How to Build a Clean, Verified Lead List in Apollo (Step by Step)
Nick Konsta walks through his exact Apollo scraping process — from ICP research to verified emails — ready to import into any sending tool.
Most people overcomplicating lead generation are skipping the fundamentals. You don't need a dozen tools or a massive budget. You need a clean, verified list of the right people, built with intention. Here's the exact process I use at BuzzLead to build lead lists that feed campaigns booking 10 to 30 meetings a month for our clients.
Start With 10 Ideal Clients, Not a Blank Search
Before you touch Apollo's filters, do this first: write down 10 companies that are already a perfect fit for what you sell. Not aspirational targets. Actual examples of the kind of client you want more of.
I do this every time I build a new list. For a recent campaign, I was going after digital marketing agencies with 1 to 20 employees. I pulled 10 agency websites I already knew and respected, then brought those domains into Apollo's Companies tab using the "include/exclude companies" filter.
Why? Because Apollo will enrich those companies with keywords, and those keywords become your targeting blueprint. When I looked across my 10 agencies, I kept seeing the same terms: influencer marketing, social media marketing, branding, web design, SEO. Those cross-referenced keywords tell you exactly what the broader universe of similar companies looks like. Plug them all into the People tab under Industries and Keywords, and you've just turned 10 examples into a search that can surface tens of thousands of lookalikes.
Layer Your Filters Until the List Is Actually Targeted
After adding keywords, my search was showing 11 million results. That number is useless. You need to keep narrowing.
Here's the filter stack I use for a US-focused SMB campaign:
Industry: Marketing and Advertising
Location: United States (set this for both the company AND the contact, they don't always match)
Employee count: 1 to 20 (for owner-led businesses)
Job title: Owner, Founder, CEO, Co-Founder, President
Email status: Verified only
After running through all of that, I went from 11 million contacts down to 42,000. That's a list worth working with. Every person on it is a US-based decision-maker at a small marketing agency. When I sit down to write copy, I'm writing for one type of person, not a crowd.
One filter I've stopped relying on: revenue. For small businesses under $10M a year, Apollo's revenue data is mostly guesswork. Companies that size aren't publicly reporting financials, so the data is thin and it artificially shrinks your list. Skip it unless you're targeting larger organizations.
The technology filter is worth knowing about, though. If you want to get surgical, you can filter by the tools a company uses. I tested filtering for agencies running Klaviyo and got 34 results, too small for a campaign, but useful if you're building a hyper-personalized sequence for a very specific offer.
Export Smart, Then Verify Outside Apollo
Apollo gives you a monthly credit allowance. I don't try to export everything. For most campaigns I run, 1,000 contacts is a solid starting point. Export them as a CSV, and Apollo will email the file to you.
Here's where a lot of people stop. Don't stop here.
Apollo's "verified" label is not a guarantee. I've learned this the hard way, I've put hours into campaigns only to find out that a significant chunk of the emails were bouncing. Bounces kill your domain reputation, and a damaged sending domain is genuinely hard to recover from.
The extra step I never skip: run the exported list through a dedicated email verification tool. I use Million Verifier. You drop the CSV in, it checks every address for activity and blacklist status, and it costs almost nothing. For roughly $40 I get 15,000 credits. On a recent list of 9,000 contacts I built for a medical practice client, only 61% came back as clean. Another 32% were flagged as "risky", these are catch-all addresses that the tool can't definitively confirm as active.
For those risky emails, I use a second tool called Scrubby. It's built specifically to validate catch-all addresses, and it recovers a meaningful portion of them. If you skip Scrubby, you're working with about 60% of the contacts you originally pulled. That's a real cost at scale.
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Clean the Spreadsheet Before You Import Anything
Once Million Verifier is done, download the "good emails only" file. Open it and strip out every column you don't need. The columns I keep:
First name
Last name
Job title
Email address
Company name
LinkedIn profile URL
Website
Location
That's it. The reason first name matters specifically: every email sending tool I've used, including Smartlead which is what I run at BuzzLead, pulls from spreadsheet columns to personalize at scale. Addressing someone by their first name in a cold email is table stakes. If the column isn't clean and labeled correctly, your personalization breaks and you're sending "Hi {FirstName}" to thousands of people.
The LinkedIn column matters if you're doing omnichannel outreach. At BuzzLead we send cold email and LinkedIn messages in the same sequence, so having that profile URL in the list means we can automate both touchpoints from one CSV.
This whole process, from pulling your 10 seed companies to having a verified, import-ready spreadsheet, takes 30 minutes to an hour. That's not a lot of time for a list that can fuel weeks of outreach.
Key Takeaways
Start with 10 known ideal clients and use their Apollo keyword data to define your broader search
Stack filters (industry, location, employee count, title, verified email) to get from millions of results down to a targeted, workable number
Export only what you need, 1,000 contacts is enough to run a real campaign
Always run your Apollo export through a dedicated verifier like Million Verifier before sending anything
Use Scrubby to recover the "risky" catch-all emails and maximize usable contacts
Keep your final spreadsheet to 7 to 8 columns: the data your sending tool actually needs
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I just trust Apollo's "verified" email label? Apollo's verification isn't airtight. Even contacts marked as verified can bounce, and a high bounce rate damages your sending domain's reputation fast. Running your export through a dedicated tool like Million Verifier adds a second layer of confirmation that's worth the small cost every time.
What employee size should I target in Apollo? It depends on who the decision-maker is. For companies with 1 to 20 employees, you're almost always talking to the owner, founder, or CEO directly. Once you get to 50 employees and above, buying decisions shift to managers, directors, VPs, and heads of departments. Know who holds the budget at your target company size and filter your titles accordingly.
How many leads should I export for a starting campaign? Around 1,000 contacts is a practical starting point. It's enough volume to get real signal from a campaign without burning through your Apollo credits or overwhelming your sending infrastructure before you've validated your copy and offer.
What do I do with "risky" emails from Million Verifier? Risky emails are catch-all addresses, the verifier can't confirm whether they're active or dead. You have two options: ignore them and work with the clean emails only (roughly 60% of your original list), or run the risky batch through Scrubby, which is built to validate catch-alls and can recover a solid portion of them.
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