How to Build a Great Prospect List in 5 Steps

In the realm of B2B sales, the significance of building a great prospect list cannot be overstated. And, while the process of crafting a quality prospecting list demands time and effort, it's an indispensable strategy to ensure a consistent inflow of leads into your sales pipeline.

What is a Prospect List?

A prospect list is a curated collection of potential customers who are considered viable leads for your product or service. This list typically includes individuals or businesses that match certain criteria and have shown an interest or need for what you're offering. The goal of a prospect list is to guide sales and marketing efforts by focusing on engaging and converting these prospects into actual customers.

How to Build a Sales Prospect List

Improve sales efforts with our guide on how to build a prospect list. Connect with the right customers using these five steps:

Clarify Your Objective for the Prospect List

The first step to any successful business process is to define the reason why you're doing it. While the primary aim of building a potential customer list is to sell your product, it's crucial to consider scenarios where the list serves a specific campaign targeting distinct demographics. Most companies don’t have a one size fits all prospect list that they use for all of their products.

Your prospects will vary depending on your sales goals, the nature of the campaign, and the product you’re promoting. Understanding the purpose behind building your prospect list is the first step to success.

Define Your Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a detailed and semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and data. It encompasses the demographics, behaviors, preferences, challenges, and goals of your ideal customer and will help you better understand your target audience, to build a list that is valuable instead of just big.

Invest in a CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is an ideal place to house your prospect list. They not only store your customer data, but streamline communication, and enhance collaboration within your team. Ongoing, they also serve as a tool to track customer interactions, manage leads, and optimize sales processes, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

Research Potential Prospects

Researching potential customers saves time by eliminating leads that wouldn't have qualified through further exploration. When diving into prospect research, there is an array of tools that can help.

• You can use Anymail Finder’s LinkedIn Email Finder Chrome Extension to extract the email addresses of all of the people at one company, a particular category of people such as CEOs in Los Angeles, or all of the people in a particular group on LinkedIn.
• Leverage platforms such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator to grasp prospect businesses' brand identity, audience, and values.
• Use prospect research tools such as Leadfeeder that can help identify companies that have already visited your website.
• Or, get crafty and use a tool like BuzzSumo to find people who have Tweeted about your product, showing their potential interest.

You can also procure prospect lists from direct marketing firms or pay to obtain data about specific industries.

Regardless of your chosen method(s), prioritize understanding prospects' core challenges and how your offerings can address them. As you dig deeper into your research, your initial list will naturally evolve.

Collect Contact Information

After researching and curating a list of prospects, whether they are individuals or businesses, the next step is to acquire their contact information and save it in your CRM.

At a minimum, contact details should contain the company's name, the individual's name (if applicable), an email address, and a phone number. To elevate your sales efforts, consider incorporating elements like previous interactions, common sales goals, birthdays, and other important specifics that could be relevant to your sales campaign.

Let Anymail Finder Simplify Your Process

Anymail Finder's email finder offers a streamlined solution to expedite the prospect list-building process. If you know the name or business name of your prospect (which you will if you follow these steps), use the Anymail app to quickly find their email address.

Anymail Finder eliminates the time-consuming task of manually sourcing contacts and gets you one step closer to making a sale.