Getting the most out of 100 trial leads

Most people burn the trial by exporting one big list and skimming it. That tells you almost nothing. Here is a way to spend 100 credits that produces an answer.

1. Do all your searching first — it is free

Before exporting anything, use the counts. Try your category in three cities. Try one level broader. Try with Has email on and off. You will learn the shape of your market for zero credits, because only exports are billed.

2. Export 20 businesses you already know (20 credits)

Pick a city where you can personally verify the answers — your own town, or a market you have sold into. Filter to a category you know well and export twenty rows. Then check them against reality: is the phone number right? Is the email the one you would have found on the site? Is anything in there that closed last year?

This is the only test that matters, and it is the one a vendor cannot game.

3. Export 50 of your real target segment (50 credits)

Now use the filters you would use for real — has an e-mail, 4+ stars, at least the 1-50 reviews band, has a website. Export fifty. Look at how many rows have a person-shaped address in Individual email rather than only an info@ in Contact email, and check the deliverability signals inside All emails. See how to judge whether an address will bounce and what the role-split email columns give you.

4. Send something to 30 of them (30 credits' worth, already exported)

Reply rate is the real quality metric. Ten replies from fifty is a good list; zero deliveries from fifty is a bounce problem you want to discover now rather than in month two.

What not to spend it on

• A country-wide export. 100 rows out of 40,000 tells you nothing and uses the whole allowance.
• Ten tiny exports of the same city. A business already exported in the last 30 days is not re-billed, so this is not as wasteful as it looks — but it is still thinking time you could spend on step 2.
• Testing whether search works. It does, and it is free.

At the end

You should be able to answer three questions: is the coverage deep enough in my market, are the contacts real, and is the reply rate worth the per-lead cost on the plan I would buy. If any answer is no, do not subscribe — that is what the trial is for.