The quality of your lead list determines the ceiling on your cold email results. A warm inbox and a brilliant sequence can't save you from a bad list. Here's how we build lists at Inboxrise — and the tools we actually use.
Step 1: Define your ICP with surgical precision
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. Most people define it too broadly. "B2B SaaS companies with 10–200 employees" is a category, not an ICP.
A useful ICP looks like this: Series A SaaS companies in the HR tech or fintech space, founded in the last 4 years, currently hiring sales or marketing roles, US or UK-based, with a founder who is active on LinkedIn.
The more specific you are, the more personalised your outreach can be — and personalisation is the single biggest driver of reply rate.
Key ICP dimensions to define:
- Company size — by headcount and/or revenue
- Industry — be specific. "SaaS" isn't specific enough. "HR SaaS for enterprises" is.
- Growth signals — recently funded, actively hiring, launched a new product
- Geography — where are they based, where do they sell
- Title — exactly who do you need to talk to
Step 2: Build the list
Source 1: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
The most reliable B2B prospecting tool. Build a search with all your ICP filters, export to CSV using a tool like Phantombuster or Evaboot, then enrich with emails.
Source 2: Apollo.io
Combines prospecting and email finding in one tool. Good for volume. Email accuracy is around 85–90% — always verify before importing.
Source 3: Crunchbase / PitchBook
Excellent for finding recently-funded companies — funding is one of the strongest buying signals. You can filter by funding stage, date, industry, and geography.
Source 4: G2, Capterra reviews
People who leave reviews for competitor products are qualified buyers. Filter by reviews of direct competitors and you have a list of people who've already bought in your category.
Step 3: Find and verify emails
The tools we use:
- Hunter.io — best for finding emails by name + company domain
- Apollo.io — find and verify in one step
- NeverBounce or ZeroBounce — bulk verification before import. Always run your list through one of these
Acceptable bounce rate for a healthy campaign: under 2%. Above 5% will damage your sender reputation. Remove any email marked "invalid" or "catch-all" before importing.
Step 4: Structure your CSV for personalisation
The columns that matter:
The recent_news or trigger_event column is the most underused. If you know that {{company}} just raised a Series A or just launched a new product, you can reference it in your opening line — and that one line does more for reply rate than any other personalisation tactic.
Step 5: Segment before you upload
Don't import your entire list as one campaign. Segment it:
- By industry (different angle for each)
- By company size (messaging for a 5-person startup is different from a 50-person scaleup)
- By trigger event (recently funded vs. recently hiring vs. just launched)
A campaign to 50 highly segmented contacts will outperform a campaign to 500 generic ones. Every time.
The list quality test: Before you launch any campaign, ask yourself: if I received this email, would it feel relevant and specific to me? If you'd feel like it was a mass blast, so will your prospect. Fix the list first.