Engaged in content marketing, email marketing, traditional marketing, and more? Regardless of your marketing techniques, the prime thing is who are you targeting?
Building a B2B sales prospects list will help align and streamline the strategies and close more deals.
In this blog, we shall learn:
What a prospects list is?
How to build a prospect list?
What is a prospect list?
A “prospect list” or a “sales prospect list” is a list of potential clients. These are the people who benefit from your brands’ products or services.
But, who are they?
Potential clients are the leads who fit your ideal buyer persona, the attributes and qualities allowing you to find the perfect fit clients for your company’s product and services.
An ideal buyer persona is created when you have answers to the following:
- Company industry
- Company size
- Company location
- Company revenue
- Company technographics
- Prospect’s role in the org
- Prospect’s age
- Prospect’s gender
- Prospect’s character traits
- Prospect’s motivations
- Prospect’s pain / challenges
- Prospect’s goals
- Prospect’s KPIs
- Prospect’s preferred working tools
- Prospect’s preferred communication platforms
- Prospect’s benefits received from product/service
However, this is the only first step to identifying your consumer persona. In order to understand your best-fit clients, you need to build a prospect list for yourself.
Also, pay attention to the product and services. Before creating the prospect list, you need to have a strong understanding of why your product or service is beneficial for the ideal consumer persona.
Before reaching ahead to creating a prospect list, get a clear head on the following:
- In-depth learning of your product or services
- Characteristics and Attributes for every persona
- Competitors and Key Differences
- Pitfalls of products or services
- Sales pitch for every persona
- Overcoming objections for every persona
- Part of product or service that may tend to lose deals
- What is considered a success for your persona?
What does the Prospect List Include?
Each service provider has a different layout for their prospect lists. However, generally, the prospect list contains:
| First Name | Last Name | Company | Role | Dept. | Contact Info | ||
| Jim | Jones | 123 Company | Head of Marketing | Marketing | Phone | ||
| Jon | Jonson | ABC Company | VP of Sales | Sales | Phone |
Depending upon the service provider, you can get hands-on more than 25+ data attributes in a prospect list.
Further, the extended list includes location (city, state, zip code), license information in case of an HCP (healthcare professional), and more.
Now that you understand what a prospect list is and how it looks or what details you get from a prospect list let us learn how to build a targeted prospect list!
How to Build a Prospect List?
If you are from a sales team or have worked with the same company for a length of time, you know your success depends not on the prospect list but the quality of the prospects list.
You might be the most skilled salesperson in the company, but if you are reaching out to the wrong person, you will not derive any results. Even though sales are just a game of numbers, most professionals advise against the wide net to catch sales.
Modern sales professionals drive satisfactory outcomes by curating and reaching out to prospects with the hyper-targeted list made with only a highly qualified prospect.
Understanding Your Product/ Service Offerings
The first step before figuring out the buyer or prospect is to understand the nitty-gritty of the product. Understand what you are selling.
We all know how lengthy the process of sales is while onboarding leads. However, in order to become the top-rated salesperson, you need to have a thorough knowledge of the product. It often includes surpassing the basics and diving deeper into the use cases, features sets, and other complicated attributes.
Increase your knowledge about the product and enhance the ability to explain the product or service to another individual. In a few cases, it also helps answer difficult questions put up by prospects, have more confidence while speaking to prospects, close more deals, and more.
So, keep in mind the following questions to start and succeed in this process:
- What problem is your product designed to solve? If you have more than one problem-solving feature, which one is more important?
- Is there something that plays a hindrance to you while closing deals? Or, is there something in your product that helps you close deals faster?
- Can you explain this product and its benefits to the elderly or a child?
- What are the most frustrating and most helpful parts of your product or services for your prospects?
- Would you be using the product you are selling to the prospects?
If you fail to answer all these questions, then it is better to speak to your superior or leader or the product expert, or your peer.
The more you know about your product, the more efficient and easier your job will be.
Understanding your Buyer
The next comes understanding the buyer. Just like you need to know what you are selling, you have to know who you are selling to.
You need to understand the market and the target audience to curate and implement the perfect plan for yourself. The better you understand who you want to sell this to, the better your target marketing activities would result.
This point gives rise to building an ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) or Buyer Profiles (BP). This helps in steering towards the audience who are more likely to show interest in your product or service. Moreover, this helps sales professionals to have a better understanding of prospects.
However, as we are creating a sales prospect list, shift your focus from the outdated profiles created by the marketing team for the new hires. There are multiple ways to carry out research for building a prospect list.
You can conduct consumer and prospect research- also known as manual data analysis performed with the help of marketing intelligence tools, custom surveys, and more. Regardless of the method chosen, you have to have an answer to the followings:
- Industry– Where does your ideal customer work – in an industry or within a set of industries?
- Company Size– What is the average size of the company where your ideal prospect works?
- Job Title– What kind of professionals are you looking for senior managers? C-level executives?
- Revenue– What is the revenue drawn by the company where your prospect works?
To more obscure your research, include the followings:
- Biggest Challenges and Pain Points– What problems do your prospects face? Are there any pain points experienced?
- Important Success metrics and goals– What is success for them? What goals are they trying to achieve with the product/ service? What goals have they already achieved with your product?
- Product Likes and Dislikes– What does the customer like about your product the most? What do they dislike? What are they looking for explicitly while purchasing a product like yours?
- Technographics– What are the tools they use? What platforms do they integrate with your product or service? Are they engaged with your competitor too?
- Engagement Preferences- How does your prospect like to engage with you- email, SMS, calls, social media, in person? What is their most preferred time? How many times does a prospect like to be contacted typically?
- Communication Styles– How does your prospect perceive your product? What do they talk about your product or service? Are they using a formal or informal tone of voice? Do they prefer a casual conversation or a technical conversation?
Getting deeper into insights:
- Key motivation and Buying triggers- What makes this person buy the product or service you are offering? Is there any event or signal that can trigger them to make a purchase decision quickly?
- Customer Lifetime Value- How valuable are your customers? How much money are they contributing to the lifetime tenure of your company? How does their value align with their industry?
- Referral Potential- What customers have the potential to bring a referral? What is the average rate of referral your customers bring?
- Product Use- What influences your customer’s purchasing decision more- upsell of products than the competitors or additional features?
- Advocacy- What factors are correlated with the probability of a customer becoming an advocate?
- Brand Value– Do your customers lend credibility to the company? Does this value impact your brand sales?
When you research, you can find common characteristics among the prospects.
These characteristics help you determine the ideal customer profile or persona.
Organizing Intel
Now, you have two data sets in your hands- information on your products/ services and information on your buyer. It is time to merge them into the beginnings of the sales prospects list.
To begin with, ask yourself:
Who is this product made for?
Who needs my product?
With all the information gathered so far, you must have the information on the above.
Your final result will be like this:
a) Company
A medium scale company belonging to the healthcare industry as pharmaceuticals who are making about $10M in revenue per annum.
b) Buyer
Initial inquiry made by an executive level in the management sector of the organization, but a senior manager has the final say. This kind of buyer struggles to manage too many technologies at once. Their success is measured in time and expenses based on efficiency and eliminating the bottlenecks in the process. These individuals are busy and want to get straight to the point. So, keep the small talk minimal or not at all.
c) Motivators
Your best customers make the largest purchases after a bunch of trigger events. For instance, these trigger events can be information related to the industry or implementation of new regulations in the industry, or insights on the security braces. This implies that they put value in legal compliance and safety. So, when your product comes up with new features that include improved performance, efficiency, better security, or something along these lines, then they are more likely to participate in associating with you.
d) Added Value
The customers with a huge scale of business are definitely valuable as they spend the most money. But it is the small businesses that spend less but bring more value to your business as they speak about your brand online and recommend products to their friends.
Identify the Key Decision Makers & Accounts
Now that you have the well-analyzed data in front of you, it is your turn to identify the key decision-makers.
With a clear picture of the kind of prospect you are looking for, the step is to find those ideal prospects. So, where to begin the search?
Note- Engaging in multiple channel research, tools, and outlets are more likely to bring the desired results.
a) Social Media
It’s an open secret that Social media has infiltrated all businesses- whether it is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. They are no more limited to youngsters; in fact, they are one of the prominent tools used by B2B businesses under an outreach program. Therefore, skipping on leveraging the social media platforms implies that you are doing yourself a disservice. Speaking of leveraging social media platforms, many brands are relying on novel ways like using Instagram walls at their events to boost engagement and increase conversions. The scope of social media in today’s era is endless. Also, companies are finding suitable influencers to promote their brands on events.
To have highly-qualified social media channels, keep in mind how each platform functions. Some platforms ought to pay more obvious attention than others. With every channel in hand, you need to be creative and stand out from the crowd. Don’t forget to keep a tab on your competitors to discover more tips for tweaking up your social media.
b) Google Alerts
Using Google Alerts gets more notifications, brand mentions, triggers of events, industry news, and so much more. You not only update yourself but also leverage the piece of information to initiate a conversation with your prospects.
c) Job Listings
The online job boards can bring you a detailed insight into the company’s priorities. Think about it- so when a company comes with a job listing, it can trigger a shift happening in that organization. And, if you are into a similar role, like maybe into marketing automation tools, then this would be a great help for you.
d) Historical Customer and Prospect Data
Buying decisions change on a whim among prospects, sometimes without reason. Either the person has a specific job to take over, or some have shifted their organization. Or, maybe some are enjoying their vacation.
For this reason, you need to comb through your historical customer and prospect data to discover what deals fall through. Don’t forget to have a follow-up with them in case of incomplete sales, earlier customers, and long-term customers.
e) Existing Customer and Prospect Data
Anchor to your costumes to improve our customer service and ask for referrals. 92% of buyers trust referrals from their known, and approximately 9 out of 10 purchase decisions are made with a peer recommendation.
You need not worry whether your customers will go for referrals or not- as per numbers, 83% of happy customers are to provide a referral. Since salespeople are not putting the request upfront, only 29% of customers end up giving a referral.
f) Sales Intelligence and Data Providers
B2B data providers host search capabilities that allow customers to enter the prospects’ criteria for a high-quality leads list. These tools and features tend to vary from provider to provider. Besides every information you get on Google alerts and social media, you get additional information- contact information.
Prioritize Dynamic Data
Now that you have the list of companies, names, and their contact information, your work is done, right? Wrong. In this digital era, all the data gathered is dynamic, i.e., it is subject to change. People change jobs, companies get bought and sold, new products develop and reach the market, and unique service upgrades are always there.
These changes make the average sales prospect list decay, and ultimately, they will not be viable after a few months, weeks, or even days. For this reason, make dynamic prospect data list your priority.
The Final Thoughts
No exact formula can guide you through creating a B2b sales prospects list. However, you must have an audience to target in mind for whom you plan and implement marketing strategies. If not, then it is the optimal time for your marketing and sales team to rethink the marketing strategy immediately. Also, understand your professional prospects, products, and other channels to generate a highly qualified prospect list.
Visit and connect with Ampliz for high-end sales intelligence. In addition to this, we offer extensive B2B and healthcare databases with more than 20 attributes for generating a filtered prospect list. Automate your data gathering and maintaining process with Ampliz with the verified and validated database.
