New-business lead sources compared: five types
Auspector ·
Five kinds of source can put new businesses on a list, and they fail in different places. Official registries — Companies House in the United Kingdom, the state Secretary of State offices in the United States — are exact but count legal entities, not places. Directories are broad but uneven; marketplaces sell slices of unclear age; data feeds refresh daily under one definition; hand-collected lists are perfect and tiny. The table compares what each is worth before you spend anything.
Five sources, five different promises
Whichever you buy, you are buying one of five things — and the marketing rarely says which. A registry file, a directory export, a marketplace list, a feed subscription or a rep’s notebook differ not in quality but in kind: what they catch, when, with which fields, under which terms. Naming the type is the first due-diligence step, because each type’s weaknesses are known in advance.
The comparison
| Source type | Freshness | Coverage | Fields | Cost model | Usage terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official registry | At the legal event — registration, sometimes before anything opens | Legal entities, country-wide; places only by exception | Name, registered address, date, legal form; a phone number rarely | Mostly public and cheap or free | Generally open; re-use terms vary by country and registry |
| Commercial directory | Variable; refreshed on the publisher’s own cycle | Broad, all sectors, quality uneven | Category, address, often a phone; websites inconsistent | Subscription or per-list | Licensed, not owned; resale usually prohibited |
| List marketplace | Often unclear — the file’s age is not always stated | Whatever slice was compiled; selection criteria rarely documented | Can include email addresses; validity varies wildly | Per-record payment, discounts for volume | Terms vary by seller; provenance and audit trail weak |
| Data feed | Daily; new businesses arrive within a day of being found | Many markets under one definition, one interface | Category, address, district, phone, website, coordinates (e.g. the feed on this site — it deliberately carries no email) | Subscription plus usage-based credits | Defined terms, stable record identifiers, traceable updates |
| Hand-collected list | As fresh as the person collecting it | A few neighbourhoods or one trade | Whatever the collector writes down | Time — rep hours, not licences | Entirely yours; exists nowhere else |
Reading the table: two honest questions
Two questions separate the types faster than any brochure. First: does the source find entities or places? A registry finds entities — right customer for banking and bookkeeping, wrong one for a field route. Everything else on the list finds places, with very different reliability. Second: is the age of the data stated? A list without a measurement date may describe last year’s world; a feed without one is a contradiction in terms. Ask both before comparing any price.
Mixing them is normal
Most working teams end up mixing: registry data where the customer is the legal entity, a feed for the places, hand collection for the three streets that matter most this quarter. What mixing costs is duplication — the same business arriving by two routes — which is why the matching key matters before the second source arrives; that step is covered in importing a list into your CRM without duplicates. The practical ways to find new businesses one at a time are compared in how to find newly opened businesses, and what a business database is — as opposed to a registry or a contact list — in types of business databases.