Advanced Generate Contacts: Building Contact Lists from Your Own Criteria

A walkthrough: building filter groups from a company list, previewing exactly who you'd get, saving the criteria as a template for your team, reviewing the companies that didn't match, and running the whole thing from an automation.

Why use Advanced Generate Contacts

Generate Contacts turns a list of companies into a list of people. Left to itself, it picks whoever CRED judges the best match at each company. Advanced Generate Contacts hands that decision to you.

The question it answers is: for every company on this list, find me one CEO, one CMO, and one salesperson — or whatever mix of roles you actually sell into. You describe that mix once, as a set of groups, and CRED fills it in account by account.

Everyone who lands in the results is both at a company on your list and a match for your criteria. Any company that couldn't satisfy a persona is flagged afterwards, so a thin result is something you can see and act on rather than something you discover weeks later.

Use it when you want to:

• Reproduce your buying committee at every account, rather than accepting one default contact per company

• Target specific job titles, seniorities, functions, or locations

• Layer in person filters beyond the job — interests and affinities, for instance — to find a warmer angle

• Control how many contacts you get per company, per persona

• See exactly who you'd receive before you generate anything

• Save your criteria as a template so the rest of your team generates contacts the same way

• Run the whole thing unattended inside an automation

• Learn which companies don't have the role you're targeting — useful research in its own right

Where to find it

Open any company list and click Generate Contacts in the top-right toolbar. The dropdown holds three kinds of entry:

The Advanced Generate screen

The screen has two halves:

• Left — your criteria. One card per filter group, plus + Add Group and a How groups work reference panel.

• Right — a live preview. For each group: the contact count, how many companies have no matches, and the actual names, titles, and companies you'd receive.

Cancel, Save template, and Generate sit in the top-right.

Inside automations

Advanced contact generation is also available as an automation action, so the whole flow can run without anyone opening the screen.

Edit an existing automation or alert and add an action. Alongside actions such as Email notification, you'll find Generate Contacts (Advanced). It asks for three things:

• Which workflow it belongs to

• Which list to generate from

• Which saved template to use

From then on, every company the alert or workflow picks up gets contacts generated against that template. Pair it with a dynamic company list and new companies are worked automatically as they arrive — an alert fires, contacts are generated, and the people flow on into a sequence or your CRM.

Because the template is a saved object, the automation stays in sync with the definition your team agreed on: update the template and every automation using it follows.

How to set it up

There's nothing to switch on. These steps take you from a company list to a finished person list.

Prerequisites:

• A company list to generate from. How it got there doesn't matter — sourced in CRED, synced from your CRM, imported from a spreadsheet, or built as a dynamic list.

• Credits available in your workspace, since generating contacts consumes them.

1. Open Custom Contacts Criteria

From your company list, click Generate Contacts → Custom Contacts Criteria.

2. Name your first group

Give the group a label that describes the persona — C-Suite, Techies in US, Marketing leaders. The name appears in the issues panel after generation and in the name of the list you get, so use something your team will recognise.

3. Add person filters

Each group is already scoped to your source list — you'll see a Company List: [your list] chip. On top of that, you have the full set of person filters: job title, seniority, department, location, and person-level attributes such as interests and affinities. Click + to stack more filters within the group.

💡 Filters within a group combine — a person must satisfy all of them to qualify. To express "C-suite or VP Engineering", use two groups rather than one.

💡 Don't stop at the job. Stacking a personal filter on top of a role filter — a seniority of Owner or C-Suite who also has a sports interest in soccer, say — narrows a persona to the people you have an actual angle with. This is where advanced criteria earn their keep over the default pick.

4. Set Per Company

Per Company controls how many people this group returns for each company. Set it to 1 for a single best-match contact per company per persona; raise it when you want depth.

5. Add more groups

Click + Add Group for each additional persona. Groups are the central idea, so it's worth being precise about how they behave:

• Each group runs independently against the source list.

• A company can satisfy one group and miss another — partial generation is expected, not a failure.

• Missed groups surface as issues after generation, not as errors that block it.

• Per Company applies per group, per company. Two groups set to 1 contact each can return two people from the same company.

💡 A two-group example from the walkthrough: Group 1 filters on a seniority of Owner or C-Suite plus a sports interest, at 1 contact per company. Group 2 filters on a job title of Marketing Director, also at 1 contact per company. One run, two personas, one of each at every company that has them.

6. Check the preview

The right-hand pane updates as you build. Read two things before going further: the contact count for each group, and the companies have no matches line beneath the group name. A group reporting "12 companies have no matches" is telling you it's too narrow — widen it here, before generating, rather than after.

7. Save it as a template (optional)

Click Save template to store the whole configuration — every group, every filter, every Per Company setting — under a name. Saved templates appear in the Generate Contacts dropdown for everyone in your workspace, so a well-tuned persona definition gets built once and reused by everybody, and can be referenced from automations. Remove one with the delete icon beside it in the dropdown.

8. Generate

Click Generate. CRED confirms generation has started and shows import progress; on a large list this takes a minute or two, and you can carry on working while it runs.

Feedback arrives before the import finishes — companies that came up short start appearing while contacts are still being added, so you can begin reading the gaps before the run completes.

9. Confirm it worked

You'll get a new person list, named after the source list and the criteria used — for example Company Favorites - Techies in US. Your original company list is unchanged.

💡 Refresh the page once the import finishes. The list is populated as it goes, so a refresh is the quickest way to see the finished set rather than a partial one.

From here the results behave like any other person list. You can filter the contacts down further, score them, enrich them, add them to a sequence, push them to your CRM, or export them.

Companies that didn't match

When a company can't satisfy one or more of your groups, CRED shows a banner above the results: "X companies didn't get contacts for some groups." Click View details to open the issues panel.

The panel opens with four summary figures — Companies missed, Missing contacts, Most-missed group, and Most-cited reason — then one row per affected company. Expand a row to see:

Use Adjust filters on a row to return to the criteria and re-run with a looser group.

On a large list this can be hundreds of companies, which is exactly why the panel leads with the summary figures. Start with Most-missed group and Most-cited reason: if one persona accounts for most of the shortfall, fixing that single group recovers most of the missing contacts in one re-run.

💡 Treat this panel as a research signal, not just an error report. A company that returns nobody for "VP Engineering" may simply not have that role — which tells you something about how it's structured, and whether it belongs in this campaign at all.

Credits

Because the preview is free and shows the exact contact count per group, it's worth reading it before every run — it's the cheapest way to avoid generating a list you didn't want. The same applies to automated runs: test a template by hand once before pointing an automation at it.

Full breakdown: credit consumption table · FAQs (Credits)

Permissions

• All roles with access to a company list can build criteria and generate contacts from it.

• Saved templates are shared across the workspace. A template you save appears in the Generate Contacts dropdown for your colleagues, and editing or deleting one changes it for everyone — including any automation that references it.

• The generated person list follows the same sharing rules as any other list you create.

• Using advanced generation inside an automation requires automations to be enabled for your workspace.

More on roles: CRED Role Overview: Admin & Member

Data privacy

• Contacts returned are business contact data, handled under the same GDPR terms as every other person record in CRED.

• A saved template stores only your filter definitions — titles, seniorities, locations, interests, and the Per Company setting. It holds no contact or company records, so sharing a template with your team shares criteria, not data.

• The issues panel reports only the companies already on your list and which criteria they failed. It doesn't reveal people who were filtered out.

• Generation never widens access: it can only return contacts your workspace is already entitled to.

Details: GDPR & Data Privacy in CRED

FAQs

Does a company appear once per group, or once overall?

Once per group. Each group returns up to its Per Company limit for every company, independently of the others. Two groups set to 1 contact each can therefore return two people from the same company.

Can I filter on anything other than job title and seniority?

Yes. The full person filter set is available, including person-level attributes such as interests and affinities. Combining a role filter with a personal one is often what turns a generic list into a warm one.

Why did generation "succeed" when some companies were missed?

Partial generation is by design. Groups run independently, so one company missing one persona doesn't stop the rest of the list being built. Misses are reported as issues afterwards so you can act on them.

How do I express "C-suite or VP Engineering"?

As two groups. Filters inside a single group combine, so stacking both into one group asks for someone who is both at once. Splitting them also lets the issues panel tell you which of the two personas is actually missing at a given company.

My new list looks incomplete straight after generating.

Contacts are added as the import runs, so the list fills up progressively. Wait for the import to finish and refresh the page.

Can I edit a saved template?

Yes. Re-open Advanced Generate, adjust the groups, and save. Remember that templates are shared across the workspace — your edit applies to colleagues and to any automation using it.

Where do the results go?

Into a new person list, named after the source company list and the criteria used. The source list itself is left untouched.

Does the preview cost credits?

No. Building criteria and previewing matches are free — credits are consumed only when you click Generate, for the contacts actually returned.

Hundreds of companies came up short. Where do I start?

With the summary figures at the top of the issues panel. Most-missed group tells you which persona is causing most of the shortfall, and Most-cited reason tells you why. Fixing the one group that accounts for the bulk of the misses usually recovers most of the missing contacts in a single re-run.

Can I run this without opening the screen?

Yes. Add Generate Contacts (Advanced) as an action on an automation or alert and point it at a workflow, a list, and a saved template. Every company the alert picks up then has contacts generated automatically.

Related articles

• FAQs (Credits)

• CRED Role Overview: Admin & Member

• GDPR & Data Privacy in CRED