Every sales team has those stretches where the pipeline just... dries up. Referrals go quiet. The last campaign didn't pull the numbers you expected. The usual channels are moving slowly. It happens to everyone, and the teams that handle it best are the ones that don't just sit around waiting for something to come in.
That's where Lead Mining in Odoo CRM comes in handy.
What Is Lead Mining?
Instead of waiting for prospects to find you, Lead Mining lets you go out and find them — right from inside Odoo. It's an In-App Purchase feature that searches a database of companies and contacts based on filters you set, then drops the results straight into your CRM as new leads.
No switching between platforms. No paying for a separate prospecting tool. No spending hours on LinkedIn building a list by hand. You define who you're looking for, submit the request, and Odoo comes back with a set of matching records ready to work.
It's not magic — the leads still need to be qualified and followed up on. But when your pipeline needs a top-up and you need it reasonably fast, this gets the job done.
How to Get Started
Go to CRM > Leads > Lead Mining Requests, or look for the Lead Mining button in the Leads list view. From there, hit New to set up your first request.
You'll get a handful of filters to work with. The most important ones are the target type — whether you want companies only or companies plus individual contacts — and the industry. Narrowing by industry is where Lead Mining starts to actually earn its keep, because a list of random businesses isn't that useful, but a list of manufacturing companies in a specific region with more than 50 employees? That's something a rep can actually work with.
You can also filter by country and state, company size, and pre-assign the results to a specific salesperson and sales team so leads land in the right place from the start.
Once your filters are set, submit the request. Odoo runs it through the IAP system and returns a batch of leads with whatever information is available — company name, website, phone number, and sometimes key contacts depending on what data the system has.
The Credit System
Lead Mining runs on IAP credits, which is Odoo's in-app purchasing system. Each lead generated uses up a certain number of credits. If you want contact-level details — actual names and email addresses rather than just company records — it costs more credits per lead than company-only results.
Credits are purchased through Odoo's IAP store and tied to your account. They're not expensive, but it's worth being intentional about how you use them. A wide-open search with almost no filters will burn through credits fast and leave you with a long list of companies that have nothing in common. Tight, specific searches cost fewer total credits and give you leads that are actually worth calling.
Think of it this way — fifty well-matched leads are more valuable than three hundred that your team has to sort through just to find the ten worth pursuing.
Where Lead Mining Fits In
It's worth being clear about what Lead Mining is good for and what it isn't. It's not a replacement for inbound marketing or for the warm leads that come through referrals and website forms. Those tend to be higher intent and easier to convert.
What Lead Mining does well is fill the gaps. When inbound is slow, when you're moving into a new market and don't have an established presence yet, when a new product launches and you need to build a target list quickly — that's when it earns its place.
A healthy pipeline usually pulls from a few different sources at once. Inbound for the warm, high-intent leads. Manual prospecting for the very targeted, high-value accounts you've specifically identified. And Lead Mining for volume when you need to cast a wider net without spending weeks on research.
Making It Actually Work
Before you run your first request, spend a few minutes thinking through who you're actually trying to reach. What industry, what company size, what geography? The clearer your picture of the ideal customer, the better your filters, and the more useful the output.
Start small the first time — run a modest request rather than pulling hundreds of leads at once. Review the quality of what comes back before scaling up. If the results are solid, great. If they're off in some way, you can adjust your filters on the next run without having wasted too many credits.
When the leads land in your CRM, assign them immediately and set a follow-up activity on each one. Mined leads that sit untouched for a week might as well not exist. The whole point is to get conversations started, so the sooner a rep picks them up, the better.
It's also worth tracking how mined leads convert over time compared to other sources. If they're closing at a decent rate, that justifies putting more credits behind it. If they're not converting, that's useful information too — it might mean the filters need adjusting, or that a different approach to qualification is needed before leads get handed to the team.
Lead Mining won't replace good sales fundamentals. But when the pipeline needs filling and you'd rather do something about it than wait, it's a genuinely useful tool to have sitting right inside your CRM.