What Is Lead Generation?

What is the difference between a lead and a prospect?

A lead is anyone who might conceivably buy: a name on a list, a form fill, a company that showed up in a search. A prospect is a lead you have checked against your Ideal Customer Profile and decided to keep. The gap between the two is qualification, and it is where most of the value in lead generation sits.

The practical test is whether you can state, in one sentence, why this company would buy from you. If you can, it is a prospect. If you cannot, it is still a lead, and contacting it costs you the same effort as contacting a good one while returning less.

How is B2B lead generation different from B2C?

In B2B the unit you qualify is a company, not a person, and several people inside it influence the decision. Deal cycles run in weeks or months, list sizes are far smaller, and one well-chosen account can be worth more than a thousand consumer signups. That changes the economics: precision pays, volume mostly does not.

It also changes where you spend effort. B2C leans on reach and conversion rate optimisation. B2B leans on choosing the right accounts first, then a message specific enough that the reader recognises their own situation in it.

How do you start generating leads with no list and no budget?

Start with the customers you already have. Pick the one that is genuinely profitable and pleasant to serve, then write down why they fit — what they sell, who buys from them, their size and region. That description is your first Ideal Customer Profile, and it cost nothing.

Then find companies resembling it and record a reason for each one before you make contact. This is the step Leads10 automates: you paste that customer's domain and get matching companies with a fit score of 70 to 100 and a written match reason, starting with 5 free credits and no card. However you build the list, the order matters more than the tool — qualify, then contact.

• Choose one existing customer worth cloning, not an aspirational one.
• Write the profile down; an unwritten ICP drifts every week.
• Record why each company is on the list before anyone contacts it.
• Measure replies per hundred contacted, not the size of the list.

How does turning a domain into business prospects actually work?

You enter your company website address. Leads10 analyzes the business and builds an Ideal Customer Profile before you choose how many prospect companies to identify. No step asks you to guess filter settings.

When verification finishes, Leads10 automatically opens Review Analysis and Prospects, your saved results page. Each company includes its name, industry, website, company LinkedIn page, fit score, and a written match reason. You can search by company name, industry, website, or match reason; filter and sort the list; and export selected companies to CSV.

• Step 1 — Enter your domain. Your own homepage, or an existing customer who already fits well.
• Step 2 — Review the business analysis. It shows what you actually sell, your industry, company size, and the pain point you solve.
• Step 3 — Review your Ideal Customer Profile. It includes target industries, company size, suggested decision-maker roles, and pain points.
• Step 4 — Scroll down on the same page and choose 1–5 prospects for the batch.
• Step 5 — Stay on the page while Leads10 checks each company's details and fit, with live progress. Please do not refresh.
• Step 6 — Review Analysis and Prospects opens automatically. Each company has its name, industry, website, company LinkedIn page, fit score (70–100), and match reason. Search, filter, sort, and export selected companies to CSV.

What is a fit score, and what does the number actually mean?

A fit score is a number from 70 to 100 that says how closely one company's situation matches what you sell. It is a judgement about fit, not a prediction that the company will buy. Companies scoring below 70 are not returned at all, so every company on your list has already cleared a bar.

The score always arrives with a written match reason, so you can read the reasoning and disagree with it. A score with no explanation is impossible to check; that is why every score here comes with one.

• A score goes up when the company's own website shows the problem you solve, when its size and market resemble customers you already serve well, and when what it sells implies a need for your kind of product.
• A score goes down when the fit rests on the industry label alone, when the company looks much larger or smaller than your usual customer, or when the evidence on its site is thin.
• 90 to 100 means a close match on several independent grounds. 80 to 89 means a solid match with one clear gap. 70 to 79 means a plausible match worth a look, not a priority.
• The score cannot know a company's budget, its timing, who holds the decision internally, or whether it already bought from a competitor last month.

What is pain-point matching, and why is it different from filtering?

Pain-point matching means checking whether a company appears to have the specific problem you solve before it goes on your list — instead of accepting it because its industry label and headcount fit a filter. It is the step that decides whether the rest of your outreach has any chance.

Filtering by industry and job title tells you a company exists and someone there has a plausible title. It does not tell you that the company needs what you sell. Two companies can share an industry, a size and a country and have completely different problems, so a list built from filters alone contains a large share of companies that were never going to buy — no matter how good the email is.

The matching here works in the other direction. It starts from your own website to establish what you sell, then reads each candidate company's public site for evidence of the matching pain point, and writes down the reason. You can read that reason and reject it, which is the point.

• What it uses: what your site says you sell, what a candidate company's own public site says about its business, and how the two line up.
• What it produces: a written, per-company reason tied to your specific offer — not a filter result you have to interpret yourself.
• What it cannot see: internal budgets, purchase timing, politics, contracts already signed, or anything a company does not publish.
• Worth being clear about: contact databases are not simply dumb filters. Apollo sells buying-intent signals and ZoomInfo sells lead scoring. Those signals are behavioural and firmographic — what a company browsed, how big it is. None of them start by reading your website to learn what you sell.

How can a Leads10 match reason help with personalized outreach?

A Leads10 match reason gives you company-specific context you can check and adapt into a relevant subject line, email opening, LinkedIn message, call plan, or account brief. It explains how the prospect's apparent pain point connects to what you sell, instead of leaving you with only a company name and broad industry label.

For example, a generic opening such as ‘Can we help with your operations?’ can become a specific starting point such as ‘Your public site describes expansion across several service regions; our platform helps teams coordinate that kind of multi-location operation.’ The fictional example shows the method, not a claim that Leads10 knows private facts or guarantees a reply.

Leads10 does not write or send outreach and does not provide a named person's contact details. Review the match reason, confirm the evidence on the company website, use the suggested decision-maker roles to decide whom to research, and use the company LinkedIn page to continue that research.

Does Leads10 give you email addresses and phone numbers?

No. Leads10 returns companies, not individual people's contact details. You get the company name, its website, its company LinkedIn page, the pain point it appears to have, the match reason and the fit score. You do not get a named person's email address, direct dial or mobile number.

That is deliberate, and it is where Leads10 sits in a normal stack: pair it with a contact database such as Apollo, ZoomInfo, Cognism or Lusha to find the right people at the companies it identifies. Leads10 decides which companies are worth contacting; those tools tell you who to contact there.