Finding and qualifying new leads. The part that matters is the part that rules people out.
A list of two hundred names from who knows where, of which thirty have closed down, forty are too small to buy from you and two have been your customers for six years. This piece builds lists from public sources and throws out everything that doesn't stand up, before anyone wastes a day on it.
Rule out first, then search. The exclusion criteria are agreed with you and applied first, because a long list of the wrong names costs more than a short list.
Nothing comes from bought lists. Only public sources anyone can check, with the source and date attached to every lead.
The piece stops before sending. It finds, filters and verifies. Writing to people who have never contacted you has its own rules, and a system doesn't get to decide them.
This page covers a single piece of the system. The other pieces, and how we choose which one to start with, are on the services page.
What changes in practice
Your salesperson's day stops being a research day. Opening fifty websites, looking for the right name, working out whether the company is the size you need and finding contact details that actually work: that's the work that moves over to the machine.
The second change is that the list is short. Twenty entries that meet every criterion are worth more than two hundred raw names, because nobody ever calls the two hundred, and in the end everyone goes back to calling the same old contacts.
A long list isn't an asset. It's a sorting job put off until later, which someone will have to do anyway, usually at the worst possible moment.
Bought lists cost you the domain you send from
The damage is technical before it's legal. Google's rules for bulk senders require spam complaints to stay below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%, and a list collected by someone else can cross that line within a few hundred emails.
Anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day also has to authenticate their domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC and offer one-click unsubscribe, requirements in force since 1 February 2024. Once a domain's reputation is damaged, quotes to real customers end up in the spam folder too.
Then there's the legal side. The Italian exception that allows you to email a customer without asking for fresh consent only applies to people who have already bought from you: the Data Protection Authority's guidelines limit it to email addresses provided by the data subject in the course of the sale of a product or service.
A new lead, by definition, isn't in that position. How to proceed from there is a judgement for you and your adviser, and this piece stops before that point so it doesn't make the call for you.
De-duplication comes before anything else
It's the check hardly anyone puts first, and the mistake that follows is the most expensive. Every entry is compared against active customers, open deals, contacts approached in the past and anyone who has asked not to be contacted again.
Introducing yourself to a long-standing customer as a stranger tells them, in one sentence, that nobody in your business knows who your customers are. And the mistake multiplies when two people are selling, because each one works from their own list.
That's why de-duplication needs reliable records, which is what the adaptive CRM keeps. Working with contacts who are already yours is a separate piece, handled by customer qualification and reactivation.
What the system does, step by step
Every entry records where it came from, when, and why it was kept or ruled out.
| Step | What happens | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Criteriaexclusions first | We write down with you the reasons a company isn't of interest: size, market, distance, type of business. |
The list you get is already made up of companies you could genuinely serve. |
| Collectionpublic sources | Company websites, Chamber of Commerce directories, trade fair exhibitor lists, trade associations, public professional profiles. |
Every lead has a stated source, and nobody has to trust a file that came from who knows where. |
| De-duplicationagainst what you already have | Customers, open deals, contacts already approached and opt-outs are checked before anything else. |
Nobody ends up introducing themselves to a long-standing customer as a stranger. |
| Verificationon the live page | Whether the company and its contact details actually exist is checked on the page as a browser displays it, not with a quick scan. |
Fewer dead entries, and no wrong claims about the company you're about to contact. |
| Deliverya short list | The list arrives in priority order, with the reason each entry is on it and what's known about each company. |
Your salesperson opens the list and gets going, instead of starting the research all over again. |
Automated scans get things wrong, and have to be checked
This is the part we learned the hard way, and we're writing it down because nobody else mentions it. A tool that opens a page and looks for a contact form or contact details reports things as missing when they aren't all the time: forms that only appear after an animation, pages hidden behind a cookie banner, content that loads after the first page load.
The result is a list that says a door is shut when it's actually open, and the person using it writes something wrong to a company that spots the mistake immediately. So verification is done on the live page, as a browser displays it, and ambiguous cases are checked by a person.
The reverse applies too, and it's why the list stays short: if in doubt, an entry is ruled out. A missed lead costs you one lead; a wrong entry costs you the credibility of the first sentence you write.
What goes out on its own, and what waits for a person
Collection, de-duplication, verification and building the list all happen on their own. They're jobs that read public information, and none of them reaches anyone outside the business.
No outreach ever goes out on its own. The first sentence to a company that doesn't know you is the most delicate moment in the whole process, and a person decides it and sends it.
For phone calls there's an extra rule in Italy: the national opt-out register for marketing calls (Registro Pubblico delle Opposizioni) now covers every Italian number, landline and mobile, and anyone running phone campaigns has to check it regularly and before every campaign. The reasoning behind keeping a person in the loop is on our page about the principles we build by.
Same mechanism, different name in every trade
The method is identical; the source that works isn't. It's worth looking at your own case, because the best source is almost always one you already know about and have never used systematically.
| Sector | The source that works | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Food and agricultureand export | Exhibitor and visitor lists from trade fairs, foreign distributors' catalogues, import registers by country. |
|
| Hospitalityaccommodation and events | Agencies and professionals who bring groups, local companies that organise meetings, the booking portals where properties are already listed. |
|
| Restaurantsand bars | Local companies for business lunches, newly opened offices and building sites, people running courses and events in the area. |
What this piece doesn't do
It doesn't buy or sell lists, and it doesn't use databases bought from third parties. If an entry has no public source that can be named, it doesn't go in.
It doesn't send anything. Research and sending are two different jobs with different responsibilities, and keeping them apart is how you stop a system deciding on its own to write to someone.
It doesn't promise a response rate. That depends on who writes, what they write and the market, and anyone promising a percentage before they've seen your first sentence is selling a made-up number. What's measured here is the quality of the list, not the outcome of the conversation.
Questions and answers
Do you buy contact lists?
No, never, and it's not a moral stance. A bought list contains addresses someone else collected for reasons you don't know, so it produces bounces and spam complaints that damage the domain you send from.
Google's rules for bulk senders require spam complaints to stay below 0.10% and never go above 0.30%: a dirty list will blow through that threshold on its own.
Where do the leads come from?
From public sources anyone can check: company websites, Chamber of Commerce registers and directories, trade fair exhibitor lists, trade associations, public professional profiles.
They're the same sources you'd go through one by one yourself, and every entry records where it came from and when, so it can always be traced back.
Do you send the emails?
No, this piece stops before that. It finds, filters and verifies; sending is a separate job with its own rules, which need looking at case by case with your adviser.
The Italian exception that allows emailing without consent only applies to people who have already bought from you: the Data Protection Authority's guidelines limit it to addresses provided in the course of a sale, so it doesn't cover new leads.
How do you avoid contacting people who are already our customers?
Through de-duplication, which is the first check, not the last. Every entry is compared against active customers, open deals, contacts approached in the past and anyone who has opted out: if it appears in any of those, it doesn't go on the list.
Introducing yourself to a long-standing customer as if you'd never met is the kind of mistake that costs you in a single phone call.
How do you measure whether it's working?
By the share of entries that pass a manual spot check, which needs to be high: if three out of twenty entries checked are wrong, the list isn't ready. The second number is the share of leads ruled out, and why, because that's where you see whether the criteria are working.
The third, further down the line, is how many real conversations came out of that list, counted one by one.
Notes on sources
- The 0.10% and 0.30% spam complaint thresholds, the 5,000-messages-a-day limit, SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication and one-click unsubscribe are all in Google's sender guidelines, in force since 1 February 2024. They apply to mail delivered to Google accounts, which is a large share of the world's email but not all of it; other providers have similar rules of their own.
- The limits of the exception for emailing your own customers are set out in the Guidelines on promotional activity and combating spam issued by the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, 4 July 2013, which link it to Article 130(4) of the Privacy Code. It's a legal provision, so there's no sample. We don't give legal advice and we don't tell you what you can send: that judgement stays with you and your adviser.
- The coverage of the Registro Pubblico delle Opposizioni, now extended to every Italian landline and mobile number, and the obligation to check it regularly and before every phone campaign, are described by the register itself.
- The problem of scans reporting things as missing when they aren't is something we've seen in our own work, not a research finding: it comes from forms that load after an animation and pages behind a cookie banner, which look absent on a quick read. We mention it because it shapes how the verification is built.
- This page doesn't report results achieved for a client, because this piece hasn't yet been delivered to a client. The tests mentioned are functional checks run in a test environment.
The other pieces in this group
Customers who are out there but don't find youFifteen minutes, with your case in front of us.
How many hours a week does your salesperson spend looking for names instead of talking to people? If nobody has ever counted, that's already the most useful thing to find out. In fifteen minutes on the phone we'll look at it together and tell you where it makes sense to start, even if we never end up working together.
You'll speak to Mattia Esposito, who then builds the system: there's no salesperson in between. If you'd rather measure things yourself before talking, the Diagnostico (in Italian) is twenty questions and five minutes.