Local lead generation: qualified small business leads without waiting for them to find you

Local lead generation means building a list of nearby businesses that have a real chance of buying from you, with a way to reach each one. When your buyers are shops and tradespeople, there is no need to wait for them to fill in a form: they are already listed. Prospya gives you 944,117 businesses across France and Belgium, filterable by trade, city, rating and channel, so you can find leads in minutes rather than weeks.

Local lead generation: inbound, outbound or a database?

There are three broad ways to generate B2B leads. They complement each other, but their cost and speed are very different.

Classic B2B lead generation leans heavily on inbound: white papers, webinars, gated content. That works for software sold to marketing or finance teams. It rarely works for a florist, a garage or a hair salon: the owner has no time to look for suppliers, so you have to go to them. That is where a database of local businesses, paired with direct outreach, earns its place.

What makes a qualified lead

A lead is more than a name. To be worth a call, it needs three things: it matches your target (right trade, right area), it is reachable (a working phone or email), and it shows a signal of need or interest. For a local business, those signals are public: many reviews, a strong rating, no website, an active Instagram account. Our article on how to qualify sales leads covers the method.

A lead generation tool built for local businesses

The prospect score, criterion by criterion

The score helps you sort a list of several hundred leads so you start with the most promising. It is built from criteria visible on the record, and the tooltip shows the ones that apply to each business.

If you do not sell websites, just ignore that last criterion and filter on what matters to you, for example “has Instagram” if you run a social media agency.

Figures are computed live from the database and update automatically. Data comes from public sources (online maps, directories, business websites, public social profiles), is cross-checked and cleaned, and covers businesses only, never private individuals.

How to find leads and turn them into meetings

1. 1
   Define your segment

   A trade, a city or a region, then the filters that matter: verified email, phone, rating, reviews, with or without website, only businesses never contacted.

2. 2
   Sort and unlock

   Sort by score and unlock the top 100 or 200. One credit per record with a phone or an email, CSV export available.

3. 3
   Reach out the same day

   Email campaign straight from the search, one-click call logging, an AI-written message per business, scheduled follow-ups.

Pick the channel that fits the trade

Not every lead is reached the same way. A builder is on site all day: they answer early in the morning or late in the afternoon and rarely reply to email. A hair or beauty salon reads messages between appointments and often answers on Instagram. A restaurant is best called between 2:30 and 5 pm, never during service. The “has phone”, “has email” and “has Instagram” filters let you build a list that matches the channel you plan to use, instead of unlocking records you cannot work.

A good habit: start with 50 leads, test your message for a week, then widen to 200 or 300 once the opening works. You spend few credits learning, and the rest of the list benefits from what you fixed.

From lead to meeting

A lead is only worth something if it is contacted quickly and followed up. From any search, the “Email these businesses” button starts a campaign: a template or an email the AI writes from one sentence, sent gradually with an unsubscribe link in every message. Recipients move to “Contacted” and the email shows in their history; a follow-up campaign then targets those who did not move forward. See the email campaigns for details.

For those who do not answer in writing, the phone takes over: each call is logged in one click, and when nobody picks up, a call-back is scheduled for the next working day. See our cold email templates and the sales follow-up sequence.

What does a lead cost?

With Prospya, a lead costs one credit, and only if it has a phone or an email. Search, the score, the CRM and a team of up to 10 people are free. Records with no contact channel are never charged, and a record already unlocked never costs again.

No subscription, and credits never expire. You get 25 credits at sign-up, no card needed, to test on your own city. If both the phone and the email of a record are wrong, the credit is refunded on request. Paying per lead suits local campaigns well. Many small teams prospect in waves: a city one month, a new trade the next, then a quiet period while they deliver the work they signed. With a monthly subscription, the quiet months still cost money; with credits that never expire, you buy what you use and keep the rest for the next wave. And because a record is never charged twice, rerunning a search in the same city only costs you the businesses that are new to you.

Compare with other pricing models in how much a lead list costs, and see the pricing page.

Ready-made lead lists

Looking for a complete tool instead? See our page on prospecting software or the business database for France. For a step-by-step method, read how to prospect local businesses. Running an agency? The page for marketing agencies shows targeting that works.