I've been running lead gen for a few years now and I'm trying to understand where other agencies, big or small, are struggling when it comes to building a lead list for clients. I voted myself, but I want to know where other agencies are at. If anyone wants to chat about list building and share ideas, happy to chat.

Most of the calls we book come from LinkedIn, so that is where I spend most of my time. One thing I took for granted there: the profile shows where someone works today, so the message reaches them at their current company. Email has been less forgiving. When we started cold email, we enriched work addresses for the same kind of list. Before importing, we compared each email domain with the company on the person's current profile, and 46% did not match. Most of them were the domain of a previous employer. The part that surprised me is that our verifier could not catch it. A valid mailbox at an old company looks exactly like a valid mailbox at the new one, so nothing in the output looked off. What we do now: match the email domain against the current company before anything goes into a campaign, and drop every mismatch, even when the verifier says valid. For those of you building email lists every week, how do you handle job changes? Do you check domains yourself, enrich again on a schedule, or trust your data source to keep up?

Many agencies believe that sharing more metrics, charts, and campaign data makes them look more transparent and professional. But does it actually build trust? What do you think builds stronger client trust? Cast your vote below!

Content, outreach, ads, referrals, or partners? Which one is working best for you right now, and which one are you avoiding? Curious what’s actually working for people here.

Most of the calls we book come from LinkedIn, so that is where I spend most of my time. The list is the whole game there, and a bad contact simply never accepts. Email has been less forgiving. When we checked how our first verifier did on addresses hosted on Microsoft 365, it was wrong on 26% of them. Nothing in the output looked off, so those addresses would have gone into campaigns marked as safe. My read is that a verifier's overall score hides how it does on each mail host, and the host it struggles with never shows up in the summary. On LinkedIn a bad contact costs you one unanswered invite. On email a bad address costs you sender reputation. What we do now: look up the MX record first, send anything on Microsoft 365 through a second verifier, and only send result=valid. Risky and unknown get dropped. For those of you running email at scale, do you split verification by mail host, or run everything through one tool? And what do you do with catch-all addresses?