Outbound prospects in your sales pipeline don’t just appear out of thin air—so how do they get there in the first place? This is by building a sales prospecting list for your sales development representatives (SDRs) to reach out and build relationships with.
A well-built sales prospecting list is essential for sales success because it empowers you to target the right decision-makers at the right time with the right sales messaging. However, many businesses don’t know how to properly build a sales prospecting list that gets results.
In this blog, we’ll cover the following topics:
What Is a Sales Prospect List?
A sales prospect list is a collection of prospective customers that includes a company and potential decision-maker name, their contact information, and other useful demographic and company information to help you secure a sale.
Creating a sales prospecting list is important for outbound sales development for many reasons, including:
- More targeted outreach: A prospecting list allows you to target specific buyer personas within your target market, improving the chances of resonating with decision-makers, securing more sales meetings, and generating more revenue.
- Increased efficiency: Building a prospecting list empowers you to prioritize your outreach efforts and avoid wasting time on leads that are unlikely to convert into customers. This allows your SDRs to focus on building relationships and finding high-converting leads.
- More qualified leads: A prospecting list allows you to gather more information on potential leads, like their industry, job title, and pain points. This information can help you tailor your sales messaging to align with their (and your business’s) needs.
- Improved customer relationship management: Keeping track of prospects in a list format allows you to build and maintain better relationships with them in the long run because you have an organized way to follow up with the right leads at the right time.
Ways You Can Use Prospecting Lists
Sales prospect lists can be used for a wide range of outbound lead generation efforts, including:
Cold Calling
Cold calling is an incredibly impactful approach to outbound sales development. However, it can be done much more effectively if your SDRs have a prospect list on hand.
With a sales prospecting list, your SDRs can prioritize leads based on their current stage on the sales funnel. Additionally, SDRs can personalize their cold call talk track based on different demographics, such as the prospect’s industry served, decision-maker job title, and different pain points they encounter. Personalizing the cold call approach based on the prospect’s information is essential for piquing their interest and exploring how your company’s product or service solution could value their everyday business functions.
Email Marketing
While cold calling is a great approach to appointment setting, we understand that it doesn’t work for every business in every industry. When cold calling isn’t a reasonable approach for a company and their target market, they can also use their sales prospect list for email marketing.
With a prospect list, SDRs have the opportunity to segment their email blasts based on different factors such as industry, decision-maker job title, pain points, and more. This empowers SDRs to personalize email content based on the wants and needs of potential buyers.
Paid Social Ads
Building a prospect list may be incredibly beneficial for outbound lead generation, but it’s also important for different inbound marketing actions, such as paid social ads. A sales prospect list is essential for paid social ads because it empowers your marketing strategists to create custom audiences within their target market, getting the right ads in front of the right prospects.
When paired with outbound lead generation, paid social ads are also great for retargeting leads in the sales pipeline. This builds top-of-mind awareness and gives prospects another chance to reach out when they’re ready to make a sale.
Step-by-Step Guide on Creating a Prospect List
Step 1. Define Your Target Audience and Ideal Customer Profile
Before building your sales prospecting list, define your target audience and establish your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ideal customer profile is what your “dream” client looks like, such as the industry they serve, decision-maker job title, company size, specific pain points they encounter, etc. With your ICP in mind, SDRs can see what qualifies a prospect as a good sales opportunity. You can do this by looking at your current book of business and see what commonalities a lot of your current customers have.
Step 2. Use Sales Tools to Help You Organize and Target Your List
Once you’ve used your preferred sales prospecting software to find potential sales opportunities, it’s time to export that data into a CSV or Excel file. This makes it easy to look at the data you have at your disposal and seamlessly integrate it into your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Step 3. Export Prospect Data Into a CSV or Excel File
Next, you can start building your list based on your target market and ICP. To fill your sales pipeline with a strong list of prospects, use a variety of sales prospecting tools and technologies. These tools empower your sales and operations analysts to find the best prospects for your sales pipeline because they can target specific lead qualifying factors, such as their industry, size, job title, job functions, geographic location, and more.
We’ll get into the best sales prospecting tools you can use to build your pipeline later.
Step 4. Export Existing Prospect Data to Cleanse New Prospect List
If you already have an extensive list of prospects in your sales pipeline, it’s important to export existing prospect data to cleanse the new list. If you have duplicates of the same contact, you have to remove them to eliminate the risk of contacting the same prospect.
Step 5. Run Your List Through a List Cleansing Software
After comparing your old and new lists of prospects, run your list through a list cleansing software. A few of the most popular list cleansing softwares include ListCertified and NeverBounce. These programs remove any prospects that have any outdated or invalid information, allowing SDRs to spend more time connecting with valuable leads.
Step 6. Upload Your List to Your CRM Software
Now that all your data hygiene has been performed, it’s time to upload the new list to your CRM. Every CRM has a different approach to uploading prospect lists, so you should follow the format and specifications they have for importing into your database. Without formatting your new list correctly, the data won’t be submitted properly, failing to import into your CRM.
Now that all your data hygiene has been performed, it’s time to upload the new list to your CRM. Every CRM has a different approach to uploading prospect lists, so you should follow the format and specifications they have for importing into your database. Without formatting your new list correctly, the data won’t be submitted properly, failing to import into your CRM.
Best Tools to Help You Build Prospect Lists
ZoomInfo is a great database for helping SDR teams cleanse prospects in the sales pipeline. This software helps SDRs clearly define who a prospective business’s decision-maker is and their direct contact information, such as their phone numbers and email addresses. This allows SDRs to reduce their overall research time, so they spend less time prospecting and more time pitching more qualified leads.
D&B Hoovers is a prospect list building software that helps SDR teams find new prospects to implement into their sales pipelines. Through this software, your sales data and operation specialists can find the best leads based on location, industry, job title, size of company, yearly revenue generated, and more.
Cognism is a trusted leader in sales intelligence; it helps SDR teams discover potential sales opportunities in their target market. This platform allows you to not only find prospects for your sales pipeline, but gives you superior insights into their different buyer personas, enabling you to craft a lead generation approach that aligns best with their purchasing habits.
Best Practices for Maintaining Your Prospect Database
While having a prospect list itself is necessary for having a reliable sales development process and building a sustainable sales pipeline, it’s just as important to keep it maintained for long-term success.
Here are some best practices to follow for maintaining your sales prospect database:
Regularly Update and Clean Your Database
Regularly updating and cleansing your prospect database is essential for updating contacts with new information and removing any data that’s outdated. This is also beneficial for seeing if you have any duplicate contacts in the pipeline, so SDRs aren’t contacting the same prospects repeatedly.
Use CRM Software to Keep Track of Leads
While CRM software is essential for everyday business operations, it’s also an incredibly impactful way to keep track of leads and organize prospect data. Using CRM software for lead generation efforts empowers your SDRs to easily segment call and email lists, prioritize leads based on their readiness to buy, and track any interactions to ensure no high-quality lead falls through the cracks.
Keep Track of Lead Sources
Keeping track of lead sources is essential for maintaining your prospect list. As we touched on earlier, leads and prospects can come into the sales pipeline through a variety of sources: referrals, online searches, inbound marketing, sales prospecting software, etc. When you keep track of lead sources, you can learn how they entered the pipeline in the first place, gaining more insight into their buying habits.
For example, if an SDR aims to contact a lead that’s in the sales pipeline because of a referral, they can use this to their advantage and start the conversation about their mutual connection. On the other hand, if an inbound lead comes in through the website, you could probably assume that they’re more likely to connect via email than a phone call, making email marketing the best way to reach out to them.
With these types of insights, your SDR teams can take the best approach to connecting with prospects, increasing the likelihood of them agreeing to a sales appointment and converting them from a prospect into a customer.
Update Communication History for Each Prospect Interaction
If you want to keep your prospect list clean and healthy for sustainable growth, it’s important that your SDR team consistently updates communication history with the prospect. This includes each call made or email sent to them. Keeping track of communication history is important because it allows SDRs to remind themselves of the previous conversation and what type of pitch they should make to the prospect this time around.
Additionally, if an SDR calls a prospect and they don’t pick up or they leave a voicemail, they must still make note of it so they know the last time they tried to get in contact with them. This is so they can put their efforts elsewhere and you don’t turn the prospect away from making too many calls or leaving too many voicemails.
Key Takeaways
Building a sales prospect list is vital for having a constant flow of potential sales opportunities. With a prospect list building procedure in place, you can consistently connect with new decision-makers without the fear of reaching out to the same decision-maker repeatedly, pushing them away from doing business with your company.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our SDR teams have all the sales prospecting tools and list building expertise to fill our clients sales pipelines with prospects that meet your ideal customer profile. After our sales data and operations analysts build sales pipelines, our sales reps make cold calls and send sales emails to verify prospect information and form relationships with decision-makers, pushing them closer to the end of the sales funnel.
When you’re ready to maximize your lead generation efforts with effective list building procedures, contact the business growth specialists at Abstrakt!
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