How to Build The Best Sales Prospect List - Guide for 2024

Sales prospecting, according to 40% of salespeople, is also one of the most difficult aspects of selling. This is why it is critical to get it right.

Even though sales is a numbers game and many sales reps would believe the more prospects the better, but most experts advise against casting a wide net in the hope of landing a sale without checking for the relevance and quality. Instead, to get better results and achieve their targets, most successful sales professionals focus on creating and reaching out to hyper-targeted lists of only the most qualified prospects.

However, identifying the right prospects and the best way to reach them is, of course, no easy task. It necessitates not only a thorough understanding of products and services but also an intimate knowledge of one's customer base and access to the necessary tools and information.

So, whether you're new to sales prospecting techniques or a seasoned sales professional, this article has something for you. Here are some effective prospect list creation tips and tricks.

A Sales Prospect List, also known as a prospecting list or a lead list, is a compilation of potential customers that are likely to be interested in your business and services offered.

Building a Sales Prospect List involves research, data collection, and analysis. The sources for generating prospects can vary and may include customer referrals, social media platforms, purchased databases, prospecting tools, etc.

By having a targeted list of potential customers, sales representatives can focus their efforts on those who are most likely to convert, saving time and resources. Regular updating and refining of the prospect list are essential to maintain its accuracy and relevance as prospects may change positions, companies, or contact information over time.

Now that we have a basic idea of what a sales prospect list is, here are the key points you should remember before creating one:

Understanding what you're offering is a prerequisite for determining who your ideal prospects are.

The understanding of your offering must go beyond the fundamentals and delve further into particular use cases, feature sets, and challenging success stories for a sales representative to be genuinely remarkable.

Enhancing your product knowledge will not only make it easier for you to identify potential customers who are qualified, but it will also help you complete more deals, confidently handle challenging inquiries, conduct yourself on calls, and more. Dillard's found that every hour its employees spent learning about products raised their sales rate by 5% (source).

Here are some questions you should ask yourself to get a better understanding of your product:

● In your daily life, would you feel at ease using the thing you're selling?
● Do you lose sales as a result of your product in some way? Or, is there anything that usually enables you to clinch challenging deals?
● Or, is there anything that usually enables you to clinch challenging deals?

Discovering who your best clients are is a necessary step before you begin constructing your prospect list. These are the clients who will benefit from your services the most.

You can identify your ideal clients by creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Here is a handy two-step guide on creating an ICP that will assist you:

→ Understanding what makes a customer ideal or the best for a company

To find the perfect, most suitable customers, you must examine and scrutinize your current clientele. To determine (or score) your most suitable consumers, ask the following questions:

● Who Has the greatest chance of success and possesses great expansion potential?
● Who closed most quickly?
● Who has the greatest potential for advocacy or referrals?
● Who has the biggest Average Deal Size(ADS) and Lifetime Customer Value(LCV)?

→ Make a list of your top clients and look for connections among them

Now that you are aware of the characteristics that make a customer perfect or the best for a business, create a list and look for common traits.

● Do they both employ the same number of people?
● Do they work in the same field or industry?
● How long has the company been in operation and where do they operate from?
● How much money do they bring in annually?
● Are they concentrated on the SaaS or e-commerce markets? What kind of clients are they providing? Businesses or customers?
● Are there any specialized technologies that they employ?
● Are they looking to expand?

By asking these common questions you will be able to target the most suitable customer.

Once you've established a trustworthy ICP, you can utilize that data to design your buyer profile. The buyer persona describes the potential or likely characteristics of the critical decision-makers on your prospect list.

A clearly defined buyer persona not only increases the effectiveness of your sales process but also enables you to better understand the thoughts and feelings of your clients.

● Demographics
● How long have they been working in the company?
● How are they evaluated at their job?
● Salary
● Goals & interests
● Pain points

Above are some of the key points to remember while building your ideal buyer persona.
Here is an illustration of how to create a buyer persona:

One of the most important B2B recruiting strategies that are frequently ignored is this one. You will need to make contact with individuals in several organizational tiers if you want to improve your chances of closing the business. Knowing who is who and who reports to whom is helpful.

To better comprehend the company's problem points, you can start prospecting for junior and middle management. When you speak to decision-makers at the top of the organizational ladder of the company, it will help you customize your sales pitch. This prospecting strategy may be applied to SMBs just as easily as it can in enterprise sales. You can also try engaging executive search firms to identify and connect with top-level decision makers, thereby enhancing B2B recruiting efforts.

One of the most important steps in the strategic prospecting process is learning as much as you can about your target before you get in touch with them. You must be certain that the audience you're aiming at will benefit from your offering.

LinkedIn is the best option here. You get access to all the data you may need on a single screen. Make sure the prospect satisfies the requirements in your ICP by evaluating it. You may, for instance, see if they are currently using one of your competitors.

Although discovering your ideal prospects is easier on LinkedIn, finding ways to reach out to them can get hectic. This is where using sales prospecting tools and email finder tools such as Clearout can bring great relief and efficiency to your entire prospect list-building process.

Clearout is an email verification, email finder, & prospecting tool that helps you build and maintain a good quality database of prospects & customers. Clearout finds the verified contact details of your prospects in seconds so that you can focus more on converting them.

Clearout Prospecting Extension For LinkedIn: To enrich your sales prospect list with your prospects’ verified details such as email address, phone number, geo-location, job title, etc, directly from your Prospect’s LinkedIn Profile. You can also extract the data of prospects in bulk directly from the search page.

Clearout Email Finder: To find the verified email addresses of your b2b prospects in bulk with just their name and company domain name. The result is supported by confidence scoring, and you also get the option to filter out any role-based accounts, and generic email addresses.

👉 Also Read: How To Find Emails From LinkedIn Profiles?

Clearout Email Verifier: To verify your existing prospect database, and get rid of any spam, fake, invalid, or unwanted prospect details, that are degrading the quality of your prospect list and your sales campaigns. The verification provides 99% accuracy while running each email address through 20+ checks, so that can you never have to think about the validity of your prospects, and you can reach out to them with full confidence.

Hence, with Clearout, you can:

● Generate pre-verified prospects to get higher conversion
● Save time & money by automating the sales prospecting process
● Discover prospect’s contact details with high accuracy & AI-based confidence scoring
● Verifying existing sales prospect list to enhance the quality of the list while removing any bad leads
● Eliminate the hours of manual prospect lookup and focus more on nurturing & converting the leads

In addition to spending time on finding prospects’ data, your prospecting approach should include acquiring new contacts through B2B marketing campaigns, cold emails, website forms, webinars, natural SEO, and newsletter sign-ups.

You may create the newest contacts by running lead generation campaigns through paid advertising on lead sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google. Include a call to action (CTA) that promotes data sharing, such as requesting contact information in exchange for a free eBook, template, or guide.

👉 Also Read: 6 Tips To Make Your Cold Email Campaign Stand Out

This is an essential step in the sales prospecting process since it identifies the strategies that are most effective for you. You'll be able to concentrate on the most lucrative ones and identify areas for development.

You may redefine your ICP quarterly by understanding what causes prospects to convert through results analysis. You can also consider what went well and poorly in each engagement you have with potential clients.

Many sales representatives feel scared when they consider how to initially contact well-qualified prospects, even though they are the best-fit, match-made-in-heaven potential customers.

Think about altering your perspective. Try redefining your outreach as a task of aid and help rather than the start of the sales process. Your responsibility as a salesperson is to provide value in all of your encounters, and you should begin doing so well before the client signs the contract.

The "sales" portion of your interactions will flow more naturally and seem less awkward if you approach them from the standpoint of wanting to assist. You can also focus on a few things such as:

● Request an introduction: Few things are more effective than a favorable introduction from a mutual connection when making a first impression.

Spend some time determining whether you have a common contact while preparing to engage a new prospect. If you do, don't be afraid to ask them to connect you with someone. The majority of businesspeople are eager to interact and network.

●Try a Drip Campaign: The prospect can be warmed up with automated drip email marketing in preparation for a more individualized discovery call.

A drip campaign is where you set up emails at a set time based on your prospect’s certain actions. Even cold leads may rapidly warm up with the correct time and substance. This also relieves some of the salesperson's strain, saving their time and effort.

👉 Also Read: 5 successful elements to successful drip campaigns

Emails are one of the best ways to grab your prospects’ attention, so it is imperative to invest in cold email outreach tools that help you boost your conversion rate. There are numerous cold email outreach tools available today, to make your work a piece of cake.

Here are a few tools that can be game changers for your cold sales prospecting outreach campaigns:

1. Clearout.io: For validating your leads and building a high-quality email list that converts.

2. Lemlist: For personalized email outreach and cold email campaigns, enabling you to scale and automate your email marketing efforts effectively.

3. HubSpot: For inbound marketing to sales automation and from attracting leads to closing deals.

4. Instantly.ai: For scaling your outreach campaigns with unlimited email sending accounts, unlimited warmup, and smart AI.

The most challenging aspect of your outreach campaign is putting together a prospect list. However, it's one of the most crucial, since even the best cold email campaign will fail if the list is inaccurate.

The secret is to invest time in selecting the ideal prospects if you want your outreach activities to be successful.

So, with patience and knowledge about sales prospecting, you should be well on your way to focusing on prospects who have a good chance of becoming customers.