How to use Vainu for sales prospecting

To use Vainu for sales prospecting, start from your ideal customer profile, create a list in Vainu and narrow it down with filters such as industry, company size, location, financials and the technologies a company uses. Vainu keeps that list up to date on its own. Then set a trigger to hear when those companies change, and send the best matches to your CRM or a spreadsheet for outreach.

Vainu is a company data provider for the Nordics. Its site says its database covers more than 5.1 million companies and 10.5 million contacts in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It is useful if those countries are your market, and not the right tool if they are not. For plans and an overview, see our Vainu review.

Before you start: two things to have in place

1. Your ideal customer profile

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the type of company that is your best customer. It works at account level, unlike a buyer persona, which describes a person inside the company. A good-fit customer is cheaper to win (low CAC), stays longer, has a high lifetime value and refers others.

Look at your best customers and ask what they have in common:

• Industry, size, location and financial situation.
• How they describe themselves, for example as sustainable, international or fast-growing.
• The moment they bought. Were they hiring, moving, launching something or raising money?
• Their technology. Which tools do they use, and how digital is their business?

Each answer can become a filter in Vainu. More in how to determine your target market.

2. A simple outbound process

Know what happens after you find a prospect. A basic outbound funnel has five stages:

1. Identify accounts that match your ICP.
2. Prepare them for outreach by adding them to your CRM with the right owner.
3. Reach out with a channel, message and cadence. See how to build a sales cadence.
4. Convert to meetings and log them.
5. Hand over with all context in the CRM, so the next person can pick up without asking again.

Vainu helps most with the first two stages and with timing the third.

Step 1: Create a list

In Vainu, click Create a list and choose New list. A new list always starts with every active organisation in your country database. You then narrow it down with filters.

There are two kinds of list:

• My lists are dynamic. Vainu adds companies that start to match your filters and removes those that stop matching.
• Custom lists are static. You decide which companies are on them. Choose Upload a list to import a spreadsheet, for example of current customers or trade fair contacts, or add companies from any list with Add to custom list.

Lists save automatically. To try a different set of filters without losing your work, duplicate the list first.

Step 2: Narrow the list with filters

Vainu's help centre lists filters in groups. The most useful for prospecting are:

• Industry: the official industry classification, or Vainu Custom Industry (see below).
• Location: visiting city, postal code, municipality, province or an area drawn on a map.
• Company size: reported or estimated employees, and revenue.
• Financials: change in revenue, employee count growth, net income, EBIT margin and more.
• Web profile: technologies used, website keywords, website language, description keywords and recruitment keywords from job ads.
• CRM data: if your CRM is connected, you can exclude companies already in it or filter on open, won or lost deals.
• Include / exclude lists: leave out companies on a Custom list, such as existing customers.

Some filters exist only in certain countries, and financial data comes with the Premium data package, so what you see depends on your database and contract.

Example: to find growing software companies in Stockholm that hire salespeople, combine a software Vainu Custom Industry, visiting city Stockholm, employee count growth above a threshold and recruitment keywords such as "account executive".

Step 3: Use Vainu Custom Industry for sharper segments

Official industry codes are often too broad for B2B targeting. Vainu Custom Industry is Vainu's own classification of more than 800 industries, assigned by an AI model that reads company websites. Each label has a confidence score between 0 and 1, and by default the filter shows only companies where the match is rated high.

You can use Vainu Custom Industry as a filter, as a field in your CRM through Vainu's Connector, in CSV exports and through the API.

Step 4: Set a trigger to know when to reach out

Companies change, and those changes often create the moment to call. A trigger watches a list and notifies you about events. To create one:

1. Open Triggers (the lightning icon) and click Create a trigger.
2. Select the source list.
3. Choose the event categories to monitor, for example New company in a saved list, internationalisation, mergers and acquisitions, funding or a change in credit rating.
4. Add a destination. Email is always available. If your CRM is connected through Vainu's Connector, you can send events to it as deals, leads, opportunities or tasks, depending on the CRM.
5. Pick the delivery days and times and the maximum number of events per delivery, then click Activate.

The older Buying signals filter exists only on Vainu's legacy platform. On the current app, triggers do this job.

Step 5: Export your prospects

To a spreadsheet

Open the list and click Download companies. Choose the data points you want, including contacts if you need them, and the format: CSV, XLSX or JSON. Exported companies count towards the export limit in your contract, and some contracts cap each file at 200 companies.

To your CRM

Vainu's Connector works with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and Dynamics 365. Once it is set up, you can:

• send a single company from its company card or profile
• send contacts from the Employees tab of a company profile or from a list's contacts view
• use Mass Export to send up to 10,000 companies at once, assign them to one or several reps and tag them, if your subscription includes it

With Salesforce and Dynamics you can send prospects as leads instead of accounts, so unqualified companies do not clutter your account records. With HubSpot and Pipedrive, exports create companies or organisations, and you can add deals, tasks or notes alongside.

What does Vainu cost?

On 1 November 2026, Vainu's pricing page listed three products, each billed annually: Reach from €250 per month, Data Sync from €417 and Discover from €583, with Enterprise on request. Every licence includes one country database, one to two seats and triggers. Premium data, which adds financials and event data for trigger lists, costs €83 per month extra, and the Full package €167. Vainu confirms the final price on a demo call.

When is another tool a better fit?

Vainu's data covers the four Nordic countries. If you sell mainly in other markets, look at prospecting databases with the coverage you need. Compare options in our lead generation companies overview and the lead generation tools category.