The best outbound sequence in the world will not work without a good lead list.

You can have the perfect message, the right follow ups, even AI writing your copy for you, but if you are sending to the wrong people you will not book a single meeting. Outbound lives or dies on one simple question: are you talking to the right people at the right time.

In this article, I will walk through the full process I teach inside our very own AI Outbound Academy. We will cover how to define your ICP before you ever open a tool, where to actually pull high quality B2B leads in 2025, how to clean your list so you do not destroy your domain, and how to load everything into Victoria AI so you can start booking meetings.

Step 1: Define your ICP before you touch a tool

Most people open Apollo or Sales Navigator and immediately start clicking filters. That is the wrong order.

If you do not know exactly who you want to talk to, the tool will happily give you a giant pile of the wrong people. So before you touch any software, you define your ICP on paper.

Start with your perfect customer. Ask yourself who gets the best results from your offer, who you actually enjoy working with, and who can comfortably afford what you charge. Maybe that is SaaS companies that need predictable demos, agencies and consulting firms that live and die on their pipeline, e-commerce brands that want customers instead of more followers, or local service businesses that care about phone calls and bookings.

Next, think about company size. Size affects budget, complexity and the length of the sales cycle. A small team of one to ten people usually gets the most value from done for you services and plug and play systems. Companies with ten to one hundred employees are often ideal for deeper system builds and automation.

Then decide where these companies are based. You can focus on broad regions such as the United States and Canada, North America and Europe, or narrow it down to specific countries and cities if you want to run a more local play.

Finally, think about trigger events. This is where your lead list starts to become powerful. Ask what a company would be doing if they were feeling the pain that your offer solves. Maybe they are hiring salespeople or SDRs, which usually means they need more leads. Maybe they have just raised funding and now have targets and budget.

Step 2: Choose the decision maker, not the bystander

The second big mistake people make is targeting the wrong person inside the right company.

They build a beautiful list of perfect companies, then send all of their messaging to coordinators and specialists who cannot say yes to anything. The company is right, the person is wrong.

For outbound to work, you want people who feel the pain, own the metric and control the budget. In most B2B lead generation or AI outbound offers, that usually means founders, CEOs, owners, heads of growth, VPs of sales, VPs of marketing, marketing directors, COOs and directors of operations.

Step 3: Pull your lead list with tools that work in 2025

Once you know who you want to talk to and who the decision makers are, you are finally ready to open your tools and start pulling leads.

Apollo as your default starting point

Apollo is still my favorite place to start. Think of it as a giant searchable database of hundreds of millions of business contacts. You can filter by job title, seniority, company size, industry, keywords, location and more.

The main advantage with Apollo is that it gives you everything you need for multi channel AI outbound. You get a verified email address, a phone number and a LinkedIn profile URL.

Clay when you need richer data

Clay behaves like Apollo with a brain attached. Instead of being limited to a single database, Clay lets you blend data from multiple sources and enrich each contact with live web data.

The Sales Navigator, PhantomBuster and AnyMailFinder stack

Sometimes Apollo does not have the depth you need for a very specific niche. In those cases, there is an old but effective combo that still works extremely well.

Scraping creative sources with Apify and similar tools

If you like to think outside the box, scraping platforms can give you some of the highest intent lead lists you will ever work with.

Step 4: Clean your emails before you send

Once you have a list, you are still not ready to start sending.

If you start sending emails to a fresh export without verifying anything, you will almost always end up with unnecessary bounces. Enough bounces will damage your sending reputation and make it harder for you to land in the inbox.

Step 5: Load everything into Victoria AI

Now we finally arrive at the fun part. You have done the hard, boring work that most people skip. You have:

  • An ICP written out
  • Clear decision makers chosen
  • Leads pulled from one or more sources
  • Emails cleaned and verified

At this point you are ready to load your list into Victoria AI and turn static data into real conversations.

The flow is straightforward. You take your cleaned CSV and open it in Google Sheets or Excel. You make sure the key columns are clearly labeled. Inside Victoria AI, you create a new outbound campaign. You go to the leads section and upload your CSV. The platform will ask you to map each column in your file to a field in Victoria.

Final thoughts

There are countless ways to "get leads." You can buy cheap bulk lists, scroll LinkedIn for hours, or cold call random numbers. Or you can do the more thoughtful work of defining your ICP, picking your decision makers, pulling clean data from reliable sources and verifying it before you send.

If you have any questions or would like help getting set up, please book a call with us here and we'd love to chat!