A lead list contains information about the people and companies you want to reach. How you create it will impact the outcome of your outreach process. The table below breaks down the possible methods of finding leads for your list.
| Method | How easy it is to get started | Data quality & depth | Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| B2B database (like Hunter Discover) | Easy for anyone to find thousands of leads in seconds. | Depends on the database—Hunter Discover is sourced from the open web, ensuring high accuracy, data depth, and coverage. | Many databases contain unethically collected data. Hunter remains fully compliant thanks to being web-sourced & letting people opt out from our database. |
| Inbound marketing | Difficult and time-consuming. You need to create lots of great content, but once the results start kicking in, it’s well worth it. | Superior data quality and potential to convert. Data depth can be limited—enrich your inbound leads with additional datapoints. | No privacy issues as long as you let your leads opt out. |
| Getting the data at scale is difficult, browsing manually is easy. | LinkedIn Sales Navigator has high-quality data. Other ways of finding leads on LinkedIn can offer mixed results. | It’s complicated. | |
| Online directories | Getting the data at scale is difficult, browsing manually is easy. | High quality and unique datapoints, e.g., user reviews. | It’s complicated. |
| Pre-built lists | Easy (but potentially expensive). | The data quality is usually low. | It’s complicated... at best. |
For more on these options, read on!
Step one in email outreach is creating a lead list by finding the right people to contact. How you create that list matters. Building your lead list with high-quality, targeted lead data is the difference between sending spam and helping prospects.
From using B2B databases to content marketing, there are many ways to source B2B leads. Your approach should be informed by data depth & quality, ease of use, cost, and more factors.
Here are your options for compiling a great lead list for outreach in 2025.
What is a lead list?
A lead list is a living dataset of people or companies you want to reach. Sourced using inbound and/or outbound tactics, it contains names and contact details.
But, a truly useful list has more:
- Firmographics: Company headcount, industry, description of products and services, HQ location, etc.
- Demographics: Job title, location, etc.
- Technographics: Software stack, technologies used on a website, etc.
- Intent data: Data indicating buying needs, e.g., job postings, funding news, job changes, etc.
Your lead list is the starting point before reaching out via email, phone, or LinkedIn.
Best practices for B2B lead list building
Before we look at methods to build a list, it’s best to keep these things in mind:
- Save all relevant data
For outreach to land, you need more than a name and an email address. Enriching your B2B lead data makes it easier to reach out with relevancy.
If you find target companies with Discover (Hunter’s B2B database), leverage our firmographic data: headcount, HQ location, industry, keywords, and more.
If you’re sourcing leads elsewhere, I still recommend that you load them into Hunter to use our enrichment capabilities.
- Verify the contact information
Even inbound lead email addresses can be wrong - at the point of entry or over time. That’s why you should verify lead information before reaching out.
If you’re using Hunter to source your B2B leads, email addresses found using the Email Finder are auto-verified. For all other email addresses, make sure you use your verification credits to filter out all invalid recipients.
- Respect privacy regulations
Don’t hold anyone’s personal information without legitimate business interest. Safeguard all personal information and use it in compliance with data protection laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
For more, read our guide to sending privacy-minded cold emails.
How to build a lead list for B2B outreach
Let’s take a look at the options you have for building your leads list:
- Inbound leads
- B2B databases
- Online directories
- Paid-for pre-built lists
Capture inbound leads
Inbound lead generation is about creating content that your ideal customers care about enough to share their email.
It takes time and effort to create a website and content. A misguided inbound lead generation strategy can flood your lead list with low-quality prospects.
But, providing you qualify inbound leads with enriched data, you’re more likely to convert inbound vs. outbound leads. That’s because they actively sought out your business and entrusted you with their contact information.
Needless to say, getting back to your inbound leads doesn’t qualify as an outbound activity. But there are some outbound tactics you can use with inbound leads, too.
Some of the lowest-hanging fruit is found in outreach for lost opportunities. While it can be time-consuming, there are effective ways to get this done.
The same goes for former customers. Use cold email to re-engage them!
Finally, there are marketing- and sales-qualified leads (MQLs and SQLs) that you’ve generated via marketing. You can create relevant outreach sequences by combining a CRM showing content engagement with data enrichment via Hunter.
Tip: Regularly review and verify your database —email addresses get stale and invalid over time. If you create a large outreach campaign and add multiple invalid recipients, the high bounce rate will inevitably break your campaign.
Feed your ideal customer profile to a B2B database
If you’re looking for B2B leads based on your ideal customer profile (ICP), a B2B database is perfect. These help you find relevant leads at scale. They contain millions of companies you can filter using your ICP's attributes (location, headcount, industry, etc.)
A B2B database is the simplest way to create your lead list, as long as you have a thorough understanding of your ICP. Our web-sourced B2B database, Discover, makes it even easier, is available to every user, and helps you find 1000s of ICP email addresses in seconds.
From there, you can use the data in multiple ways:
- Eyeball each company to ensure they’re a good fit for your outreach.
- Quickly find email addresses for the ICPs, and save them as Leads.
- Save companies you find as Company Leads, segment further, and send cold emails.
- Export the results, e.g., for further enrichment using your data.
Data in Discover is fresh, accurate (we’re among the most accurate data providers, according to a benchmark by Clay), and data-protection friendly. It can be used to map the buying committee of your ICP—from just CEOs to larger companies where you need other decision-makers through to junior employees.
Hunter Discover can also be used to find similar companies based on examples. It's great when you’re not 100% on your ICP, but have a list of your best customers.
While I mostly rely on filtering to find prospects, I really like supplementing list building with lookalikes. It helps me find leads I hadn’t necessarily considered.
Tip: Save every relevant company you find in Discover as a Company Lead in Hunter. It doesn’t cost anything and saves you time.
Leverage LinkedIn activity
LinkedIn is a great source of B2B leads, and you can use the platform to build your lead list based on the LinkedIn activity of your potential prospects in several ways.
With Sales Navigator, you can find people who recently viewed your profile.
You can also source leads based on their interactions with you by joining webinars, posting regularly, and creating polls.
You can even interact with a given post, using a LinkedIn scraper like Phantombuster.
For example, you can scrape and engage people who comment or like your post, a post that mentions you or a competitor, or even your competitor’s post.
Tip: As software makes it easier—and more popular— to scrape LinkedIn activity for sales purposes, using this approach is becoming increasingly unpopular with LinkedIn users who may see it as a violation of privacy. To mitigate, enrich your leads, and make sure your email is truly relevant to them.
Use online directories
Depending on your ICP, online directories may be a good source for your lead list.
Some examples include:
- Clutch.co
- G2.com
- Capterra.com
- Google My Business (more difficult to leverage at scale)
These websites list companies or products (Clutch.co is great for finding service agencies, and G2/Capterra are directories listing software companies), and they can be filtered for specific verticals—both manually and using their APIs to automate lead generation.
From there, you still need a tool like Hunter to enrich their email addresses and additional data points.
Tip: Directories typically let users review the listed companies -a goldmine for email outreach. This user feedback can contextualize your messages, using strengths or weaknesses from reviews and using them for unique positioning.
Get a pre-built lead list
While the norm is to avoid pre-built lead lists, the truth is the devil is in the detail.
The creation of a pre-built list isn’t necessarily too dissimilar to a B2B database. But, there are some factors to keep in mind:
- Be sure of the owner of the list and their reputation
- Understand how the data was sourced
- Be wary of the need to refresh the list
If you trust the source, understand how the list was compiled, and are confident that you aren’t breaking any laws, acquiring a pre-built lead list may work.
I recommend taking full control of your outreach process. That means building your own lead lists using a platform like Hunter and its Discover tool. It’s easy to use, with the quality, data depth, and targeting that are vital factors to success.
How to prioritize your choice
Given all these tactics, what is the best way to build your lead list?
The short answer is: use a B2B database. It’s the best starting point because it will find thousands of leads in seconds, and you can continuously refine your search to ensure reaching out to them will make sense.
In the long term, you should also supplement your lead list with inbound leads generated from content marketing & social media.
Directories like G2 can also give you a specific set of leads in specific scenarios.
For more, here’s a deeper dive into the various tools for finding leads.
Send cold emails with Hunter