Build your lead list

Cold outreach lives or dies on list quality. Scrap together the wrong contacts and even perfect copy falls flat. Find the right people and an average email still sparks conversations. Your list is the single biggest lever you control.

Most guides hand-wave over the practical work, but this chapter stays in the weeds. You will see exactly how to cast a wide net, pull data from multiple sources, clean every line and narrow the focus until only high-fit prospects remain. Each step is built for action, not theory.

By the end you will know how to:

• open the funnel with broad industry filters,
• layer on clever intent signals such as active job posts or live fundraising,
• verify every address for deliverability, and
• segment the winners into tight groups that deserve personalised copy.
  

Copy the process today and you can start shipping targeted emails tomorrow.

Start broad to gather real-world data

A wide first send turns your campaign into live market research. Guessing which niche will buy traps you in assumptions and hides entire sectors that would have replied. Launch broadly, record who opens and answers, then let data point you toward the high-response pockets.

Choose generous industry filters

Open Apollo or Lemlist and head to the company section. Select every business-to-business vertical that might use your offer, usually 50 to 90 options ranging from accounting firms to waste-management contractors. If the tool allows, you can leave industry blank and rely on head-count alone; that choice often uncovers surprising blue-ocean groups.

Limit head-count for higher reply rates

Keep employee count between one and fifty on the first pass. Firms in this band reply far more often than large enterprises, so signals appear quickly. Add a second slice of fifty-one to two hundred employees only when your product obviously fits growing companies.

Layer in funding-stage intent

Funding data focuses the search on firms with fresh budgets and pressing problems. Use the funding filter to target companies raising now or that closed a round within the past twelve months. Skip the well-worn “just closed Series A” lists; thousands of reps already hound them and they delete most outreach on sight.

Export 10,000 rows and test

Pull email, name, job title, company, industry, head-count and funding stage. A file of ten thousand records is large enough to reveal patterns yet small enough to warm a new domain safely. Send the list over about three months roughly one hundred and sixty emails a day to protect deliverability.

When the run ends, download the results, sort by positive replies per industry and per company size, then focus future campaigns on the segments at the top.

Your first broad list shows which industries bite, but it still treats every company inside a segment as equal. The fastest way to surface warmer prospects is to layer intent signals, moments when a firm raises its hand and says, I need help now. Most databases collect these clues; you only have to turn the filters on and export the rows.

The steps here are for Apollo. Sign up via this link to get started.

Job-listing signals

Recruiters post openings the moment a pain grows bigger than the payroll cost. Open the Job Posts filter in Apollo or Lemlist and type titles that link directly to your offer. A PR agency might search “Publicist,” “Communications Manager,” or “Crisis Lead.” Anyone advertising those roles already feels the problem you solve, so replies come faster. Export the matches and tag them Hiring-now in your spreadsheet; give that segment first place in the send queue.

Funding-round signals

Next, open Funding & Financials and pull companies in an active Seed or Series A raise—or those that closed within the past year. Fresh capital means the founders need quick traction and have room in the budget. Skip the well-worn “just raised Series B” lists; they drown in vendor pitches and your message will blend in.

Growth or contraction signals

Use Employee-count Trend to spot firms that added head-count quarter over quarter or that shrank sharply. Fast growers crave tools that scale; cutters look for cost savers. Mark each contact “Growing” or “Cutting costs,” then write an opener that acknowledges their situation.

Interest-based signals

In Apollo’s Intent panel search for keywords the platform tracks across content consumption and tech installs. A cybersecurity vendor could filter for spikes in “MFA” or “Password Manager.” The data lags a few weeks, so treat it as a warm pool rather than a hotline.

News and spotlight signals

Filter for organisations Recently mentioned in the news. When a company lands press coverage it often wants to ride the momentum. Export the list, label it “In-the-media,” and reference the article in your first sentence to prove you did your homework.

Assemble the master list

Download each signal set as a separate CSV, add a column that notes the trigger (Hiring, Funding, Growing, etc.), append them into one sheet, and de-duplicate by email. Upload the cleaned file to Lemlist or Apollo and build sending segments around each trigger so every prospect receives a message that mirrors the context you discovered.

What you gain

Signal-based lists cut through broad targeting and hand you prospects who have publicly admitted a need. Combine two or three triggers—say, a 25-person bookkeeping firm hiring a “Senior Accountant” right after securing a small-business loan and reply rates rise without inflating send volume.

Before a single email leaves your server the raw list has to become a reliable one. That means adding context that sharpens your pitch, scrubbing bad rows that waste sends, and double-checking every address so your domain’s reputation stays intact. Work through three quick passes—enrich, clean, and verify—before you import the sheet into Lemlist or Apollo.

Enrich the records

Pull in data points that let you personalise at scale. Tools like Clearbit, Hunter, or Apollo’s enrichment tab can append firmographics (industry tags, revenue bands, head-count) and technographics (CRM, help-desk, or CMS in use). Two columns to prioritise are primary pain trigger—mapped from the signal that put the contact on your list—and use-case guess, a one-line note such as “needs SOC-2 compliance” or “scaling agency passwords.” These fields power dynamic snippets in your opening line and stop your emails from feeling canned.

Clean for consistency

Next, open the sheet and look for traps that break mail-merge logic or wreck metrics.

• Remove duplicates by email and by domain so a company does not get the same message twice.
• Standardise job titles (turn “Founder/CEO” and “Chief Executive Officer” into “CEO”) so you can merge the {title} tag without odd capitalisation.
• Trim whitespace and split first and last names into separate columns; many personalisation tokens rely on the first name only.
• Delete obvious throwaway domains such as “info@” and “support@” that rarely reach a decision-maker.

Verify deliverability

Run the cleaned emails through NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, or Apollo’s Verify step. These services ping the mail server without sending a message, returning “valid,” “catch-all,” or “invalid.” Purge every invalid line; move catch-alls to a low-volume warm-up sequence; send full volume only to verified addresses. A bounce rate under 3 percent keeps your domain in the good books and lifts inbox placement for the rest of the campaign.

Complete these three passes and you end up with a list that is smaller but far more valuable: every row carries context for a sharp opener, no placeholder address will tank your bounce rate, and personalised tokens will render cleanly in each message.

Why a quick eye-test matters

Databases, enrichment tools, and verifiers get you 95% of the way, but that last five percent can still wreck a campaign. A merge tag without a first name, an address that points to info@ or support@, or a company that has clearly shifted away from your niche will either bounce, trigger spam filters, or earn an instant delete. A two-minute human scan strips those land mines out before they cost you sender reputation or waste sends.

What to pull from the list

Open your master sheet, set a timer for ten minutes, and scroll line by line. Delete or archive any row that shows:

• A missing value you plan to use in the email body or subject line, such as first name or company.
• A role address like admin@, hello@, or billing@ instead of a personal inbox.
• A domain that redirects to a parked page or shows no site at all.
• Obvious mismatch with your ICP, for example a consumer blog when you only sell B2B software.
  

Finish with a clean slate

Save the trimmed file as your send list and keep the discarded rows in a separate tab for future research. You will send fewer emails, but every message will land in a real inbox with accurate personalisation, exactly what you need before drafting copy and launching the first campaign.

Conclusion

A high-quality lead list is not a lucky scrape, it is a deliberate build. You began by casting a wide net across industries and company sizes to discover unexpected pockets of demand. You layered on live intent signals to surface firms that already feel the pain you solve. You enriched every row with direct contact data, cleaned bad fields, verified deliverability, and finally ran a fast human sweep to pull out anything the tools missed. The result is a lean, accurate file of prospects who are far likelier to open, read, and reply.

With the list ready, the hard part is done. In the next chapter we will turn those rows into personalised copy and multi-step sequences that earn real conversations instead of auto-deletes. Bring your clean sheet and let’s write emails that get answers.