5 Best Places to Buy Business Leads Online 2018

Lead generation is a vital part of growing any business. You need to draw in new customers, cultivate relationships, and successfully close new deals. While there are many ways to do this in a public setting, like content marketing and attending trade shows, we’re going to compare six of the best places you can purchase B2B leads online.

Make sure you’re prepared to follow through with every contact by using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Freshsales is a free CRM that lets you set up a profile for each new lead, make follow-up calls or send emails, and track leads through your sales pipeline, all in one convenient platform. You even get intelligent rules-based lead scoring to help you prioritize and focus your efforts. Click here for a 30-day free trial.

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Best Places to Buy Business Leads Summary Table

How Were the 5 Options Selected?

The five B2B lead suppliers I have recommended were selected using the following criteria:

1. Cleanliness of data
2. Filters and data attributes available
3. Affordability for small business
4. CRM Integrations
5. Ease of use

All of the five options selected are easy to use and affordable to small business, with the exception of Data.com for some small businesses. As a result, I have focused on the rest of the criteria to determine which business lead supplier would be best to use under which circumstances.

Lusha: Best for Cold Calling

Using the Chrome Extension to Reveal Direct Contact Details in LinkedIn

Lusha provides a different solution to purchasing a conventional list of business contacts. It identifies direct phone numbers, mobile numbers and email addresses as you browse LinkedIn and Twitter profiles in your Google Chrome browser.

It’s simple to get started; you just sign-up and download the Chrome extension with one click. You are then allowed up to 5 contact details reveals per month for free, which allows you to test the service.

The power of this solution is in its simplicity. Just browse LinkedIn or Twitter as you normally do when you’re looking for new prospects. When you come across someone, you can instantly reveal their contact details. To learn more about how to make effective cold calls I recommend reading Cold Calling – A Beginners Guide for Small Business Owners.

There is also an API, which you can use to integrate Lusha with your CRM. This will allow you to enrich your existing contacts if you have captured LinkedIn or Twitter profile addresses.

Lusha Pricing

The pricing model is very simple with the same features available at each price point. You get up to 5 contact reveals/month for free. Thereafter for 50/month, it costs $25/month at a cost of $0.50/reveal. For 200/month, it costs $59/month at a cost of $0.30/reveal. For 500/month it costs $119/month at a cost of $0.24/reveal.

To learn more about Lusha pricing click here.

Lusha Filters & Data Attributes

As explained further above, Lusha provides a different method of identifying contact details: It simply reveals direct phone numbers, mobile numbers and email addresses as you browse LinkedIn and Twitter profiles in the Chrome browser.

Lusha CRM Integrations

Lusha operates using a Chrome Extension, which is simple to download and easy to use thereafter. It does not offer any CRM integrations, however, it does provide an API which your web developer can use to integrate with your CRM. You may want to do this to enrich existing contacts with direct phone and mobile numbers.

Lead411: Best for Purchasing Triggers

Custom Purchasing Triggers in Lead411

This solution is not only a source of fresh business leads, it is also able to integrate with a wide range of small business CRMs, like Freshsales, and provide you with intelligence updates on the prospects you are targeting. These are generally called purchasing triggers. For instance, you can receive alerts to tell you which companies are growing, when they put new tech in place and when key contacts change roles.

Triggers save you a lot of time on research, as you’ll be automatically notified when a window of opportunity has opened. This also gives you a competitive edge over less well informed competitors.

Lead411 also has a Chrome extension, which allows you to create email templates, find work email addresses and send up to 400 emails at any one time for free.

Unlike the other solutions, which promise a 90% delivery rate on data, Lead411 guarantee a 95% deliverability rate.

Lead411 Pricing

The basic price package allows for 100 contact record/month for $75/month at a cost of $0.75/contact record. This includes unlimited email verifications, sales triggers, Gmail integration and the Chrome Extension.

The pro package allows for 300 contact records/month for $125, which comes out to $0.42 per record. In this package you also get access to currently hiring and IT intelligence data.

The team package allows for 1000 contact records/month for $349 at a cost of $0.35 per record. In this package you also get access to create your own custom triggers.

To learn more about Lead411 pricing click here.

Lead411 Filters & Data Attributes

You can filter companies by; job title, location, industry, company name, company revenue and number of employees. It takes literally seconds to complete your search and the platform is so well designed and easy to use.

All contact records come with; phone number and job title and over 90% come with email addresses as well as all of the company data points too.

In addition, Lead411 provides IT intelligence and currently hiring data from the pro package price point of $125/month.

Lead411 CRM Integrations

Lead411 lets you export leads to many well-known small business CRMs, including Pipedrive. Pipedrive is a great tool for sales teams who can then take these leads and track them in a visual sales pipeline from first contact to first purchase.

LimeLeads: Best for Data Quality Checking

Contact Record Preview Screen in LimeLeads

LimeLeads data comes from a wide variety of verified data sources and there are currently more than 3.3 million company records in the US alone. The data records are verified against multiple third party services, APIs and federal records.

This data supplier has a great reputation for quality amongst customers. This is because they use advanced tech and machine verification techniques, as well as human ones. To demonstrate how seriously they take data quality, they produce a quality data quality report every quarter, which they publish on their website.

The one downside to LimeLeads is they do not currently integrate with any CRM platforms, and so there is no way to cleanse your leads or enrich them as new data becomes available.

LimeLeads Price

LimeLeads allows you to pay-as-you-go and has a sliding scale for pricing which starts from $240 for 500 leads at a competitive cost of $0.48/contact record. At the other end of the scale, you can buy 100,000 contact records for $12,500 at a cost of $0.125/contact record.

Alternatively, you can sign-up to a monthly plan and purchase contacts more cost effectively. For instance, the startup plan delivers 2,000 contacts/month for $499/month at a cost of $0.25/contact record.

To learn more about LimeLeads pricing click here.

LimeLeads Filters & Data Attributes

You can filter companies by; job title, location, industry, company name, company revenue and number of employees. It takes literally seconds to complete your search and the platform is so well designed and easy to use.

All contact records come with; phone number and job title and over 90% come with email addresses as well as all of the company data points too.

LimeLeads CRM Integrations

LimeLeads does not come with any CRM integrations, although leads are easy to export and import via Excel spreadsheet.

SalesRipe: Best for Low Cost Leads

Business Lead Search Process in SalesRipe

SalesRipe is a very affordable solution for small business. The 15 million business records come from a wide range of sources including; news articles, press releases, social networks, blogs and online company profiles. 90% of these records have email addresses.

It’s starter package costs only $0.24/contact record, which is half the cost of Data.com by Salesforce. What’s more, you can pay on a monthly basis, which helps to protect your cash flow.

SalesRipe does have a downside; it only guarantees 90% data accuracy. This means that only 90% of the contact information is guaranteed to be accurate. As a result, if data accuracy is more important to you than price, I would suggest you prioritize the other options. In addition, SalesRipe does not integrate with any recognized CRM platforms.

SalesRipe Price

There are 3 pricing packages. The starting price is $49 for 200 contacts/month at a cost of $0.24/contact record. However, the price comes down if you increase the volume. For $79 you get 1,000 contacts/month at a cost of $0.08/contact record. Or for $129/month you get 2,500 contacts/month at a cost of $0.05/contact record.

To learn more about SalesRipe pricing click here.

SalesRipe Filters & Data Attributes

You can filter businesses by location, industry, sales volume, number of employees, contact title, contact level, contact job function, technologies used, landline vs mobile phone numbers, one contact per company vs multiple contacts, website URL and email Address.

SalesRipe CRM Integrations

SalesRipe provides free use of its own CRM platform, but this is not a well-known small business CRM platform, like Freshsales. As a result I would recommend purchasing business leads and exporting to your own environment via Excel spreadsheet.

Data.com: Best for Salesforce users

Business Lead Search Process in Data.com

Data.com is best for Salesforce users, as it has a full integration. One really great feature of Data.com is that you can preview contacts (except direct phone numbers and email addresses) in Salesforce before you buy them. This allows you to check contacts match your ideal customer profile before you purchase.

The vast majority of the data is sourced from Dunn & Bradstreet (D&B). D&B passes through companies to Data.com that have more than 20 employees, and as a result there are around 3.5 million company records.

As of 1 August, 2017, it is possible to buy data direct from Data.com without being a Salesforce customer.

Data.com Price

Data.com charge $1800/year for 300 contacts/month. However, this is billed yearly in advance so you have to pay $1,800 when you subscribe. For a cost of $300/year you can also pay for your Salesforce records to be regularly cleansed and updated.

To learn more about Data.com pricing click here.

Data.com Filters & Data Attributes

You can search for companies by location, industry, annual revenue, number of employees, type or organization and Fortune 500 and 1,000 ranking. You can search for individuals by name, email address, job title, job role, department, and the rest of the company search criteria.

When you submit a search, you can review the results before you purchase. The only thing hidden from you are individual contact direct phone numbers and email addresses.

Data.com CRM Integrations

Data.com is owned by Salesforce currently and has a deep integration with the Salesforce CRM platform. However, after 1 August 2017, you’ll be able to purchase data direct from Data.com and the platform will begin integrating with other platforms.

The Bottom Line

There are many ways to generate business leads for cold calling and cold emailing purposes. However, purchasing business leads that are not updated in real-time means that they will age and become less useful over time. This is the case with most conventional business lists including; LimeLeads and SalesRipe.

For short-term use, all of the options are worth considering. However, if you are looking to nurture business leads over time I would recommend Lusha and Lead411 (connected to a small business CRM like Freshsales) over the other options. Or if you are a Salesforce user, you should look no further than Data.com due to the depth of the integration between the two tools.

If you would like to learn more about other good ways to generate leads, I recommend reading Lead Generation: 25 Ways to Get More Leads for Your Business.