Building a B2B lead list usually means several tools: one to find business emails by keyword, another to check them, a third to send the cold emails — and an afternoon moving spreadsheets between them.
We (Outreach) built one screen that does all of it. You type an industry keyword, choose where to look, and Outreach collects matching businesses with their email addresses, phone numbers and Instagram handles. From the same list, you send emails from your own email account.
This post walks through the whole thing, step by step, with screenshots. Outreach supports English and Korean. The demonstration screenshots below show the English interface with illustrative data.
What does Outreach do, in one sentence?
Outreach turns an industry keyword into a list of businesses with contact details, and then lets you email that list without leaving the page. It's a B2B lead generation tool and a cold email automation tool in one.
Every project screen has 4 tabs across the top: Collect, Collection results, Send and Survey results. To go from an empty project to your first message, you work through the first three from left to right, and the Collect tab holds both the search choices and the contact-detail choices:
- Collect tab, questions 1–3 — what kind of business to find, where to look and how many
- Collect tab, “Which businesses should we save?” — which contact details you want
- Collection results tab — the table of businesses Outreach found
- Send tab — emails to the businesses you choose
What do you need before you start?
A keyword, an email account for sending, and tokens — and new accounts get free tokens. That lets you run a small first project and see real results before paying anything.
- A keyword. The kind of business you want to reach: "craft brewery", "dental clinic", "interior design studio".
- An email account. Emails go out from your own address, so replies come straight to your inbox. You connect it in Settings: Gmail, or another account by filling in Enter server details.
How do you tell Outreach where to look and what to find?
In the Collect tab, you type one or more industry keywords under “What kind of business should we find?”, pick the country and region under “Where should we look?”, and set the number under “How many businesses should we collect?”. Review the country, region, keywords and target in the “Here’s what we’ll look for” box on the right before starting collection.
Pick a country other than South Korea and you can choose a state or region of it, if you want. Outreach can collect from 193 countries, and when you pick a region it keeps only businesses whose location in that region is confirmed. Once the country is abroad, an “Only Korean-owned businesses” option also appears for anyone selling to Korean businesses abroad. We cover the overseas side in detail in how to find overseas buyers by country and region.
Next, add your keywords. You can add several words for the same industry, because businesses describe themselves differently, and each name finds different businesses. The number under “How many businesses should we collect?” is the target for the whole search, however many keywords it has; for example, choose 100 companies.
The current screen above shows the selected search settings: Georgia, USA, three industry keywords and a target of 300 businesses. It shows the settings you chose, not a separate list of generated search phrases. Review whether your words describe the businesses you want before starting. Different descriptions of the same industry, such as "Korean restaurant" and "Korean eatery", can find different businesses. The sample screen has the Korean-owned-only filter enabled. Keywords alone do not enable that filter. A target is a request, not a guarantee that enough matching businesses exist.
How do you choose which contact details to collect?
For each of email, phone number, Instagram handle and LinkedIn, you pick one of three settings: Don't get, Get if available, or Required. That choice decides both what ends up in your list and what you pay.
- Don't get — do not purchase or receive that field.
- Get if available — save it when the business publishes it.
- Required — only save businesses that have it. If you plan to send email only, set Email to Required and every business on your list will have an address.
The current example above shows all four contact choices. Email, Phone number and Instagram handle are set to "Get if available", and LinkedIn is set to "Don't get". Outreach saves a business when it has at least one of the selected contact details. Change a field to "Required" when every saved business must have it.
How do you know what a collection will cost before it starts?
A cost line appears above the Start button, showing the maximum number of businesses the run could collect and telling you that tokens are used for the info you receive. You see the limit before you commit.
In this example, the run asks for up to 300 businesses. Tokens are used for each contact detail actually found. If a business has an email but no phone number and no Instagram, tokens are used for that one detail, not three. That's why the real cost usually lands below what the maximum suggests.
When the numbers look right, click Start collecting. Businesses in Korea are found in public business information such as government business records, and businesses abroad in sources such as public map data; each one is checked for contact details and region as it's collected, which is why a run takes a while. You can leave the page; collection keeps running.
What does the results table show?
One row per business: the business name, email, phone number, Instagram handle, and where it was found. A summary card at the top counts how many businesses have each kind of contact detail.
In our illustrative example, a list of 34 sample businesses has 24 with an email, 7 with an Instagram handle, 15 with a phone number and 5 with no contact details. A business can have more than one contact field, so the email, Instagram and phone counts overlap. These figures are illustrative data, not results from a customer campaign.
Two things happen before a business ever reaches this table:
- Things that aren't businesses are filtered out. News articles, sites that list many businesses, government offices and associations don't belong on a B2B lead list, so Outreach removes them.
- Email addresses are checked before they're saved. Outreach asks the recipient's mail server whether the address exists, without sending anything. Addresses that don't exist aren't saved. (You can try the same kind of check on a single address with our free checker; the checker is also available in English.)
Every business you collect is on the send list by default; you only remove the ones you don't want. Tick the businesses in the table, then use the Change send list menu to add them to, or remove them from, the email list. The business stays in your table either way. Download to Excel at the right end of the table gives you the list as a spreadsheet, with whatever filters you've applied.
How do you send cold emails from Gmail?
On the Send tab, write your subject and message, then click Send now or choose a time under Send later. Emails go out from your connected email account one at a time. You can adjust the sending gap and daily limit before sending.
Write the message once. Fields like {company_name} are filled in for each business automatically, so every email is addressed to the business by name. If you need ideas, see 5 B2B cold email templates.
Then choose when to send:
- Send now starts right away.
- Send later lets you schedule a specific time, or have Outreach pick a send time that avoids weekends and late nights.
Outreach sends emails one at a time using the configured sending gap and daily limit. Use Change limit/speed to review your current settings. Those settings do not guarantee when a recipient will receive an email.
The send queue also keeps the businesses you have already emailed.
If an email you send doesn't get delivered, the tokens for that email are refunded. Before your first big send, it's also worth running your domain through our free checker for sender settings; setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC explains what it checks.
How do you follow up with businesses that didn't reply?
You can send a follow-up by hand from the "Already sent" list, or set up automatic follow-up emails that go out only to businesses that haven't replied. A busy owner who missed your first email may answer a short second one, so it's worth setting up once.
- Follow-up by hand. In the project, businesses you've already emailed move to "Already sent". Pick them and send a follow-up message.
- Automatic follow-up emails. A menu item of the same name lets you set a follow-up that's sent automatically after a set number of days — and only to businesses that haven't replied. Anyone who replies is taken off the sequence.
- Saved text. Keep the messages you use often in the Saved text menu so you don't rewrite them for every project.
Where do you see what's working?
Each project has a results view that shows how many businesses you collected, how many you emailed, and how many replied. The biggest drop between two stages is the thing to fix first.
In this illustrative example, the screen shows 128 businesses collected, 52 emailed, 3 that clicked a link and 4 that replied. These are sample counts, not customer outcomes. If most businesses were collected but few were emailed, the list needs more emails (set Email to Required next time). If many were emailed but few replied, the message is the thing to change.
How long does this take compared with doing it by hand?
By hand, finding one business's contact details takes about 1–2 minutes, so 300 businesses take 5 to 10 hours. That's the realistic time to search, load each website, find the contact page and copy the details into a spreadsheet.
With Outreach, you set the conditions once and click Start collecting. Finding businesses, collecting their contact details and checking the region happen without you, and you don't have to watch it happen. We compare the manual options in more detail in 4 ways to find B2B contacts as a solo founder.
Where should you start?
Start with one keyword, one region and a small target, like 30 businesses. Your free tokens let you run a first batch like that, and you'll see exactly what the list looks like for your industry before spending anything.
- Create a free account.
- Create a project and type one keyword.
- Set Email to Required if email is your main channel.
- Check the cost line, then start collecting.
- Connect your email account, write one short message, and send.
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 a question-mark button in the bottom-right corner of every screen gives you search, FAQs and a way to message us if you get stuck.
