How SDRs Can Build a Qualified Prospect List in Under 30 Minutes

Building a qualified prospect list shouldn’t take a full day. The work that SDRs spend on list building — exporting, cleaning, researching, and enriching contact data — is almost entirely repeatable. Once you have the workflow locked in, what used to take 4–6 hours can be done in under 30 minutes.

This post is the workflow. It covers LinkedIn search, URL export, enrichment, and verification — the full pipeline from first filter to send-ready list.

Why Most SDR List Workflows Are Slow

The slowest parts of a manual list-building workflow are almost always the same:

Manual contact research — opening each LinkedIn profile, looking for visible contact info, copying it into a sheet
Back-and-forth between tools — LinkedIn → spreadsheet → enrichment platform → back to spreadsheet
No standardized output format — every list looks slightly different, which creates friction when loading into a CRM or sequencer

The 30-minute workflow below eliminates all three.

The Workflow

Minutes 0–10: Build and Export the Search

In LinkedIn Sales Navigator (or LinkedIn search if you don’t have Navigator):

Apply your ICP filters: job title, seniority level, company headcount, industry, geography
Narrow to 100–300 results for a targeted batch (fewer rows = higher ICP match rate)
Export profile URLs

If you’re using Sales Navigator, use its CSV export feature. If you’re on standard LinkedIn, use a Chrome extension that exports search results to CSV. Either way, you want a spreadsheet with at least the following:

First name, last name
Current company
LinkedIn profile URL

Tip: Do not try to enrich 1,000 rows in a single run. Batch your list building. 150–200 high-fit contacts enriched and contacted is worth more than 1,000 low-fit contacts in a queue.

Minutes 10–15: Clean the URL Column

Paste your data into Google Sheets. Clean the LinkedIn URL column:

[ ] Remove rows with company page URLs (linkedin.com/company/...)
[ ] Remove duplicate URLs (Data → Data cleanup → Remove duplicates)
[ ] Confirm all URLs follow the linkedin.com/in/... pattern
[ ] Filter out blank rows

This takes 2–3 minutes and prevents wasted API credits on rows that will never return results.

Minutes 15–22: Run Enrichment

Open Extensions → LinkedIn Enricher → Open
Go to Settings — confirm your Datagma and/or LeadMagic API keys are active
Go to Enrich tab — select the LinkedIn URL column
Set your primary provider, enable fallback if available
Click Enrich

For a 150-row list, expect 1–3 minutes to complete. For 300 rows, 3–6 minutes. Use this time to do something else.

After the run, your sheet has email, phone, provider, and timestamp columns filled in.

Minutes 22–27: Review and Filter

Sort by the Email column. You’ll have three segments:

Segment	What to do
Email found	Ready for verification → outreach
No email found	Add to re-enrichment queue (re-run in 60 days) or LinkedIn outreach track
API error	Check URL format and API key, re-run just these rows

Check the enrichment hit rate. For a US SaaS ICP, expect 65–78%. Lower than 55% suggests a URL format issue or a list composition that’s poorly indexed (very small companies, non-English profiles, private accounts).

Minutes 27–30: Verify Emails

Before loading into your sequencer, run email verification on the found emails. This removes:

Stale addresses from job changes
Typos in indexed data
Catch-all domains that appear valid but won’t deliver

Most email verification tools process 150 emails in under 2 minutes. Filter to “valid” status only before importing to your outreach tool.

Output: What Your List Looks Like at the End

After the full workflow, your sheet should have:

Column	Source
First name	LinkedIn export
Last name	LinkedIn export
Company	LinkedIn export
LinkedIn URL	LinkedIn export
Email	Enrichment (Datagma / LeadMagic)
Phone	Enrichment (where available)
Enrichment Provider	Enrichment
Enriched At	Enrichment timestamp
Email Status	Verification tool

This is everything your sequencer needs. Most tools (Apollo, Lemlist, Instantly, Outreach) accept a CSV in this format.

Real Numbers from This Workflow

Based on running this process on a typical US SaaS ICP list (VP and Director level, 200–2,000 person companies):

Step	Time	Output
LinkedIn search + export	5–8 min	150–200 raw rows
URL cleaning	3 min	~140–190 clean URLs
Enrichment run	3–5 min	~95–140 emails found (67–75% hit rate)
Email verification	2–3 min	~85–130 verified emails
Total	~15–20 min	85–130 outreach-ready contacts

30 minutes is the ceiling, not the average. Once you’ve done this a few times and have the workflow internalized, 15–20 minutes is typical for a 150-row batch.

Scaling the Workflow Without Breaking It

This workflow is designed for batches of 100–300 rows. If you’re trying to build much larger lists, a few things change:

Credit management. At scale, the per-row API cost matters. Prioritize your highest-ICP rows first. Enrich in order of fit score, not alphabetically.

Rate limits. Both Datagma and LeadMagic have API rate limits. Check your plan’s limits before running very large batches.

Verification at scale. For lists over 500, verification becomes even more important. Sending to unverified lists at scale damages domain reputation.

Segmentation. Break large lists into sheets by persona or segment. Keeping lists small and focused makes tracking hit rates by ICP segment easier — useful data for improving your search filters over time.

Who This Workflow Is NOT For

This is a manual, batch-based workflow. It’s right for SDRs building lists themselves and for small ops teams. It’s not the right fit for:

Fully automated enrichment pipelines — if you need real-time enrichment triggered by CRM events or inbound form fills, you want an API integration or a tool like Clay
Very large volumes (5,000+ rows/week) — at that scale, a platform contract with ZoomInfo or Apollo will likely cost less per contact than pay-as-you-go credits
Teams that don’t use Google Sheets — the add-on is Google Sheets-specific

For how to handle the not-found rows after enrichment, see LinkedIn Enrichment Failure Handling in Google Sheets →

Start building better prospect lists in less time. LinkedIn Profile Enricher for Google Sheets →