How to build a B2B lead list in the Netherlands: five steps from target profile to a list you can call
Tips
The short answer
A lead list is a list of companies that fit what you sell, with a contact person, a channel and a reason to get in touch this week for each of them. Those last columns are what separate it from an address file. A list of names and addresses is a company list. Only when it says who you call and why now does a salesperson have any use for it.
You build one in five steps: describe who you are looking for in filters a register understands, pick a source, add contact people and check what you may do with them, add a trigger, and keep the list current. If you would rather buy a list, read buying B2B leads in the Netherlands first. What you buy there is usually step two only. The other four stay with you.
Lead list, prospect list, address file: which is which
The terms get mixed up, and list vendors do not help. This is how we use them on this page.
Term | What it contains | What you use it for |
|---|---|---|
Address file or company list | Company name, address, registration number, often an activity code and a headcount. No people. | Mail, market analysis, the starting point for the rest |
Prospect list | Companies that meet your target criteria, checked for existence and size. No trigger yet. | Account selection, marketing campaigns |
Lead list | Prospects with a contact person, a channel and a trigger. | Outbound by sales |
Call list | The lead list filtered to who you may call, with a phone number. | Cold calling |
The difference between a company that fits and a lead is covered in more depth in what a lead actually is. For this page, one line is enough: the value of a list sits in the columns to the right of the address.
Step 1: describe who you want in filters, not in words
"Mid-sized manufacturers in the Randstad that are growing" is a fine sentence for a strategy document and useless for a list. Translate every property into something a register or a database can filter on.
Activity. The SBI code in the Netherlands, the NACE code in Belgium. Codes have one weakness: they are old and companies are new. A company doing something new is registered under something old. Add a search on website text where your source allows it, and accept that a code selection always carries some noise.
Size. Headcount is the most reliable measure, because it is in the business register. Revenue is not: small companies rarely publish it. Work with bands (10 to 49, 50 to 199) rather than exact numbers.
Location. Postcode area, province, or a radius around your office if you visit customers.
Legal form. A BV or NV is a legal person, a sole trader or partnership is not. It looks like an administrative detail and in step 3 it decides who you may call.
Exclusions. Existing customers, competitors, companies where a conversation just fell through, and companies with a Non-Mailing Indicator if you send post.
Test the filters against your best ten customers. Do they all fit? If not, the filters are too narrow, or they do not describe what your customers actually have in common.
Step 2: pick the source
Source | What you get | What it costs | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
The Dutch business register, as a KVK selection | Name, address, KVK number, and for a surcharge SBI code, legal form and headcount | €334 set-up fee plus €0.05 per address, extra fields €0.04 per data point (2026 rates) | No phone numbers, no email addresses, no people. A snapshot of one moment. |
LinkedIn, by hand or through Sales Navigator | People with job titles. Company size as the company reports it itself. | A subscription per user, plus the hours | No register data, sizes are often wrong, export is limited |
A B2B database (Bizzy, Company.info, Leadfeeder and others) | Register data plus contact people, filters, signals and export to your CRM | Subscription | Coverage differs by country. Ask where the contact data comes from. |
Your own data: CRM, website visitors, event attendees, former customers | Companies that already know you, or that you already know | Almost nothing | Small. But it is the warmest list you have. |
The KVK rates are in the KVK price overview; worked examples are in buying a Dutch business address file. One thing to remember with every source: a phone number in the Dutch business register is not public data. If a bought file has a number next to a company, it came from a website, a directory or another collected source, and you need to be able to say which.
If you build from your own data, start with website visitors. Which companies came to your site and which pages they read is covered in which companies visit my website.
In Bizzy, steps 1 and 2 happen on one screen. You filter on activity code, headcount, region or a radius around an address, legal form and technology in use, and for niches that have no code you search on topic in companies' website text. Every row is a registered company with its contact people attached, and the list goes to HubSpot as a segment or to your CRM as an export. What that does not let you skip is step 3.
Step 3: add contact people and check what you may do
A company list becomes a lead list the moment a person and a channel are attached. Decide on two roles per company: who decides, and who would use the product every day. At a thirty-person company that is often the owner-director and an office manager or team lead. At two hundred people there is a layer in between. Sources for people are the database from step 2, LinkedIn and the company's own team page.
Then the question that rarely comes up while a list is being built: what may you do with these people? Three Dutch rules decide the columns of your list.
Calling. A commercial phone call to a sole trader or partnership has needed prior consent since 1 July 2021, and since 1 July 2026 that includes existing customers. A legal person such as a BV is outside the rule (ACM, in Dutch). This is why the legal form column from step 1 is there: it defines your call list.
Informing. Personal data you did not collect from the person themselves falls under the information duty of Article 14 GDPR: who you are, what you use the data for, on which legal basis and where it came from. Within a month at the latest, or at first contact if that comes sooner. In practice that information sits in your first email or call.
Post. Companies with a Non-Mailing Indicator at KVK should not be written to. KVK itself calls it a digital "no junk mail" sticker (KVK, in Dutch). The indicator says nothing about email or phone.
The rules per channel for the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany sit side by side in cold outreach rules in Europe. Add a "channel" column to your list that states per row what is allowed, so nobody has to work it out call by call later.
Step 4: add a trigger and sort
Two thousand fitting companies are not yet an order. What belongs at the top is decided by the trigger: something that happened at that company that makes your offer more relevant this month than last month.
A vacancy in the department that would use your product.
A new director or a job change for the decision maker.
A move, a new branch or an acquisition.
Filed annual accounts showing more staff than the year before.
A visit to your website from that company.
Sort into three groups: A has a trigger from this month, B fits but has none, C is doubtful. Sales works through A, marketing keeps B warm, and C only gets attention once A and B are empty. How to use a trigger in the first fifteen seconds of a call is in B2B cold calling in Europe. Which leads deserve your time when there are more A's than you can handle is in lead qualification.
Step 5: keep the list current
A list is a snapshot of one moment, and the register keeps moving underneath it. In 2025, 194,057 business locations in the Netherlands closed, 7.5% of all locations the year started with (KVK business dynamics, in Dutch). On a list of two thousand rows that is around a hundred and fifty companies that no longer exist after a year, before anyone has changed jobs or the company has moved.
Three habits keep a list usable. Refresh group A monthly and the rest quarterly. Mark every bounce and every "no longer works here" in the list straight away, not in someone's head. And record when a row was last checked, so you know which half you no longer trust. Keeping your own file aligned with the register costs €1,279 a year at KVK for the mutation service; a database does this continuously. How fast Belgian company data decays, and what that means for a list, is in how fast B2B data decays.
An example: a lead list for a payroll firm in Utrecht
The firm runs payroll for companies with staff and wants customers that manage without an HR department of their own. This is what the list looks like.
Activity: SBI 41 to 43 (construction) and 25 (metal products). Sectors with many people on the payroll and little HR.
Size: 10 to 49 employees. Large enough to need payroll, too small for an HR employee of their own.
Location: 30 kilometres around Utrecht, because the first meeting is on site.
Legal form: BV. Can be called without prior consent.
Exclude: current customers and companies with a Non-Mailing Indicator.
Trigger: a vacancy for administration or HR, or more employees than a year ago.
Contact: the owner-director and the person who does the administration.
The result is a list of hundreds of rows, not thousands. That is the point. In a week a salesperson calls a few dozen companies with a reason, not a few hundred without one.
Build it or buy it?
A third route is to pay an agency for the whole thing; what that costs and when it pays back is in outsourcing lead generation. Buy step 2 when your target group is broad and you do not have the time to pull a selection yourself: a KVK selection or a database delivers it faster than manual work. Build the list yourself when your target group is narrow, when the trigger matters more than the volume, or when you already have customers the next ones should resemble. In both cases steps 3, 4 and 5 stay your job; no vendor knows which legal form you may call or which trigger counts for your product. What the four things sold as "leads" cost in the Netherlands is in buying B2B leads in the Netherlands.
The list is step 2 of a five-step method; our prospecting guide for the Netherlands covers the four steps around it, from target profile to follow-up.
Frequently asked questions
What is a lead list? A list of companies that fit your offer, with a contact person for each, a channel on which you may approach that person, and a reason to do so now. Without those columns it is an address file.
What is the difference between a lead list and a prospect list? A prospect list holds companies that meet your criteria. A lead list adds a person and a trigger. The prospect list belongs to marketing, the lead list to sales.
How big should a lead list be? As big as your team can follow up with attention in a month. A salesperson who calls thirty companies a week with a reason needs about a hundred and fifty rows a month. Bigger lists usually get called less well, not more.
Can you build a lead list in Excel? Yes, and for a narrow target group that works fine. The columns are company, registration number, legal form, headcount, location, contact person, role, channel, trigger, date of last check and status. The problem with Excel is not building but maintaining: nothing in the list moves with the register.
May you buy a lead list in the Netherlands? Buying is allowed. What you may do with it depends on the company's legal form (calling), the information duty of Article 14 GDPR (personal data) and the Non-Mailing Indicator (post). Those rules do not come with the purchase.
Read next: buying B2B leads in the Netherlands, buying a business address file, what is lead generation and B2B cold calling in Europe.
Photo: De Cope office building at Papendorp, Utrecht, IIkopdefiets, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons