Finding buyers in another country is where many export plans stall. You know your product would sell in Texas, Bavaria or Ontario. What you don't have is a list of the shops, distributors and studios there who might buy it — or the time to build one from the other side of the world.
We (Outreach) built our overseas search for exactly this. You pick a country and, if you want, a state or region, type what your buyers are called in that market, and Outreach collects matching businesses with their email addresses, phone numbers and Instagram handles. It keeps only the businesses whose location it can confirm.
This post explains how that works, what the options are, and what a real overseas project looked like.
Why is finding overseas buyers so hard from home?
Because the search tools you'd normally use are built for local customers, not for someone abroad building a B2B lead list. Collection results mix businesses with news, list sites and pages from the wrong city, and none of them come with contact details ready to use.
Three problems show up almost immediately:
- The words are different. Buyers in Germany don't call themselves what you'd call them in English or Korean. The same industry often has several local names, and each finds different businesses.
- The region is fuzzy. A search for one state returns businesses from the next state, head offices from the capital, and national chains with a toll-free number.
- The contact details are scattered. One business puts its email in the footer, another on a contact page, another nowhere at all.
By hand, finding and copying one business's contact details takes about 1–2 minutes. Add the checking — is this really in the right region? — and a list of a few hundred overseas businesses becomes a week of evenings.
Which countries can you search with Outreach?
Outreach can collect businesses in 193 countries. You choose the country from the Country list under “Where should we look?” in the project's Collect tab; there's nothing to install or configure per country.
To search abroad, pick a country other than South Korea under “Where should we look?”. Everything else — keywords, contact details, sending — works the same way as for a domestic project, so once you've run one project you know how to run them all. The full flow is in how to build a B2B lead list and send cold emails from one keyword.
How do you target one state or region instead of a whole country?
After picking the country, choose a state, province or region under “Region”. Outreach then searches in that region and saves only businesses whose location in it is confirmed.
This matters most in large countries. A distributor in California is not much use if your delivery partner only covers the East Coast, and a café in Munich is a different conversation from one in Hamburg. Picking the region up front keeps the list focused on buyers you can actually serve.
If you leave “All” selected, Outreach searches the whole country and keeps only businesses it can confirm are in that country.
What does "only businesses whose region is confirmed" mean?
A business is saved only when there's evidence it's in the region you picked. If Outreach can't confirm the location, it leaves the business out. You may get fewer businesses than your target, but the ones you get are in the right place.
The published street address is the strongest evidence, so it comes first. A phone number is used only when there's no address, and only if its area code belongs to that region.
The order matters more than it sounds. When we collected 50 businesses in Georgia, 4 of them used out-of-state phone numbers — toll-free numbers, or numbers kept from a previous location. We checked each website by hand: all 4 of 50 had Georgia addresses. Judging by phone number first would have thrown away four good businesses. Judging by address first kept them.
The trade-off is honest: a stricter rule means some real businesses are left out when their location can't be confirmed. We think a shorter list with no wrong-region entries is worth more than a longer one where some of your emails go to businesses you can't serve.
What keywords should you use for a foreign market?
Use the words businesses in that country use to describe themselves, and add a few different names for the same industry. Review the country, region and keywords in the “Here’s what we’ll look for” box of the Collect tab before starting, so you can check whether those settings describe the businesses you want.
For example, if you're looking for kitchen showrooms in Germany, "Küchenstudio" and "Küchenfachhandel" will find more than "kitchen showroom". If you're looking for independent cafés in Texas, try "coffee shop", "espresso bar" and "café" as separate keywords.
A few things in the Collect tab help with foreign markets:
- Several searches. You can add more than one search to a project — for example, one per region — each with its own keywords and target. Use “+ Also search other businesses or areas”.
- A target is set for each search under “How many businesses should we collect?”. If one keyword runs dry, Outreach also tries other common names for the same industry to reach the count.
- The region is added for you. You don't need to write the region next to your keywords: the region you pick under “Where should we look?” is applied to all the keywords in that search.
- Local-language suggestions. If you type an industry word in Korean, a helper suggests local-language terms for common industries. You choose which ones to add; nothing changes automatically.
How do you find Korean-owned businesses abroad?
Pick a country other than South Korea, then tick “Only Korean-owned businesses”. Outreach then saves only businesses where there's evidence that they're Korean-run.
The sample screen above has "Only Korean-owned businesses" enabled. That setting requires evidence of Korean ownership; typing a keyword such as "Korean restaurant" alone does not enable the filter.
This option exists because many sellers' first customers abroad are Korean-owned businesses: restaurants and grocery stores that need Korean ingredients, clinics and offices that want Korean-language services, shops that already know Korean brands. For a Korean company, they're often the easiest first door into a new market.
The important word is evidence. A business that serves Korean customers isn't necessarily Korean-run — a Japanese restaurant chain or a large financial company may advertise to the Korean community without being Korean-owned. So the option doesn't save a business just because it looks relevant; it needs a sign that the business itself is run by Koreans.
What did a real overseas project look like?
In one real project, we collected 305 Korean-owned businesses in the US, with ownership, region and email checked for each one. The full story — what went wrong, what we changed, and what we learned — is in how we built a list of Korean-owned businesses in the US.
Two things help set expectations before you start:
- Where businesses come from. Overseas businesses are found in public business information such as public map data, and when an entry has a website, Outreach visits that website to read the contact details. With the Korean-owned option on, it also looks in Korean community directories in the regions those directories cover. So in a region or industry these sources rarely list, results can be few or none. Start with a small target, look at the results, then widen your keywords or region.
- Email availability varies by industry. Local restaurants, for instance, often take bookings by phone and never publish an email. If email is your only channel, set Email to Required and expect a shorter list in those industries; if not, collect phone numbers and Instagram handles too.
What contact details can you collect from overseas businesses?
Email addresses, phone numbers and Instagram handles — the same three as a domestic project. For each one you choose Don't get, Get if available, or Required.
Before an email address is saved, Outreach asks the recipient's mail server whether the address exists, without sending anything. Addresses that don't exist aren't saved. That matters more abroad than at home, because you can't easily call a business in another time zone to check. If you already have addresses from somewhere else, our free email checker runs the same kind of check on a single address (also available in English).
Tokens are used for each contact detail found, and nothing is used for details a business doesn't have. Before collection starts, a cost line shows the maximum number of businesses and tells you that tokens are used for the info you receive.
How do you contact overseas buyers once you have the list?
Send emails from your own email account, from the same project screen. Replies come straight to your inbox.
Write the message once; fields like the business name are filled in for each email. Write it in your buyers' language if you can, keep it short, and make the ask easy to answer — our 5 B2B cold email templates show what that looks like.
For timing, Send later lets you pick the time, so — with their time zone in mind — your emails can arrive during their working day rather than yours. Emails go out one at a time, about 10 minutes apart by default. Before your first send, run your domain through our free checker for sender settings.
How do you start with a new market?
Run one small test: one country, one region, two or three local keywords and a target of about 30 businesses. New accounts get free tokens on signup, so you can see what Outreach finds in your market before you spend anything.
- Create a free account and start a project.
- Pick the country and the region.
- Add two or three local keywords and check the region and target in the “Here’s what we’ll look for” box.
- Tick "Only Korean-owned businesses" if that's your first market.
- Choose your contact details, check the cost line, and start collecting.
There's a free plan that gives you tokens every month, and paid plans when you need more. Tokens are used per contact detail found and per message sent — and you can use the interface in English or Korean.
