Anyone selling B2B in Italy hits the same wall: international contact databases cost a lot, cover Italian SMEs poorly, and the European data is often stale or GDPR-grey. An Italian business-communications software vendor used one of these platforms and wasn't happy. The answer became a product: LeadIntel.
01Measure, don't buy
Instead of reselling another database, we looked at what they needed. They sell apps that plug into Microsoft Teams, Cisco and Webex. Their ideal customer isn't "a company with 50+ employees": it's a company that already has that kind of phone system. That's a technical fact, and technical facts can be read, not bought.
02A real Italian base, and ours
About 1.39 million companies, built from open data and official sources — no third-party scraping: business registry, open data, public datasets. The starting data is verifiable and its provenance declared. For every company with a website we read — from DNS records, headers, certificates — the tech stack, and above all the telephony: a domain tells whether it runs Microsoft 365/Teams, has an on-site Cisco Collaboration system, or federates SIP. No intrusion: information the domain exposes itself.
03The filter the client needed
On this base we ran the telephony analysis over more than 410,000 companies. The result: about 24,000 companies on Microsoft Teams, over 10,000 with federated SIP, and the Cisco installations recognizable from public records — exactly their ideal customer, with a contact already on file for a good share. Where they had a generic list, they now have tens of thousands of companies qualified by technology, sortable by size and with the company name, not an abstract segment.
04The data is ours, and it stays here
An international database is rented: when you stop paying it disappears, and meanwhile the data sits on someone else's servers, under another jurisdiction. LeadIntel is the opposite: the base is built by us on open sources, runs on our infrastructure in Europe, and the enrichment never leaves toward third parties. The client buys a result they own, not an access that expires. And where data is missing, it isn't invented.
05What we learned
1. The customer's buying criterion is a technical fact, not a segment. "Who uses Teams" beats "large company in sector X". 2. Public signals are enough, if you can read them. 3. Building beats renting when the data is the product. 4. Sovereignty is a commercial advantage, not just compliance.