How to Use GBP Leads + GoHighLevel to Land Local Business Clients
Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link to GoHighLevel. If you sign up through our link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we use alongside GBP Leads in real agency workflows.
Most agencies treat prospecting and outreach as two separate problems. One tool to find leads, another to manage them, a third to send emails, and a spreadsheet somewhere holding it all together with duct tape. The result is a fragmented workflow that leaks time and leads at every handoff.
This guide shows you how to build a complete local business client acquisition system using two tools: GBP Leads for finding and qualifying prospects from Google Maps, and GoHighLevel for managing, contacting, and converting them. No Zapier. No spreadsheet merging. No guesswork about who to contact or what to say.
The Two-Tool Workflow, End to End
Here is how the full workflow looks from the moment you decide to prospect a new niche to the moment a local business owner books a discovery call with your agency:
Find leads (GBP Leads) > Export and import (CSV to GHL) > Segment by opportunity signals (GHL smart lists) > Run automated outreach (GHL workflows) > Book meetings (GHL calendar) > Manage pipeline (GHL opportunities)
Each step flows directly into the next. The data you pull in step one carries through every stage. The review count that helped you qualify a prospect also personalizes your email. The rating that flagged a prospect as high-opportunity also appears in your pipeline view when you are deciding who to follow up with first.
Phase 1: Build a Targeted Lead List
The quality of your outreach depends entirely on the quality of your list. A generic list of every business in a city gets generic results. A targeted list of businesses with specific opportunity signals gets responses.
In GBP Leads, search for your target niche and location. For example, "roofing contractor" in "Atlanta, GA". GBP Leads returns every matching business with full Google Business Profile data: name, phone, email, website, address, rating, review count, and categories. Every result goes into your Data Vault automatically, deduplicated across all your searches.
The key differentiator here is the data quality. Because GBP Leads pulls live data from Google and lets you refresh records before outreach, you are working with current information, not a list that went stale the day you downloaded it.
Run searches across 5-10 cities in your target niche. Your Vault grows with every search, building a compounding prospecting asset that gets more valuable over time. If you have not built a list before, our first lead list tutorial walks through the full process.
Phase 2: Import into GoHighLevel
Export your filtered list from GBP Leads as a CSV. Then import it into GoHighLevel using the bulk contact import. We have a detailed step-by-step import guide that covers formatting, field mapping, custom fields for prospecting data (rating, review count), and tagging best practices.
The short version: upload your CSV, map columns to GHL contact fields, set up custom fields for Google rating and review count, tag the import with the niche and date, and let GHL process the file. It takes about five minutes.
After import, your GoHighLevel CRM contains every prospect with their full Google Business Profile data attached. This is where the real leverage begins.
Phase 3: Segment by Opportunity Signals
Not every lead on your list is equally worth contacting first. Some businesses clearly need help and are likely to be receptive. Others are already well-marketed and will ignore your outreach. The data you imported tells you which is which.
Tier 1: Immediate outreach
Businesses with fewer than 20 reviews, a rating below 4.5, AND a missing or broken website. These prospects have multiple visible gaps in their digital presence and are statistically the most likely to respond to a well-crafted outreach message. They know they need help but have not found it yet.
Tier 2: Strong prospects
Businesses with 20-50 reviews and a functional but outdated website. They are doing some marketing but not enough to dominate their local market. Your pitch focuses on the gap between where they are and where their top-reviewed competitors are.
Tier 3: Nurture
Businesses with 50+ reviews and a decent web presence. They may already have an agency, but agencies churn clients. Add these to a slower nurture sequence and check back quarterly. When their current provider drops the ball, you will be top of mind.
Build these as smart lists or tags in GoHighLevel. Each tier gets a different outreach sequence with different messaging, send timing, and follow-up cadence.
Phase 4: Build Your Outreach Sequence
GoHighLevel's workflow builder lets you create automated multi-channel outreach sequences. For local business prospecting, a combination of email and SMS consistently outperforms email alone. Here is a proven sequence structure:
Day 1: Opening email
Lead with a specific observation from their Google Business Profile. Not a compliment, not a generic intro, just a fact that implies an opportunity. "Your Google listing shows 14 reviews while the top three roofers in Atlanta each have 80+. That gap is costing you calls every week." Then offer a single, low-friction next step.
Day 3: SMS follow-up
A short, conversational text that references the email. "Hi [First Name], I sent you a quick note about your Google reviews on Tuesday. Worth a look if you are trying to get more calls this summer." SMS gets opened at 98% compared to email's 20-30%. This is where most responses come from.
Day 7: Value-add email
Share a specific insight or quick win. If their website does not load on mobile, tell them and explain why it matters. If their GBP listing is missing business hours, point it out. Give them something useful for free. This builds credibility and separates you from every other agency blasting generic templates.
Day 14: Final follow-up
A brief, no-pressure close. "I will not keep following up, but if you ever want a second opinion on your marketing, here is my calendar link." Respect their time. Some of your best clients will come back to this email three months later.
For a deeper dive into building this exact sequence inside GHL, including workflow triggers, timing settings, and email templates, see our complete cold outreach sequence tutorial.
Phase 5: Book Meetings and Manage Your Pipeline
When a prospect replies or clicks your calendar link, GoHighLevel handles the rest. Its built-in calendar books the meeting, sends confirmation and reminder emails/texts automatically, and creates an opportunity in your pipeline.
Set up a simple pipeline with stages that match your sales process: New Lead > Contacted > Replied > Meeting Booked > Proposal Sent > Closed Won / Closed Lost. As prospects move through your outreach sequence and respond, GHL moves them through the pipeline automatically based on triggers you define.
This gives you a real-time view of your entire prospecting operation: how many leads you have contacted, who has responded, how many meetings are booked, and what your conversion rate looks like at each stage. When you are ready to scale, you just add more leads from GBP Leads and let the same workflow process them.
Why This Workflow Compounds
The reason this two-tool setup works so well is that both tools are designed to compound over time. GBP Leads builds a growing, deduplicated library of every prospect you have ever searched for. GoHighLevel maintains the complete history of every touchpoint with every prospect. Together, they create an agency prospecting system that gets more valuable the longer you run it.
When you enter a new city or a new niche, you are not starting from scratch. You are adding to an existing system with proven sequences, tested messaging, and a pipeline that already works. The only variable is the list, and building a new list takes minutes.
For a comparison of how this approach stacks up against using GoHighLevel's built-in prospecting tool alone, see our GoHighLevel Prospecting Tool vs GBP Leads breakdown.
Start with GBP Leads to build your lead list ($27/month, 7-day money-back guarantee), then set up GoHighLevel to run your outreach and close deals.