# How do I find leads with Lead finder?

> Describe the companies you want in plain words, or use the filters, then export a CSV or add them straight to a campaign.

Source: https://warmerly.com/docs/help/find-leads

Open **Prospecting > Lead finder** in the sidebar (the page is at `/leads`). Type a sentence describing the companies you want, such as "dental practices in the UK", and press **Find companies**. Warmerly turns the sentence into filters, shows you the matching companies, and lets you export them as a CSV or add them to a campaign. **Searching is free.** Only exporting a CSV and adding leads to a campaign use your monthly lead allowance.

The companies come from Warmerly's own database, built by reading the public websites of businesses. They are companies with a published way to contact them, not a list of named individuals. For the API version of the same search, see [Leads API](https://warmerly.com/docs/leads).

Lead finder has two tabs under the title. **Lead database** is the search described on this page. **LinkedIn search** (`/leads/linkedin`) searches LinkedIn itself for named people, using your own connected LinkedIn account and a Warmerly Link slot. See [What is Warmerly Link?](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/warmerly-link).

## Search with a sentence

1. Open **Lead finder**. The first screen is a single box.
2. Describe who you want in your own words. Business type and place work best, for example "restaurants in London" or "accountants in Manchester".
3. Press **Find companies** (or Enter).
4. Warmerly shows what it understood as a row of chips (for example the business type and the location), then the matching companies underneath.

Under the chips there is a box for refining the search, for example "only ones hiring". Each chip has a remove button, and removing a chip is the same as clearing that filter in the panel below.

### What the sentence can and cannot express

- It can express the same things the filter panel has: keywords, country, town or city, business type, the technology a website uses, email provider, company size, founding year, and the company signals listed below.
- Things Warmerly does not hold, such as revenue, funding or ratings, cannot be searched. They show up as greyed, struck-through chips labelled "Not in our data, so it was not applied", so you can see what was ignored rather than assuming it was applied.
- The filter panel holds one business type. If your sentence names several, the first is used and the others appear as not-applied chips.
- A founding-year range is only applied if your sentence actually mentions one.
- If the AI part is unavailable or cannot make sense of the sentence, Warmerly falls back to a plain keyword search and the chip row says "searched by keyword". Nothing is lost, you just get keyword matching instead.
- Describing a search is free and does not use an AI credit. You can describe up to 60 searches an hour. If you hit that, wait a little and try again, or use the filters.

## Search with filters

Press **Use filters instead** on the first screen, or use the filter panel that sits above the results. Every control narrows the results; none of them adds companies back.

| Control | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Keywords** | Free-text search, for example "wedding photographer". |
| **Country** | Limits to one country (default **Anywhere**). |
| **Business type** | Pick from the grouped list (default **Any business type**). |
| **Reachable by** | **Email address** (the default), **Contact form** or **LinkedIn page**. Every result has that way in. |
| **Website uses** | Limits to companies whose site uses a technology you tick. |
| **Email provider** | Limits to companies whose mail is hosted by a given provider. |
| **Town or city** | For example "Manchester". |
| **Company size** | A size band. |
| **Founded between** | A from and to year. |
| **Company signals** | **UK-registered**, **Hiring now**, **Has a phone number**, **VAT registered**, **Has a contact form**. |

There is no way to search for companies with no contact route at all: every option under **Reachable by** guarantees one. Only the **Email address** option produces results you can add to an email campaign, because a campaign lead is an email address.

## Reading the results

- **The count.** Above the table Warmerly says how many companies match. For narrower searches this is an exact number ("46,695 companies match"). For very broad searches it cannot count them all quickly, so it shows a rounded estimate ("roughly 450,000 companies match"). The estimate tends to be lower than the true number.
- **The table** shows Company, Location, Business type, Contact email and Data. Open a row for more detail, such as address, phone, other email addresses, social pages, company and VAT numbers, size, founding year, whether they are hiring, website technology and when the company was **Last checked**.
- **Business type** marked "Likely" is our best guess from the company's own website text, not something the company stated.
- **Rows per page** is 50 or 100, and **Load more** fetches the next page.
- **Sorting** by a column header reorders only the rows already loaded, not every match. The page says "sorted within the loaded rows" when this applies.
- **What we hold on these companies** is a set of bars for Email, Phone, Company no., Contact form, LinkedIn and Country. For big result sets it is measured on a sample of the matches, and says so. Check it before you commit: a segment can be nearly all email but have almost no phone numbers. Company size and founding year are only known for companies that publish them, so filtering on them can shrink a search sharply.

### When almost nothing matches

If a search returns very few companies, Warmerly offers ways to widen it, and shows how many companies each would return before you click, for example searching a whole country instead of one town, or any company size. If nothing matches at all, it may widen the search for you and say so in a banner ("Nothing matched that exactly. We widened the search"), naming what it dropped. Use the chips to narrow it back.

## Export or add to a campaign

Tick the companies you want. A bar appears at the bottom with the actions.

- **Select all matching** appears when there are more matches than you have loaded. It selects everything that matches the current filters, not just what is on screen.
- **Export CSV** downloads a file. It includes the company name, website, country, city, business type, contact email and all published emails, phone, address, social pages, company and VAT numbers, size, hiring flag, founding year and other details. Emails are the published company addresses, which are often shared inboxes such as info@.
- **Add to campaign** opens a dialog. Pick a campaign, or choose **+ Create a new campaign...**, then press **Add leads**.

If you arrived from a campaign's **Audience** tab, a banner says which campaign you are building and the campaign is preselected in the dialog.

### What adding to a campaign does

- Only companies with a contact email are added. If you selected companies found under **Contact form** or **LinkedIn page**, the dialog tells you they have no email and suggests exporting them to work by hand.
- Duplicates already in the campaign are skipped.
- Addresses that fail a quick free check (no working mail server, disposable domains, invalid format) are not added, so the number added can be lower than the number you selected. Risky and uncertain addresses are still added and marked.
- Your own **Settings > Do not contact** list is applied, so anyone on it is skipped. Separately, companies that have asked to be removed from Warmerly's database never appear in search at all.
- The campaign's per-campaign lead limit still applies (see [Plans & limits](https://warmerly.com/docs/plans-and-limits)).

## What it costs

Searching, counting and describing a search never use your allowance. Each lead exported to CSV, and each lead actually added to a campaign, counts once against your **monthly lead allowance**, which resets on the 1st. Leads that are skipped or not added are not charged. The allowance is shown as a chip at the top of the page and in **Settings > Usage & limits**. See [Lead credits, lookups and allowances](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/prospecting-allowances) and [Plans & limits](https://warmerly.com/docs/plans-and-limits) for the size of the allowance on your plan.

If an export would go past what is left of your allowance, the file stops at the allowance and Warmerly says so, rather than pretending it finished. Exports have no other row limit. Adding to a campaign takes at most 10,000 leads per click.

## Common problems

- **"Lead export limit reached for this month."** You have used your monthly allowance. Check **Settings > Usage & limits**. You can buy more with credits there, upgrade, or wait for the reset on the 1st.
- **Nothing matches my sentence.** Remove the most specific chip first (usually the town or company size). The suggestions under the results show how many companies each widening would return.
- **The count differs from what I exported.** The count is measured before you act. At export time opted-out companies are removed again and rows without a contact address are dropped, so the file can be smaller.
- **I searched by Contact form and Add to campaign added nothing.** Campaigns send email, so they need an email address. Export those rows to CSV instead.
- **Too many searches in a row.** Wait a minute and try again.

## Related

- [How do I import leads from a CSV?](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/import-leads-csv) if you already have a list
- [How do I find someone's email address?](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/email-finder) for a specific company or person
- [How do I check whether an email address is valid?](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/email-verification)
- [How do I launch my first campaign?](https://warmerly.com/docs/help/launch-first-campaign)

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