Every company needs quality leads to find financial stability and opportunities for growth. Out of that need comes the age-old question: Where do you find business leads that fit your company?
One thing you could do is invest in sales development and do the grunt work yourself. That means hiring researchers and campaign strategists to form your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona (BP), search the web and compile a contact profile with enough data for it to be processed by your sales development representatives (SDRs).
Or you could choose one of the companies that sells lead lists or provides a B2B lead database. It saves time, effort, and money and can give you better results since you’ll be assisted by professionals.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the types of lead providers, difficulties of building lead lists on your own, reasons to outsource, tips on how and where to buy leads online, and a list of twenty top business lead providers.
A B2B lead provider is a company that offers tools, services, or simply leads to fill your sales pipeline with new opportunities. Some companies provide all of the services mentioned above, plus they can take over your lead generation efforts in general (prospecting, personalization, lead qualification, and closing deals).
A proper lead provider only operates with data that is GDPR compliant, doesn’t provide the same list to multiple customers, and finds leads that would be perfect for your needs.
So what makes a lead list provider stand out? Eric Quanstrom, CMO at CIENCE, revealed:
First and most importantly is accuracy and updating of records. You can often glean this by asking how the provider gets their records and how regularly they update them. Listen for answers that would be red flags, such as if they don’t have automated ways of regularly validating records.
The best way to validate a contact record is to use it (as part of outbound campaigns we control, for instance) and have that usage connected to the database so that decayed or inaccurate records are filtered out automatically.
There’s always a dilemma in regard to buying leads: Should you buy leads or do the work yourself? On one hand, if you don't spend enough time on research, you might end up with an untrustworthy provider. On the other hand, if you outsource to a skilled lead list provider, they’ll come with the knowledge of knowing how long it really takes to generate a high-quality lead list.
Manual research includes hours of human labor, data qualification and verification, data segmentation, and application.
Overall, yes, you could build lead lists yourself, but it would be more time- and cost-effective to buy lead lists from a professional.
Leads are always needed for any business, so you could buy them any time you want. However, there are at least three big reasons to plan a lead list purchase in the near future:
Your pipeline should never be left empty—it could bring you severe sales consequences. Be sure to monitor the number of leads you have in your pipeline now, and if you see any indicator of data running low, you should buy some new business leads.
If you notice a drop in your sales numbers, this may be the perfect opportunity to accelerate sales and save time by providing quality lead lists to your sales reps.
Launching a new product or discovering a new market will require relevant leads. So for that, it makes sense to get some help from the outside.
When you’ve decided that you want to buy leads, there are a few steps you should take to find the best fit for your business:
What does a provider offer to you? Is it a formed list, or do they first educate themselves about your needs? Do they have a customer relationship management (CRM) system integration or a free trial? Where do they mine their leads from? Are they GDPR compliant? Answer all of these questions and see if the answers match your expectations.
There is no steady price per lead—it depends on the industry, parameters, and delivery time. However, here’s some advice for buying business leads: Too cheap may mean low quality, too expensive may include features you don’t need, but most importantly, it should fit within your budget.
A lot of the issues you may face with a company could be right there in reviews and ratings. Look for red flags like the validation process and sourcing of data.
“My advice on choosing the provider is to ask how they source their leads and use them themselves,” said Eric Quanstrom. “You'll be surprised at the answers you'll hear.”
The quality of your data may not matter if you don’t know what to do with it later. Here are a few things you should remember:
Leads are just the start of a journey—if you buy data exclusively, you still have to process it, connect it to your CRM, set up web analytics and call tracking, introduce it to your sales team, and start rolling out the prospecting.
Qualify your leads, identify where exactly they are in the funnel, and warm them up. Also, make sure you adjust your cold calling scripts or email templates according to how the person's contact information was obtained.
As soon as new leads enter your database, it’s very important to keep it clean and up-to-date. If your lead list provider doesn’t offer data cleansing or data enrichment, do that on your own: Clean out duplicates and unfit contacts using an email verification tool, and record every interaction with the lead to get a full picture.
In this list, we’ve gathered the best lead list companies on the market where you can buy leads and get services such as email identification and verification, audience building, data enrichment, and even hiring.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Enrichable, highly targeted lead database.
CIENCE GO Data is a sales intelligence platform that offers a database of 300 million lead records validated through real-time use by a team of sales professionals. Those records are constantly enriched and cleansed to stay fresh and ready to use. The platform functions this way to fit any industry’s needs and find perfect matches just for your ICP.
What makes GO Data stand out is that the lead list that you buy is actually an audience—a dynamic data compilation of leads fit for your company. Lists can get outdated and lose their value very quickly, which doesn’t happen to curated audiences.
Besides the star-quality data, you can also get ad retargeting solutions, website visitor tracking, personalized research, ad targeting, orchestrated outbound services by SDR professionals, data exhaust, and the ability to download leads to use them internally for various purposes.
Pricing: $74 to $299 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Monthly subscription to millions of data records
UpLead is a business lead database provider that offers access to millions of lead records with more than just a name and a contact number. For instance, with the help of a social media profile, a sales development representative can gather enough information to make a personalized cold call or cold email.
Pricing: $49 to $499 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Multipurpose lead generation tool
AeroLeads is a lead generation tool that works as a Google Chrome extension. This allows you to add leads straight from a social media profile page and, as an extension, it saves storage for your system. It also provides data enrichment, email verification, and integration with your CRM.
Pricing: $29 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Lead generation tool for small businesses
Salesfully is a tool to buy business leads with a simple interface and millions of leads ready for unlimited searching and downloading. The data comes from various public registries and resources so you don’t have to worry about breaking data compliance rules. It is subscription-based, so you can cancel any time you want; however, it only has individual access—the enterprise rollout is in the works.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Search tool for gathering lead information
DiscoverOrg is a tool for lead information gathering that focuses on B2B decision-makers. It provides a wide scope of data on each of the leads from various industries and for multiple purposes. For instance, if you need a glimpse into the tech stack of the company (so you know what to offer and how to center your pitch), this tool can show what technology your leads are utilizing and where.
Pricing: $29 to $44
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available for premium and enterprise packages
Key Offering: Lead list builder that works as an extension
Lusha is a lead information database that offers various data points and integration with platforms like Salesforce and LinkedIn. It also allows data enrichment of existing lead records. It has a version with an extension for your browser, allows building accurate lead lists, and connects to your potential customers, readers, or hires.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Email finder and email verification
Hunter.io is an email-finding tool that can be very useful for the early lead list generation stages. You can search for people working in a specific company and find their work email that has been verified to minimize deliverability faults. There are plenty of search filters to choose from, after which you can verify, check the source, and save the lead.
Pricing: $49 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Email finder tool
At VoilaNorbert, you can buy leads and use them for many applications such as sales, recruiting, content marketing, business development, or PR. It has separate solutions for prospecting, email verification, and data enrichment. For email verification, it provides a scale of the accuracy of the emails it finds (30%, 60%, and 100%).
VoilaNorbert also has an application programming interface (API) and various integrations available to fit your marketing stack.
Pricing: $79.99 to $125 per user per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available, except for the cheapest subscription plan
Key Offering: Essential lead list-building tool
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a part of a LinkedIn offering and is used by the majority of sales experts. This tool is useful If you want to build a lead list for yourself or just get an additional grasp on your leads in the social media pool. It can identify prospects, track their activity, and reach them right through the email inbox. It also shows who visited your profile so you don’t miss any incoming LinkedIn leads.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Not available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Lead list generation tool with option to hire a sales team
RightHello is a business leads website that focuses on finding your sales strategy and leads that could be your potential customers. As a lead list provider, RightHello provides data segmentation, data enrichment, and data validation services, but besides that, it offers other supporting services: outreach, web assistance, and email automation.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Lead data with emphasis on quality
ZoomInfo offers more than 65 million phone numbers and over 150 million email addresses to discover buyers that match your ICP. It works on buyer intent, website visitor tracking, customer interaction analysis, and email automation. It also offers data segmentation, data management, and data enrichment.
Pricing: $149 to $299 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Easy-to-use lead list platform
Data Axle Genie (formerly Salesgenie) offers lead-building packages for individual, team, and enterprise use. With easy access to millions of leads, sales reps get to qualify prospects and make the first contact via email. They also have various marketing choices like online display advertising, search engine optimization, direct mail campaign, cold calling and emailing campaigns, dialer, and reporting.
Pricing: $0 to $99 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Lead generator tool with a browser extension
LeadMine is a service where you can buy sales leads that offers data filters, email finder, and email verification. It generates leads by the parameter most important to you: location, industry, revenue, position, company name, and employee count.
With the email search tool, you can find all of the emails from a specific domain in a matter of seconds—the email verifier will provide information on the deliverability of that email address, and the browser extension allows you to work while switching the tabs.
Pricing: $132 to $447 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Lead list tool with real-time AI crawling
LeadFuze is one of the business list providers that has an AI feature that crawls the web to aggregate, match, and verify real-time company information. It offers hyper-targeted lead search and an automated list-building process to save valuable time. It also has an “ignore list” feature that you can create to avoid adding your existing contacts, competitors, or customers.
Pricing: $49 to $149 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Email search tool that charges only for verified contacts
Anymail Finder is a lead generation tool that allows you to look for emails and verify them so the wrong contacts don’t produce high bounce rates that affect your deliverability. Their key feature is that they won’t charge you for emails that are not 100% verified. You can also verify emails in bulk—up to 50,000 entries per upload.
Pricing: $20 to $1000 per list
Free Trial: Not available
CRM Integration: Not available
Key Offering: Marketplace to find freelancers for lead generation
If you have no desire to build a lead list yourself, you could also try Fiverr, a gig marketplace that allows you to find a freelancer that can generate leads and even contact them for you. To find a contractor just for you, you can filter through languages, industries, delivery time, or their rating. Fiverr is an affordable way to find leads, but you have to carefully choose the contractor.
Pricing: $650 to $1,150 per month
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Social media ad campaign builder for attracting leads
LYFE Marketing works on attracting and gathering leads through advertising and social media services. When you hire LYFE, a manager is assigned who will dive deep into your business specifics and create an ad campaign from ground zero. Although it is pretty pricey, it could be a nice add-on to your traditional lead generation efforts.
Pricing: $295 to $995 per month
Free Trial: Not available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Search system that finds what technology your leads use
If you offer technical services and need to know what your leads already have in their arsenal, BuiltWith can be a very useful add-on to your lead gen efforts. It has a database of over 670 million websites with sales intelligence on what technology they have, which can be very insightful for your prospecting.
Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available for certain packages
Key Offering: Cloud-based lead list provider
Cloudlead is a cloud-based provider that uses human researchers and tools to provide lead lists for sale. They offer custom prospecting, data enrichment, data cleansing, and lead scoring. They use multiple public sources, platforms, and search engines to mine the data and then provide it in CSV and XLS formats.
Pricing: $99 to $300
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Key Offering: Full-circle B2B lead generation
Demand Science (formerly Leadiro) provides access to a massive database of contacts, but besides that, it offers services like data enrichment, data segmentation, audience activation, statistical analysis, qualifying leads, converting them into sales, outbound prospecting, and marketing.
Although a decision on who’s going to be your B2B lead provider may seem daunting (after all, there’s such a variety of choices), it all comes down to a few simple things: need and offer, budget and price, expectations and results.
If those parameters match, you’ll get the best collaboration possible that will give you peace of mind and a stable flow of high-quality leads into your sales pipeline.