10 Best B2B Lead Sources For Cold Email (2025)

A great lead list is the difference between a 5% reply rate and a 0.5% reply rate.

In this article, I share the top 10 B2B lead sources for cold email:

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
2. Job ad sites (LinkedIn, Upwork & Indeed)
3. Crunchbase
4. PitchBook
5. Find “top companies in x category”
6. Review sites
7. YCombinator
8. Competitor audiences
9. Google Maps
10. Directories

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the largest lead database in the world.

It is also the most accurate since LinkedIn is one of the few platforms where people actively update their profiles.

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can search for leads that are relevant to your offer. They have over 25 search filters that you can use to narrow your list.

For example, if you wanted to find founders of companies that are located in the United States that are in the renewable energy sector, then LinkedIn Sales Navigator would allow you to do this.

There are other lead database companies, such as Apollo and ZoomInfo, but these are worse versions of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The data in these tools isn’t as accurate as LinkedIn.

The only problem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that they don’t give you the email address of each lead.

Instead, they only let you messaging leads directly through their platform, via their “InMail” system. It gets even worse, since they only give you 50 InMail credits per month, meaning that you can only message 50 people per month.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

You can use Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension to export your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator with their email addresses.

Emailchaser has its own proprietary email finding software, so even though LinkedIn doesn’t give you the email address of each lead, Emailchaser’s extension finds the emails using publicly available information (name, website etc).

Using the extension, you can export your leads as a .csv file, and then upload them into your Sales CRM.

2. Job ad sites (LinkedIn, Upwork & Indeed)

You can find companies that are actively hiring by scraping job boards such as LinkedIn, Upwork, or Indeed.

When a company posts a job opening, it’s a strong signal that they need assistance or new solutions.

For example, if a business is recruiting sales reps, they are also probably in the market for sales tools, meaning that if you are selling a sales tool, then you should reach out to them.

There are pre-made scrapers available on Apify; if you’re not technical, then you can hire a developer to set up and run the scraper for you.

3. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a website that allows you to see companies that recently raised funding.

This is a good lead source if you are looking to sell to recently funded companies.

The reason why salespeople often target recently funded companies is because they have money to spend and are in a growth phase, making them more likely to buy your product or service.

4. PitchBook

PitchBook is similar to Crunchbase.

You can find recently funded companies on PitchBook.

The below Tweet thread from Sam Blond discusses Brex’s most successful outbound sales campaign. They contacted 300 companies, and closed 169 of them as paying customers. They used PitchBook as their lead source in this campaign:

1/ The best outbound campaign we ever ran at Brex (75% demo rate, 75% demo to close):

Brex launched in 2018 as the first corporate card for startups. After launch, when we were still ~30 employees and near 0 rev, we ran the most successful outbound campaign I've ever seen.

— Sam Blond (@samdblond) January 9, 2023

5. Find “top companies in x category”

You can search for “top companies in x category” on Google and Twitter to find leads.

For example, if you were building a Newsletter software, you could search Google for “top blogs in x category” to find a list of potential customers.

The following tweet thread from Nathan Barry discusses how he grew ConvertKit’s MRR to over $100,000 by using this method as his primary lead source:

My software company hit $1,500 MRR and then got stuck.

...Until I pivoted marketing tactics.

Here’s the exact method I used to scale to $100k MRR in the next 12 months: pic.twitter.com/9k8V1jMkh3

— Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry) October 27, 2022

6. Review sites

Review sites can be a great lead source for certain industries.

For example, if you are selling a product that is built for SaaS companies, then you can find lists of SaaS companies on software review sites like Capterra and G2.

If you are selling a product or service for tourism companies, then TripAdvisor would be a good lead source.

7. YCombinator

If you are selling to startups, then YCombinator is a good lead source.

YCombinator is the world’s largest startup accelerator, and has funded over 4,000 companies.

You can see a list of YC companies on their website.

Selling to startups has its advantages and disadvantages. It is easier to get a startup to adopt your product, however, they are more likely to go out of business, so churn will be higher compared to selling to larger established companies.

8. Competitor audiences

Another lead source is your competitors’ audiences.

Anyone that follows your competitors on social media is likely an existing customer of theirs.

If someone is already a customer of your competitor, then you know that they have the problem that you solve.

My favourite way to find my competitors’ audiences is to see who follows their Twitter pages.

Twitter shows you who follows a page. You can contact the followers of these pages, one by one, to sell your product or service.

You can use Emailchaser’s Email Finder tool to find the email address of each person. You can also hire someone from OnlineJobs.ph to do this for you as it's a time consuming process.

9. Google Maps

Google Maps is a good lead source if you are looking for local businesses.

For example, if your target market is plumbing companies, then you can google “plumbing companies in city”.

I recommend that you only reach out to companies with good reviews.

If a company doesn’t have good reviews, then they probably aren’t successful, and are less likely to buy your product or service.

10. Directories

Directories are websites that list companies by category.

For example, there are directories that list law firms, such as The Legal 500.

If you are doing outbound sales, then you could find a directory that is relevant to your industry, and reach out to the mentioned companies.

Final thoughts

The right lead source for your company depends on who your target customer is.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great option for most outbound sales campaigns. You can also use Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension to export your leads with their emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

If you need help building a lead list, then check out my article How To Build A Lead List For Sales.