Cold Outreach works from lead lists— prospects you intend to contact cold — which are kept separate from your CRM people. A cold lead does not become a CRM person automatically; that promotion happens only when a lead replies positively and you choose to promote them (see Cold Replies in Your Inbox). Keeping cold leads separate keeps unconsented prospects out of your CRM until they engage.

From the Leads tab, choose Import and upload a file. We accept CSV, Excel (.xlsx), and JSON, up to 25,000 rows.

File structure. One row per person. The only required column is email. These columns are recognized and auto-mapped (you confirm the mapping on the next step): first_name, last_name, company, title, and country_code. Any other columns are kept as {{custom variables}} you can drop into your emails — nothing is discarded. The upload step has a downloadable sample file to copy.

During import, Laureo runs several safeguards before any lead becomes eligible to send:

Every import requires you to attest to the source of your list — that you have a lawful basis to contact these people and did not buy a scraped list of unknown provenance. This attestation is recorded and is a hard requirement: a sequence cannot launch against leads imported without it. It exists to keep the whole platform's reputation clean and to give you a record for compliance purposes.

Imported leads pass through a bundled email-verification step that checks whether each address is likely to accept mail. Verification is a gate: leads must clear it before they are eligible to send, which keeps your bounce rate low and your mailboxes out of the bounce-rate auto-pause described in Deliverability.

Your organization can have up to 10,000 leads activein cold sequences at once. The Leads tab shows a gauge of how much of that headroom you are using. When you launch a sequence, Laureo checks that enrolling its leads would not exceed the ceiling — if it would, the launch is blocked with a message telling you exactly how many leads over the ceiling you are. Resolve enrollments or finish existing sequences to free up headroom.

A lead list does not send anything on its own — it has to be attached to a sequence. Open the sequence builder and, in the Leads section at the top (above the Steps), use Attach a list to pick the lead list (or lists) this sequence emails. Once a list is attached, the builder shows the eligible-lead count— how many of its leads are verified and clear of suppression, so you can see exactly who the sequence will reach. You can attach up to 20 lists to one sequence.

The Leads tab opens on All leads, a single table of every cold lead across all your lists. Individual lists are one toggle away, and a Filter by list control narrows the all-leads view to any one list, alongside filters for status (Active, Replied, Paused, and more), verification, and a search box. A muted note at the top restates that these are cold leads, kept separate from your CRM contacts and the CRM Lead stage.

Opening a lead reveals its activity timeline beside its imported fields: the emails sent to that lead, any reply, and its enrollment and opt-out events, drawn from the real send and consent history rather than a guess. From the same panel you can pause or resume, promote, unsubscribe, or remove that one lead.

Select rows to act in bulk. Move to list reorganizes the selected leads into another list, and Promote to CRM promotes them all at once, which pairs naturally with the Replied filter: narrow to leads who wrote back, select them, and promote the batch into your CRM in one step. Leads already in the CRM are counted as such and skipped rather than duplicated.