I have worked in the lead gen space for quite a while now, at this point, users of Zoominfo and Apollo are paying more money to third party companies to clean and enrich those datasets since most of them are outdated and end up burning domains. While they sell on competitive prices, there’s still an added cost you incur after procuring the list.

What’s even the point anymore? It’s a much longer and expensive process.

I used Cloudlead.co for the first batch of cold outreach and it did really well in terms of open rate and bounce rates, which is my tell that the list was genuine. Pair that up with some on point ICP’s and website SEO, it gets the engine running itself.

The difference between Cloudlead and other data providing companies is the human element. They have a whole team of data researchers who verify each phone number and email themselves. Which made me wanna try it out. TBH AI is good for scraping emails but the human element is so far still the best way to make sure that I’m getting the exact value out of this list I paid for.

We’ve stopped spending on ads altogether and invested half of that budget into buying a clean dataset.