B2B sales teams spend an enormous amount of time on a task that should not require human intelligence: finding businesses to contact. You know you want to reach "restaurants in Mumbai" or "construction companies in Dubai" or "dental clinics in Bangalore" — but compiling that list means hours of Google searching, cross-referencing directories, and manually copying contact details into a spreadsheet.
The B2B lead finder automation described here reduces that work to a single input. Type the business type, city, and country. The automation runs in the background and delivers a structured spreadsheet of leads — business name, email, phone number, address, and sometimes website and social profiles — within minutes.
How the Automation Works
Step 1: Input Interface
The workflow can be triggered in multiple ways: a simple web form (built in n8n or hosted externally), a Google Sheet where you add a row with the search parameters, or a WhatsApp/Telegram bot interface. The inputs are: Business Type (e.g., "dental clinic"), City (e.g., "Pune"), Country (e.g., "India"), and optionally a Radius or Count limit.
Step 2: Google Maps API Search
The workflow calls the Google Maps Places API with a text search query: "{business_type} in {city}, {country}". The API returns up to 60 results per search (paginated), each containing: business name, address, phone number, rating, website URL, and Google Place ID. For most use cases, this is the primary data source — Google's business data is the most comprehensive and up-to-date directory available.
For higher result counts, the automation tiles the search across a grid of coordinates within the city, running multiple API calls and deduplicating results.
Step 3: Email Enrichment
Google Maps rarely contains email addresses directly. The automation addresses this in two ways: (1) it visits the business website (extracted from the Maps result) and scrapes the contact page or footer for email addresses using an HTML parsing node; (2) for businesses where website scraping does not yield an email, it queries Hunter.io or Apollo.io APIs with the domain name to find professional email addresses.
Step 4: Data Structuring & Validation
All extracted data passes through a validation and structuring step. Phone numbers are normalized to E.164 format. Email addresses are validated against basic syntax rules. Duplicate entries (same business appearing from multiple search tiles) are deduplicated by Place ID or business name + address similarity. The result is a clean, structured dataset.
Step 5: Export to Google Sheets / CRM
The final dataset is written to a Google Sheet with columns: Business Name, Category, Address, City, Country, Phone, Email, Website, Rating, Source. Each search run creates a new tab with a timestamp. Optionally, the leads can be pushed directly into HubSpot, Zoho, or any CRM via API — creating contacts or companies automatically and tagging them by the search campaign.
Tools & Stack
- n8n (self-hosted) — workflow orchestration and logic
- Google Maps Places API — primary business discovery
- Hunter.io or Apollo.io API — email enrichment
- Cheerio (HTML parser in n8n) — website email scraping
- Google Sheets API — export and storage
- HubSpot / Zoho API — optional direct CRM import
Expected Output & Scale
For a typical city-level search, the automation returns 50–200 leads per run in 3–8 minutes. For large metros like Mumbai or Delhi, a grid-search approach can return 500–2,000 leads in 15–20 minutes. Email enrichment success rates vary by industry: B2B services (IT, consulting, professional services) typically achieve 60–70% email match rates; retail and F&B businesses are lower at 20–30%.
A sales team that previously spent 2 days building a 100-lead list can now generate 500 leads in an afternoon — and spend their actual time on outreach instead of research.
Compliance Note
Lead generation automation should be paired with a compliant outreach approach. In India, cold email outreach is not regulated the way it is in the EU (GDPR) or US (CAN-SPAM), but best practice is to include a clear unsubscribe mechanism in all outbound emails and to only contact businesses (not consumers) with relevant, professional messaging. Always review the terms of service for the APIs you are using.