I've spent years running ABM campaigns for enterprise, so when a colleague asked me to help their local SMB client generate leads, I assumed there'd be a tool similar to Apollo or ZoomInfo for small businesses. Turns out, that market is basically non-existent.
The problem is that these platforms are designed for large-scale B2B data - company names, job titles, work emails. For local businesses like restaurants or tradespeople, you need location-specific data, and no major tool has decent coverage at that granularity without costing thousands.
What actually works is scraping Google Maps directly. You can use a Python script with requests and beautifulsoup4 to extract business names, phone numbers, and addresses. Or, if you're not a coder, something like n8n has a Google Maps node that can do the scraping for you. Then you enrich that data manually or with a lightweight CRM.
A colleague in the original discussion confirmed this - there isn't a proper all-in-one tool for local SMB lead gen. You have to build your own pipeline. It's frustrating, but once you set it up, it's consistent and much cheaper than enterprise tools.
