Lead mining is the closest thing to modern-day gold mining we can get.

In this article we are going to cover:

With this guide we want to arm you with pickaxes and give you a map where there is a highest chance to find gold.

Once you stumble upon a real gold vein - you’ll know it right away. Although some lead databases are expensive I feel like leads are still undervalued.

1 good lead can be worth 10-100K for a high-ticket B2B offer.

We’re going to go over some of the bigger players on the market but also some lesser-known strategies and databases that will give you a leg up on your competition. Like with everything - the goal is to get into a habit of testing different angles and databases weekly because if you’re starting off fresh you won’t know what works.

Sometimes it works right away, other times you need to test 10+ different databases and target groups.

How to succeed with this guide:

1. Create a 30-minute calendar event daily to scrape, clean, and fill your campaigns with leads.

2. Based on your daily sending volume scrape 2-3x of that amount of leads. After lead validation, you might find that only 50% of the leads are good to go. You never want your active campaigns to run out of leads

3. Monitor your lead numbers daily - If the bounce rate for leads is over 3%, change your lead source.

4. If you’re getting results with a specific lead database - double down on that and export all the leads possible.

5. If you’re not getting results with a specific lead source - try a different one.

Before lead mining, you should do research to know exactly which kinds of leads you need.

Also, what countries do you want to target? There are plenty of countries outside of North America and the UK that speak fluent English and have high purchasing power. Do some research on high GDP per capita countries out there and you’ll know where to find some undiscovered pockets of opportunity. Follow the money.

Get crystal clear on who your offer is for and what segments/lead lists make sense to test. The better your targeting, the more relevant your message will be and ultimately the more positive replies you’ll get. Your offer could be the best thing since sliced bread for one lead list/segment but then be completely uninteresting for another demographic.

All this comes into play when choosing the perfect lead database for you.

If you’re just starting out with a new client the easiest way to find a good target is to look at case studies. Which type of people have closed before for this exact service? Which kind of people have gotten value from this service?

Go to https://app.instantly.ai/app/lead-finder and add some filters.

Once you have all the filters in place, you have two options to manage the leads.

The Download status will appear on the top of the page:

The CSV file contains leads that have not been verified yet. You will have to use a third-party verification tool before uploading the CSV file to your campaign.

The Download status will appear on the top of the page:

If you’re going to be successful in the cold emailing game you’re going to have tons of leads after a couple of months.

Better be organized straight away than trying to find a specific lead list from 100s of lists you’ve accumulated.

Being organized is super useful if you ever want to re-use lists for a different project or a client.

Outsourcing lead mining is going to be so much easier as well if you already have the setup done correctly from the get-go.

Here are the steps to organize your lead Lists:

1. Create A Google Drive Folder

2. Create A Folder For Each Niche You're Going After

3. Create 3 Folders in the Niche Folder:

4. Start adding all the lead lists you export into this Google Drive Folder.

You can name your lead Lists:

Apollo.io is a cheap & effective lead source overall. That’s why we feature it here first. It covers the basics and then you can layer other more advanced lead sources that we show later in this guide on top of it.

Always make sure to verify the leads before putting them into a campaign to make sure the leads that are marked as ‘Verified’ are actually verified and good to go. We have a chapter about lead verification and how to do it toward the end of this guide.

You can build the lead lists 10-15 times yourself to understand the process and what’s possible with the filtering options. And then later down the line it’s easy to delegate to a reliable team member so they can build it for you. Delegate and elevate.

Follow the instructions below to set up a search and export Apollo contacts to a CSV file. Clean the CSV file and then it’s ready to be uploaded into an Instantly campaign.

When you log in to your account, click on Search tab and then on People tab, you can also follow this link:

On the left hand side, there is a list of very useful Filters that can help you reach out to your ICP by changing some of the values. We will go through each one of these in the video.

The filters that you are going to use the most are Job Titles, Location, #Employees, Industry & Keywords, Technologies and Revenue.

1. Start by typing the job titles that you want to research. You need to have your ICP identified before you start the search. This is the basic use of the Titles filter:

For an advanced search, you can combine title keywords with management levels. Type all the keywords first, and then select the desired management levels.

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.

2. Next, you want to set the location of your contacts. Bear 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 in one country. By clicking on Exclude locations you can list the countries that you don't want.

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

4. 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.

Let's do 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", or "android app". This search will bring the results of all the companies listed on Apollo that have these keywords in their profile description.

5. 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. Bear in mind that only the technologies with the most users on the market will be listed here.

6. Revenue filter allows you to include the companies with certain revenue. The thing to consider here is that there is not enough data for all the companies so the number of results will be considerably lower. Sometimes is better to use the Employee filter instead, it 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.

This 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. Here are the steps to save the contacts to a list:

After you create your list and add 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.

Step 3: Exporting lead lists

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

Once you've exported your CSV file, you want to verify the leads by using one of the online email verifiers. You only need valid emails so your sending reputation stays intact by avoiding bounces.

Check this article to learn how to verify the leads.

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. Here are the steps to enrich leads using Apollo:

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.

Here I’m going to show you three different Linkedin Scrapers. Test all three and see which one works best for you. They all work well.

I recommend learning about Boolean Search on Sales Navigator if you use these lead sources a lot in order to increase the accuracy of your targeting.

Whether you put the search terms in quotes, use NOT, OR, AND or Parentheses (), it all matters when lead mining and finding that perfect lead list.

Evaboot is a smart AI LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper that extracts and enriches data based on your LinkedIn search, and turns it into a CSV file. You will need a Sales Navigator account to use Evaboot or other LinkedIn Scrapers out there.

To start, sign up with https://evaboot.com/, and download their Chrome extension.

Please follow the instructions below to create the search on LinkedIn and then extract the lead list from Evaboot.

Step 1: Create the search on the Sales Navigator of LinkedIn.

In this section, we will describe the most common filters. 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.

Lead filters:

Account related search:

Step 2: Extract the lead list from Evaboot.

Once you are happy with your filers in the Leads tab and when you have narrowed down the search to less than 2.5k results (Evaboot only extracts 2.5k results per day, which is a threshold set by Linkedin), you can transfer the leads to Evaboot app. Click on the Evaboot extension.

You will be taken to the Evaboot site where you need to name your list and begin the scraping process.

After the extraction finishes, to get email data you need to click on the button “Find emails”.

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.

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 Instantly 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.

There are three ways to extract the list of domains that you can enrich by using Apollo or a similar tool.

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-hand side to get all the live websites that use it, or you can filter the search by specific location.

You can use Google Search to find the list on Builtwith too. Just type the technology and Builtwith Trends in the search, if the analytics exist for this technology, it will appear in the results.

From the Usage statistics page, you can easily download the list of live sites with this tech.

Try typing the keywords in the Builtwith search that are relevant to your offer. If you are a brand agency focusing on cosmetics and beauty, type "beauty products":

You will get all the sites that contain this keyword, but it is not related to any technology with the same name.

Your data will be in a CSV file and will contain account-specific information - domain, company name, social network profiles, sales revenue, etc.

An 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 the companies list by uploading the list to Apollo, or by using any other third-party app.

Launch Gravity is a lead database that tracks new business creations and web activity over the month. They focus on fundable startups. 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, and 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 that 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 colored 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.

If you want to enrich the Accounts with no contact data, you can use Apollo. The steps are described in this article.

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 can also find directories of ethnicities (i.e. People of Color or Asian business owners) or different sexual orientations (LGBTQ+). If you are in that demographic yourself you can create some highly resonating messaging. Or if you’re a female entrepreneur reaching out to other fellow female entrepreneurs with your offer, can be a good move. Shoutout to Michael from DFYmeetings for coming up with this great idea.

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

Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart…

You know that quote?

Same goes with leads. Some of them don’t really exist.

If you are importing leads directly from Instantly Lead finder to your campaign, there is no need to use third-party verifiers.
​

But, if you’ve exported leads from any other database, even if they tell you it’s verified you should use a Lead Validation tool to double-check those leads. You’d be surprised to see how many leads don’t actually exist.

And if you send emails to addresses that don’t exist, you will hurt your deliverability and eventually burn your domains.

This is why we clean our lead lists and ensure those email addresses are actually there.

PS: This is very important - don’t skip.

https://bulkemailchecker.com

+ Cheap

- Slow

To get started, login to your account and go to Login to your account and go to Bulk Verify page.

On the left-hand side select Bulk Verify.

On the right-hand side select This file contains multiple columns of data in a csv spreadsheet. Select the file with your leads and click Upload.

Wait 2-3 minutes for the next window to appear and click the green button Check Status.

Select the column with the email address. Depending on your lead source, your email addresses might be located in a column with a different name. Click the green button Select.

Wait 5 minutes until the next window appears to start the validation process. Click on Check status to move to the next step.

Click the green button to start the validation process. We recommend the slower validation method since it is significantly cheaper.

Once the lead list has finished validating and you can export the lead list.

Make sure to format and clean it before sending emails.

You do that by only keeping the rows that say “The address passed all tests” in the Details column (the last column all the way to the right). Remove any rows that don’t say The address passed all tests, such as Dupe., The address does not have a valid dns., None., Is a Catchall mx server config., Greylisting is active on this server. Etc.

The following step-by-step instructions show you how to do this fast and accurately.

Upload the .csv to your GDrive as a Google Sheet. Apply filters on the entire sheet.

Once the filter is applied to the entire sheet go to the column Details. Click on the filter symbol inside of that column header. Click Clear and type in the search box passed so you can find all email addresses that have passed the validation stage. Click on the result and press OK.

Select all, copy and paste into a new sheet inside the same spreadsheet. Add -only-passed at the end of the new sheet name where you pasted in the results.

Delete the original tab/sheet so you only have the [NAME]-only-passed sheet left in the spreadsheet.

This makes sure that you’re only sending to valid emails and keeping your spam score low. Once you’ve done that you are ready to proceed and start sending in Instantly :)

Millionverifier

Cons:

Pros:

Step-by-step guidance:

Hiring Lead Miners

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.

Bonus: Here's a video about this document and lead mining on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/3j7CK8ARlsw

And that’s it :)

Don’t forget why you started & step-by-step you get ahead.

Let’s rock and roll.