7 July 2022

Article

Creating a Winning Sales Prospecting List: Template & Guide for 2023

Name: Intelligent list building
Uploaded: 2021-04-13T08:27:02Z
Duration: 10 min 36 s
Description: intelligent list building to ensure success across all your prospecting activities

6 minute read
By: Ilse Van Rensburg
Sales

There’s no shortcut to scaling a B2B business.

But there are methods you can use to support the process, like creating a prospecting list.

Think about this:

If you don’t have customers, you won’t have revenue.

So, building a list of names, contact details, and other vital information is an important first step in generating and growing a successful B2B business.

In this article, we’re going to deliver a crash course in building a sales prospecting list.

Topics covered include:

Steps to building a valuable prospecting lead list for sales and marketing
Reasons why creating your own list is always better than buying one
A free downloadable template to prospect successfully

Make sales easier with the highest quality data on the market. Click to book a demo with Cognism.

What is a prospect list in sales?

But first off, what is a prospect list?

Prospecting lists are datasheets filled with the names and contact details of potential customers. B2B sales teams use these lists to contact customers that they know will fit their ICP.

Since these lists contain information on pre-qualified and highly targeted leads, sales reps are more likely to convert and maintain positive relationships with customers, as opposed to cold calling random numbers at will.

For B2B prospecting lists to be successful, you’ll need quality, GDPR-compliant B2B data that’s valid and up to date. This ensures your sales team has all the information they need to succeed.

💡 Have a look at Cognism's pricing to get started building your perfect list of prospects

How do you build a prospecting list?

There’s much more to a professional prospecting list than just figuring out who your SDRs should be connecting with. Your list needs to be accurate, relevant and compliant for the best success.

An up-to-date B2B prospecting list is going to save your team time, lower your cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and assist in building better client relationships for improved customer lifetime value (CLTV) and reduced churn.

To start building a targeted sales prospecting list, you’ll need to establish your sales goals and calculate your Total Addressable Market (TAM). This will ensure your team creates a hyper-targeted list that consists of only the most qualified prospects.

Here’s a quick video explaining intelligent list building to ensure success across all your prospecting activities 👇

6 steps to creating a successful sales prospecting list

Keep in mind that developing a sales contact list shouldn’t be slap-and-dash. Rather stick to the following six steps that’ll be sure to support any prospecting plan:

1. Learn your product

2. Build a buyer persona

3. Get a CRM

4. Collect and update your data

5. Create campaigns

6. Score your leads

1. Learn your product backwards

Coming up with a good sales prospecting plan all depends on understanding what you're selling. You need to know how your product can help a customer solve pain points, and in turn, this will inform you of who your ideal customer profile (ICP) is.

Start by taking a look at your most valuable customers:

👉 Who are they, and why do they enjoy your product?

If you're a new SDR, then you'll need to surpass the basics when it comes to understanding the product you're selling. Study use cases, watch Gong calls and do a deep dive into success stories.

A better understanding of your product won’t only do wonders for the way you sell, but it will help you understand what factors drive buyers to make purchases.

2. Build a buyer persona

Once you understand what you’re selling, you'll need to establish which prospects are best to target. This will also help you define your sales prospecting list format.

Take everything you’ve learned about your product and define your ideal customer - our TAM calculator can help.

Watch this video for tips on using it 👇

After this, start researching:

Who are these prospects?
Where do they work?
What roles will be best to reach out to etc.

Then create a buyer persona to use when outreaching to these sales lead prospects.

A well-defined buyer persona not only improves the success of your sales process but also helps you get into the minds and hearts of your customers to better understand their needs.

3. Invest in a CRM

There’s no formatting rule when building a prospecting list. Anything goes from vcf and CSV files to excel and Google sheets. However, having a contact list spreadsheet, while cost-effective, can be time-consuming and result in errors.

Investing in sales automation like a CRM can help you avoid human error, save time and update and clean your data easily.

Salesforce, Pipedrive and Zoho are some popular CRM software examples.

4. Collect and enhance contact data

Now, it’s time to start populating your prospecting list for sales development. Start by cleaning your existing customer records and removing any phone numbers and emails that are out of date.

You can use a sales intelligence solution like Cognism or ZoomInfo to check what data is still relevant and to get new fresh contacts.

💡Check out this interactive workflow if you need help figuring out how to collect and enhance your data.

5. Create lead generation campaigns

Other than investing in a data provider, your prospecting list strategy should include collecting new contacts via B2B marketing campaigns, website forms, webinars, organic SEO, and newsletter sign-ups.

Lead generation campaigns run through paid advertising via lead sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google can help you generate the most new contacts. Be sure to include a CTA that encourages data sharing, such as providing contact details to download a free eBook, guide, or template.

6. Implement lead scoring

Once you’ve collected enough marketing data through your prospecting activities, analyse and categorise the leads you’ve collected. Then, add the most relevant leads to your sales follow-up prospecting list.

Using lead scoring, you can categorise your sales leads on any factors you think are relevant such as the level of their intention to buy, the size of the company, the value the account will bring to your business etc.

To build or buy, that is the question

When it comes to B2B sales prospecting lists, many business owners think buying leads is easier than creating a data list of their own.

But this isn’t the case, not when you have a quality data provider to help ensure your prospect information is up to date, GDPR compliant and accurate.

In fact, buying sales contact lists can work out to be more trouble than they're worth because the data might not be accurate or GDPR compliant.

This can lead to a lot of annoyed prospects and even some hefty fines and penalties. Especially if the person you’re contacting is on a do not call list.

Did you know Cognism offers an exclusive mobile dataset called Diamond Data®, where we manually call each number to confirm it's correct?

YuLife used Cognism's compliant data to build its perfect business sales list. This is what Shay Khosrowshahi, Head of Revenue Operations, had to say:

“A stumbling block we previously had was getting our SDRs to make 50-70 calls per day. This is because they didn’t have a hot-cold call list of valid numbers available at their fingertips. With Cognism, they can generate a list of diamond-verified contacts within minutes.”

Start building your sales prospect lists with Cognism 👇