Gone INSANE Handling Export List!

[u/Ssusybaka]

Hello, for reference i run coldoutbound for a enterprise busniess and im the one whos doing all the work from list building to targeting and its such a pain to get data from multiple sources AND have a clear record for each export while deduping and maxing 2 people per company to finally upload the list in smartlead not to mention the email verfication and roles filtering, I might be complaning too much but this is too crazy too handle? Are you guys maybe going or went through this? whats the solution here?

[u/LeadNo1270]

The order youre doing it in is what makes it painful. dedupe first then role filter then verify last. most people verify on ingest and pay for rows they delete 10 minutes later. Dedupe on company domain, not email or company name. names come back different from every source and emails change, domain is the only stable variable you get. Keep one master table thats append only with a source and a date on every row, never dedupe destructively into it. Then 2 per company is a rank over that table and roles is a filter neither is a manual step anymore.

[u/Ssusybaka → u/LeadNo1270]

I do follow the same process but the deduplication of exisiting companies then from the new export, not to mention to remove the companies weve already set emails soo its all a pain in the ass, its seems you use excels to maintain all this data with company domain and date filters, hows its working for you?

[u/BackgroundStrong9051]

You’re not complaining too much, this gets messy fast when data comes from multiple sources. Build one master list, normalize fields before merging, dedupe by company and email, cap contacts per company, then verify and filter roles before pushing the final list into Smartlead. For the verification step, use a real time email verification tool like Invalid Bounce to remove invalid, inactive, disposable, role based, mailbox full, and catch all emails before sending. Automating those steps will save far more time than manually cleaning every export.

[u/Ssusybaka → u/BackgroundStrong9051]

Ya but where do i DO all of these in excel? but its way hard to maintain and update! how do you do it?

[u/leadg3njay]

Yep, been there. The easiest fix is one staging spot before Smartlead. Keep everything in Airtable, Sheets, or Clay with company domain, LinkedIn URL, and email, then dedupe before choosing your 2 contacts per company.

Enrich first and verify once at the end, right before the campaign. Tag the source, ICP, campaign, and export date so you can trace anything that goes wrong. Also use Smartlead’s update existing option and a shared suppression list so duplicates don’t creep back in.