B2B SaaS”, “dental clinics”, “commercial roofing contractors”.
• Size: headcount range, or number of locations for local businesses.
• Geography: the countries, states or cities you can actually serve, and the time zones you can sell in.
• Trigger or signal: something that makes now a good time, such as a recent product launch, a new location or a hiring push.

Person attributes

• Job titles and seniority: “Head of Sales”, “VP Marketing”, “Founder”, “Practice owner”.
• Function: sales, marketing, operations, engineering.
• Who signs, who uses: the buyer and the day-to-day user are often different people. Decide which one you're writing to first.

2. Pick your sources

Different ICPs live in different places. Pick the source where your buyers are already listed with the details you need, instead of forcing one source to do everything.

Sales Navigator gives you people. Google Maps and directories give you businesses. Product Hunt gives you both: a company and the makers behind it. If your offer needs a named person, start from a people source. If any decision maker at a small business will do, a business source plus its company inbox is often enough.

3. Collect the leads

You can copy leads into a spreadsheet by hand, and for a list of 20 that's fine. Past that, a scraper saves hours and keeps the fields consistent. QuickExtract is a Chrome extension that collects leads from all four sources above into one dashboard, and extraction is free from every source.

Sales Navigator

Build your search with filters that match your ICP, copy the results page URL and paste it into QuickExtract. Choose how many records to collect, from 1 to 2,500 per scrape, and which group to store them in. It reads the search through your own signed-in Sales Navigator session, so you need your own subscription. See how to export leads from Sales Navigator for the full walkthrough.

Google Maps

Type searches in plain English, one per line, each with its own number from 1 to 120:

• find 100 plumber emails in Austin
• 80 dentists in Denver
• 60 roofing contractors in Tampa

Each line runs in a background tab. More in how to get emails from Google Maps listings.

Product Hunt

Pick a date range of up to 62 days, or a preset such as Last 7 days, and how many launches to take from each day (1 to 200). See how to find Product Hunt founder emails.

Websites and directories

If you already have a list of company websites, from a directory, an event exhibitor page or an old spreadsheet, paste up to 1,000 URLs and QuickExtract visits each one looking for an email. While you browse a directory you can also right-click and choose “Crawl this page's links for emails”.

4. Find email addresses

There are two kinds of email you'll collect, and they behave differently.

• Company emails such as hello@, contact@, info@ or sales@. These are published on the company's own website. They are fine for small businesses, where the owner often reads the shared inbox.
• Person emails such as [email protected]. These reach one named person and are usually what you want for larger companies, where a shared inbox is triaged by someone else.

QuickExtract finds company emails automatically for every lead with a website. It checks the homepage and up to 8 likely pages (contact, about, team, support, impressum and similar), decodes obfuscated addresses like name [at] domain [dot] com, and ranks the results so a founder or hello@ address beats a legal@ or privacy@ one. Company emails and any publicly available email are always free.

For a named person whose email isn't published, QuickExtract's email finder looks up their work email at their company's domain. It costs $29 for 2,000 credits, about 1.45¢ each, and a credit is only used when a valid email is found. For the manual version of this step, see how to find someone's work email from their name and company.

5. Verify before you send

Unverified addresses bounce, and bounces hurt the sending reputation of your domain. Verification checks an address before you send to it. A thorough check has three layers:

1. Format and domain: the address is well formed and the domain is set up to receive mail.
2. Mailbox: the mail server confirms that this exact mailbox exists.
3. Catch-all: some domains accept mail for every address, real or not, so the mailbox check can't tell. These need a separate check. Read catch-all emails explained for why.

Every person email QuickExtract delivers has passed all three checks, and verification is included in the same credit. If you have emails from somewhere else, you can run them through the verifier with the same credits.

6. Clean the list

Raw scraped data always needs a pass before it goes into a sequence. Work through these in order:

• Remove duplicates. The same person can show up in two searches. QuickExtract matches Sales Navigator leads by LinkedIn ID and updates them in place, and website rows are one per domain, but dedupe again once you combine lists from several sources.
• Drop rows without an email if this list is for email outreach. The dashboard's With email tab does this for you.
• Check first names. Personalization breaks on “Hi info,”. When a first name is derived from an email, a shared address like info@ gets no first name, so use a fallback such as {{firstName|there}}, which turns into “Hi there”.
• Remove existing customers and open deals by comparing domains against your CRM export.
• Remove anyone who has opted out of your emails before.

7. Segment into groups

One list of 2,000 mixed leads gets one generic email. Ten groups of 200 get ten specific ones. Segment by whatever changes your message:

• Role: founders care about different things from heads of sales.
• Industry: dentists and plumbers need different examples.
• Region: for time zones, language and local references.
• Email type: person emails and company inboxes deserve different openers.

QuickExtract puts every run into a group, named automatically after the search, and you can rename groups or create your own. A naming scheme like VP Sales · SaaS · US or Dentists · Denver · Oct keeps months of lists readable.

8. Export and send

Export the group you're about to contact, not the whole database. QuickExtract exports:

• CSV with 37 columns, saved as UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel shows accented names correctly. Import it into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or any other CRM.
• TXT with one email per line, for tools that only want addresses.
• Copy emails to your clipboard.

If you send cold email with Quickprosp, connect it with your API key and save leads straight into a Quickprosp list, add them to a campaign, or enroll them in an automation. Leads you've already sent to are skipped. See integrations and how to import leads into your CRM. Before your first send from a new domain, read how to warm up a cold email domain.

The B2B lead list checklist