Prospecting List Techniques for building a solid List each time

Covering the basics of prospecting lists

Prospecting lists are essential for businesses when trying to acquire new customers. It’s a list of potential customers that can be used to initiate contact with leads and guide them through the qualification process.

First and foremost, a quality prospecting list relies on data accuracy, so business owners have to take the time to ensure their sales reps are reaching out to active prospects and current lead information is kept up-to-date.

By building solid prospecting lists, sales teams can identify qualified leads and target those prospects more likely to make a purchase, a.k.a. the ideal customer profile. This helps the sales reps focus their efforts on finding prospective customers that are far more likely to convert into paying clients. The extra effort spent creating the perfect prospecting list will help maximize results from outreach campaigns by making sure they’re targeting the right people at the right time and increasing customer acquisition in the process.

How to use prospecting lists?

As much as it sounds self-explanatory, many Sales Reps are not aware of all options they can prospect through and are not familiar with the effective usage of prospecting lists. 

Email prospecting, LinkedIn prospecting, and cold calling are among the most popular prospecting channels known and used among b2b sales teams. 

Email is an effective tool for connecting with your intended audience. It enables you to offer guidance and education to your ideal customers, cultivate stronger ties, and keep them informed about your business. And it’s also a method to contact a large prospecting list and enables immediate interaction between your sales team and responding leads, due to its low cost.

LinkedIn is a widely-used platform for networking among professionals and reaching potential clients. As professional social media gains popularity, it is likely that most B2B users will maintain an active LinkedIn presence.

And, despite a decline in popularity, cold calling remains an effective prospecting method for many sales teams. Research indicates that 82% of buyers are willing to accept meetings when contacted by a sales professional, suggesting that the practice is still viable.

Sources of prospecting data

Building a prospect list requires carefully evaluating potential buyers and selecting specific targets that match your product or service. To begin building your list, start by determining what criteria you want your prospects to meet.

This may involve understanding their market size, geographical area, and age range, and going into even more details like their location, technographic, and so on. Additionally, take into account how long they have been in business and factors such as income level since these characteristics also impact their buying power.

Once you’ve narrowed down who your target market should be, create a plan for discovering prospects.

The first thing you need to sort out is the source of your prospects. Combining multiple data sources is a proven way of gathering all the information you need for prospecting. 

For example, we can go to LinkedIn and create a prospect list using their filtering system. Once we have a preliminary prospect set, we’ll need to get direct contact data and all additional information we can find about every single prospect. 

This is where reliable business data providers and sales intelligence tools like Sales.Rocks come to play.

Sales intelligence tools are a great way to quickly generate prospect lists of potential buyers. You can accurately filter out the exact type of customer you’re looking for, allowing you to build a highly targeted list in seconds. These tools give access to large databases containing millions of business records which are updated on an ongoing basis ensuring the accuracy of the contact information provided. This means that no matter how specific your search is, you can be sure that it returns reliable and viable sources.

Additionally, with the filters available, making sure that only those consumers who actually fit your criteria make it into your final list is easy because you can set preferences for location, job title, web technologies used by the company, and more.

Building a solid prospecting list

Now that you know where to source your prospecting data, it’s crucial to know which information you need and which information should be collected, used, and retained.

First of all, you need to create a prospecting list according to your ICP and buyer personas. So, the first thing that will be the base of your prospecting list is the industry the prospects work in. Each industry has its own pain points you can target with your outreach, so the list creation should start from there. It’s optimal if you can get hold of in-depth information on the industry and the company activities as well in order to determine the core products and services of the company. The industry is a good indication, but having information on the industry classification, registry numbers, and company activities will give your list the right amount of segmentation for highly targeted prospecting.

Next, you need to get into more granular segmentation of the prospects themselves, by their job titles. Same as the industry, every job title has different challenges and could shape your prospecting strategy. Sometimes, having information on the hierarchy and departments can make your prospecting list successful. 

For your direct prospecting, you’ll need the direct contact information of the prospect, like their email address, their LinkedIn profile, and possibly a direct phone number. Of course, it’s not even worth mentioning that you need the full name of the person that you are contacting so that you can do personalization and call them up using their name during the cold calling process. 

Another very important piece of information for a solid prospecting list is the prospect’s location. And not only the location of the company they work for but the actual location of the person, where they are located, and from where they operate. Knowing their location can help you craft your prospecting content in their mother language to achieve even better results. 

Last, but not least, you can create a prospecting list based on the web technologies that the company is using to do highly-targeted and hyper-personalized outreach. People using a certain tech stack very often have the same obstacles and have similar tech knowledge

Summing up the prospecting lists

An essential part of any sales strategy is to get detailed information from potential customers to create a list of prospects. This includes not just names and contact details, but also relevant information about their job title, company, industry, and any other relevant data that will be useful for your sales and marketing purposes. You can acquire this information by working with a reliable source of information that provides data for potential customers.

By obtaining their contact information and understanding more about their interests, web technologies they use, and specific areas where you can provide value, you can begin to build a comprehensive prospecting list of people interested in the goods or services offered by your business. Having this list on hand will enable you to reach out to the right people at the right time with the right message tailored for them specifically.