Most teams burn credits in Lusha for the same reason: they reveal contact details at the moment they find someone, instead of at the moment they have decided to contact them. Those are two different moments, and putting a qualification step between them is worth more than any other optimisation.
Here is the workflow we use to build a 200-contact list. It costs roughly 400 credits instead of the 1,000 you would spend revealing everything, and the list that comes out the other end is better, not worse.
Step 1 — Define the account list before you open Lusha
Write down the account criteria in a document first: industry, headcount band, region, and one disqualifier. The disqualifier is the important one, because it is what stops a search from returning 4,000 plausible-looking companies that you will half-qualify later at 5 credits a head.
If you cannot name a disqualifier, you do not have an ICP yet — you have a demographic. Fix that before you spend anything.
Step 2 — Filter in the prospecting workspace, reveal nothing
Lusha's prospecting search lets you filter by job title, seniority, department, company size, industry, location, revenue and tech stack. Browsing results and building a list costs nothing. Revealing costs.
Filter aggressively on seniority and department first, then narrow by company size. A search that returns 180-250 people for a well-defined ICP is right. A search that returns 3,000 means the filters are doing no work.
Step 3 — Bulk-enrich emails only
Run the bulk enrichment on the shortlist with emails enabled and phones disabled. At 1 credit each, 200 contacts costs 200 credits. This is the cheap half of the list and it is the half you can act on immediately.
This is also the single most important setting in the product. Bulk enrichment defaults are where a careless click turns a 200-credit job into a 1,000-credit one, so check the toggle every time — not just the first time.
Step 4 — Qualify on the email tier first
Send the sequence. Watch for opens, replies, bounces and out-of-office autoresponders — an autoresponder naming a replacement is free, current, human-verified data that no vendor sells.
After two weeks you will have a shortlist of accounts showing genuine signals: engaged opens, a reply, a bounce that proves the person left, or a colleague named in an autoresponder. That shortlist is usually 30-40% of the original list.
Step 5 — Buy phone numbers for the survivors only
Now spend the expensive credits. On a 200-contact list, roughly 70 accounts will have earned a phone call. At 5 credits each that is 350 credits — bringing the total to about 550 rather than the 1,200 you would have spent revealing everything up front.
The dials also convert better, because you are calling people who have already seen your name in an inbox rather than opening cold. The credit saving is the smaller half of the benefit.
Step 6 — Push to the CRM and let enrichment maintain it
Sync the list to HubSpot or Salesforce with field mapping and de-duplication turned on, then enable scheduled enrichment so the records refresh themselves. A contact list decays at roughly 2-3% a month through job changes alone; scheduled enrichment is what stops you paying to rediscover the same people next quarter.
Test the sync against a sandbox object first. Field mapping mistakes are cheap to fix in a sandbox and expensive to unpick in a production CRM with 8,000 records in it.
Step 7 — Turn on job-change alerts and stop starting over
Save the qualified contacts to a list with job-change alerts enabled. When one of them moves, you get notified — and a contact who already knows your product, now at a company that is actively rebuilding its stack, is the warmest outbound trigger that exists.
This is the step that compounds. The list you built this quarter keeps producing opportunities in the next three, at zero additional credit cost.