Buying a Lead List: Five Checks Before You Pay

Anyone who has bought a peti of Alphonso mangoes knows what to do. The top layer is always perfect. So you lift it and look at the fruit underneath before you pay. The seller expects this. A good one lifts the layer for you.

A lead list is sold the same way. The rows in the sample are perfect: the right company, the right title, an email that works. The rest of the file sits underneath, and most buyers pay without lifting the layer. Three weeks later the emails have bounced, half the people have changed jobs, and nobody has replied.

This piece covers what a lead list is, the four kinds you can buy, five checks to run before you pay, and how to work out what a list really costs you per row.

What a lead list is, and what it is not

A lead list is a file of companies and people you plan to contact. Each row has a company, a person, a role and an email, and sometimes a phone number. You will also hear it called a sales lead list, a lead generation list or a prospect list.

The name is a little dishonest. Nobody on the list is a lead yet. A lead is someone who has shown interest in what you sell. The people in the file have never heard of you. They are prospects, and they become leads only when they reply.

This matters when you buy. A seller who promises "qualified leads" in a spreadsheet is promising something a spreadsheet cannot hold. Qualifying happens in a conversation; we covered how in the piece on lead qualification. What a list can honestly give you is a good reason to start that conversation with the right person.

The four kinds of lead list you can buy

The first two are cheap per row, and that is the trap. The price per row falls as the file gets bigger, so a bigger file always looks like the better deal. What you should compare is the price per row you can use. We come to that sum below.

If you are choosing between databases, the piece on Apollo alternatives compares the common names.

Five checks before you pay

Before any of the checks, ask for 20 sample rows. Do not accept the seller's showcase. Name the industry, the company size and the cities yourself, and include one city outside Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. This is how you lift the top layer.

A seller who will not give a sample from your own market has already told you what is underneath.

1. Is the company really a fit?

Open the website of each of the 20 companies. Ask one question: would we sell to this firm?

A filter cannot answer that. A filter that says "IT services" cannot tell a software firm from a computer training institute. In our own work, one in three companies that pass a database's filters turn out to be the wrong fit when we read their website. If your sample looks like that, a third of what you are about to pay for is waste.

2. Is this the person who buys?

Open each person on LinkedIn. Check two things. Are they still in that job? And do they own the budget for what you sell?

A title is not authority. A "Marketing Manager" at a 30-person firm may decide nothing; the founder signs. People also change jobs often, and a file finds out long after LinkedIn does. A row with the right company and the wrong person is a row you cannot use.

3. Will the email land?

Run the 20 addresses through an email verifier. Most have a free plan that covers a test this small. Count three results: valid, invalid, and "accept-all". An accept-all domain takes any address, so the check proves nothing and you need a second one.

Count generic addresses such as info@ and sales@ as failures. Nobody who decides reads them.

This check protects more than your money. Bounces damage your sending domain, so your next campaign lands in spam more often, even for good addresses. We explained how in the pieces on email verification tools and email deliverability.

4. How old is the row, and where did it come from?

Ask for the date each row was built or last checked. A good list has it on the row. Then ask where the contact came from: the company's website, LinkedIn, a paid database, a scraped directory?

There is a second reason to ask. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 puts duties on anyone who uses personal data. This is not legal advice. But if the seller cannot say how a contact was collected, that question passes to you along with the file.

5. Who else has this list?

A ready-made file is sold again and again. Every other buyer in your industry sends the same people the same kind of pitch in the same month. By the time your email arrives, the reader has seen five like it.

Ask how many buyers have had the file. If the list is a monthly one, ask whether you will get the same company twice.

Work out the real price per usable row

Now do the sum. A row is usable only if it passed the first three checks: the company fits, the person buys, and the email lands.

Say a file of 1,000 rows costs ₹10,000. That looks like ₹10 a row. If 8 of your 20 sample rows are usable, expect about 400 usable rows in the file. The real price is ₹25 a row, and you have 600 rows to find and remove before you send anything.

Those numbers are only an example. Put your own sample count in. The cheapest list on the price sheet is often the dearest one after this sum, because you also pay for the hours spent cleaning it and for the bounces you missed.

A lead list template: what each row should carry

Most lists stop at three fields: name, title and email. Those tell you who. They do not tell you why this company, or why now. If you build your own list or brief someone else, ask for these fields.

"Why now" is the field that earns replies. A plant opened last month, a first sales hire, a funding round: each one gives you a true first line for your email. We covered where these events come from in the piece on intent data.

How to build a lead list yourself

You can build a good list by hand. It is slow, not hard.

1. Write down who buys. Industry, size, city, and the role that signs. If this is vague, stop here and fix it; the piece on the ideal customer profile shows how.
2. Pick your sources. Job boards, company and funding news, LinkedIn, and a database for the basic facts.
3. Confirm each company on its own website. Drop the ones that do not fit.
4. Find the person who owns the budget. Check on LinkedIn that they are still there.
5. Find the email and check it. Drop the ones that fail. Do not guess.
6. Write the date and the source on the row.

By hand, this takes about twenty minutes a prospect. Ten prospects a day is more than three hours. That is why founders who start doing this stop within a month, and why the bulk file is tempting.

The check no bulk file passes

A bulk file can pass all five checks and still fail you. It can have the right companies, the right people and clean emails, and say nothing about which of them needs you this month. You are left writing to 1,000 strangers with no reason to write.

Our prospect research service is built around that missing field. We do not sell a one-off bulk file. Every morning you get a short list of companies in your market that show an early buying signal: they just hired, raised money, opened a site or announced a launch. Each company is confirmed on its own website, and comes with the person who owns that budget and an email we have checked, with the result on the row. You never get the same company twice. Plans start at ₹18,000 a month.

If you want the sending done as well, our B2B lead generation service runs the whole channel.

Frequently asked questions

The mango seller who lifts the top layer for you is the one you go back to. Ask your list seller to do the same. Twenty rows, from your market, checked by you. If they pass, pay. If the seller will not show them, you have saved the price of the whole peti.