If you sell to businesses that buy or supply physical goods, some of the best prospect data in the world is sitting in public trade directories — Alibaba, Global Sources, Made-in-China, Kompass, ThomasNet, and the regional platforms your industry actually uses. The catch: it's scattered, inconsistently formatted, and full of stale contacts. Here is the process we use to turn it into a lead list your sales team can trust.
1. Define the ideal customer before you touch a directory
Write down, in one paragraph: the product category, the buyer's role, company size, and the countries you can realistically serve. Then translate that into 5–10 concrete search keywords — the words a supplier or buyer would put in their own listing, not your internal jargon. "Stainless steel fasteners" finds companies; "precision joining solutions" finds nothing.
2. Mine the platforms systematically, not casually
Pick two or three platforms where your category is dense and work through listings methodically: company name, country, product focus, contact person, and any email or domain you can see. Capture the listing URL too — you will want to re-check the source later. Expect this to be the slow part: a person doing this carefully gets through maybe 20–30 useful companies an hour, which is why teams either automate it or outsource it.
3. Find the real email, not the form
Many listings hide contacts behind platform messaging. The company domain is your way out: most firms publish a sales or info address on their own site, and common patterns (first.last@, sales@) plus the public pages usually surface a workable address. Record more than one email per company where you can — redundancy pays off at the next step.
4. Verify deliverability before anything enters your CRM
This is the step most teams skip, and it's the one that quietly ruins outreach. Sending to dead addresses drives your bounce rate up, and mail providers read a high bounce rate as spam behavior — which hurts delivery to your good contacts. Run every address through a deliverability check (there are several affordable verification services) and drop anything that isn't a confirmed mailbox. A 500-row list that's 98% deliverable beats a 2,000-row list that's 60% deliverable, every time.
5. Enrich, deduplicate, and structure for the CRM
- Deduplicate by domain, not company name — the same firm appears under different names across platforms.
- Enrich with country, product category, and company size where visible, so you can segment the first campaign instead of blasting everyone with one message.
- Structure the columns to match your CRM import — company, contact name, email, country, source URL, date collected. Future-you will want to know where each lead came from.
The pitfalls that waste the most time
- Stale listings. Directories keep dead companies around for years. A quick domain check catches most of them.
- One giant unsegmented list. If you can't say why a company is on the list, your first email will read like it.
- Skipping verification to save a few dollars. The cost shows up later as a burned sending domain.
Done well, this process reliably produces a few hundred qualified, verified companies per keyword family. It is not glamorous work — it is careful work. That's exactly why it's worth doing properly.
Rather have this done for you?
This is exactly the service we run for clients: you describe your ideal customer, we hand back a clean, verified, CRM-ready spreadsheet — usually within hours. Quoted up front, sample included.
See the lead generation service →