Creating an effective B2B sales prospecting list for resounding success in 2022

A good growth strategy requires effective B2B sales prospecting. With the help of prospecting, you can rapidly grow your customer base and revenue by building an effective, repeatable system for generating pipelines. The success of B2B sales prospecting is dependent on the quality of your sales prospect lists.

If you don’t reach out to the right people, your sales and marketing messages may fall on deaf ears. To find success in today’s market, it is critical to use hyper-targeted sales prospecting lists made up of only the most qualified prospects.

To help you set foot on the right note, we have compiled this comprehensive sales prospecting list guide that will go over everything you need to know about creating an effective B2B sales prospecting list.

But, before we dive into the expert-approved tips, let us first understand what sales prospecting means.

What is Sales prospecting?

Sales prospecting includes identifying, researching, and, in some cases, contacting prospective clients who are good fits for your products or services. Close to 80% of salespeople consider it one of the most challenging parts of sales.

Despite their best efforts, just 24% of their sales emails are opened, and even fewer calls are answered.

All these issues arise because of an inefficient sales prospecting list. As per a 2022 study, 50% of your prospects don’t even qualify as “good-fits.” An effective sales prospecting list can minimize sales prospecting issues and produce a better return on your investments.

#1. Understand your product

To build a targeted prospect list, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your offering. It would help to hold a team-wide product training to contemplate on what exactly you’re selling. By understanding the product, we don’t just mean basic features and benefits; you also need to make sure your teams are well versed with your product’s USP.

#2. Know your customers

Having a top-to-bottom understanding of the businesses that your product would best serve really makes a big difference to your prospecting strategies. You need to acquaint yourself with the firmographic benchmarks, specific pain points, and influencing factors that would make certain businesses a good fit for your products. This knowledge would also help in conversations with key decision-makers. An excellent way to start is by studying your existing customer base’s demographics. Analyzing the current customers will help you understand the characteristics of the ideal prospects you’re currently trying to engage. You may want to ask questions like –

• Which customers have the highest potential?
• Which customers have Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)?
• Who closed the deals fastest?
• Which customers have the most potential for referrals or advocacy?

#3. Create an Ideal Customer Profile 

By creating an Ideal Customer Profile, you avoid wasting your efforts and time chasing unproductive leads and prospects.

Below are some crucial aspects needed to create an ideal customer profile:

• The company’s size
• Their region.
• Your prospect’s background
• The age group of your prospects
• The gender that you are targeting
• The key decision-makers in the company
• Prospect’s previous payment routine
• Your prospect’s goals
• Challenges faced by the prospect

The below example elucidates what an ideal customer profile looks like.

Source: stratwell.ca

With this example in mind, you can start building your ideal customer profile. After creating the suitable Ideal Customer Profiles, you can begin prospecting based on your narrowed-down list.

#4. Find commonalities between your best customers

After creating your ideal customer profile and identifying your best customers, find similar attributes shared by them. To be more accurate with your targeting, come up with as many characteristics of such customers.

The following questions can be helpful to figure out commonalities between your best customers.

• Are they in the same industry?
• Do they have similar numbers of employees?
• How much revenue do they generate annually?
• What’s their location?
• What customers are they serving?

By narrowing down on common features between the decision-makers in your ICP companies, you can create buyer personas.

#5. Leverage LinkedIn to build a Targeted Prospect List

LinkedIn is an excellent professional social media platform to build a highly targeted B2B prospect list in a few easy steps.

Searching for prospects with filters –

Click on the “Filter people by” option to find your targeted audience. There are several filters to downsize your search. You can filter using the industry, the region of your audience, and much more.

Source: blog.linkedin.com

Initiate contact–

Once you have cut down your choices, you would send a personal message to your prospect. You can also ask your common contact to introduce you to your target contact and provide information about your work and brand.

In addition, if you and your prospect are members of the same group, don’t hesitate to initiate the contact. Based on group activities, you can even discern their requirements, pain points, and interests.

Start building your list in a few easy steps.

These simple steps can help you build a prospect list manually:

• Find companies that are compatible with your ICP
• The next step is to search for the decision-makers associated with these companies
• Find the contact details of these influential people.
• Validate your contact data.

a. Arrange and Prioritize Your Sales Prospect List

To be more productive, it’s important to spend most of your time and resources on prospects who need your product. Therefore, you must aim to organize and prioritize your list according to your prospect’s readiness to buy and budget.

To do so, you first need to describe your targets – do you want bigger deals? More deals? Faster deals?

By knowing your goals, you can shape your list according to the most urgent priority. Other critical factors to consider while honing your list:

• Would this prospect be a good organizational match for us?
• Can you identify decision-makers and key stakeholders in the company?
• Do you already know the potential customer’s market?
• Are there any constraints for this prospect, and are those constraints deal-breakers?
• Is the candidate aware of your offering?
• Does this client have potential lifetime value?

With these questions, you can determine how many sales resources you can dedicate to a given prospect at any given time.

b. Using technology to measure the readiness of potential clients

Feeding your sales pipeline is not always easy and fun. That’s why several sales teams today rely on B2B sales prospecting tools to gather intelligence better, move faster, engage prospects, and close more deals. Modern prospecting software can gauge the engagement levels of each of your prospects and guide on how to proceed with that prospect.

A good prospecting software can save you time and hassles and help you in the following areas:

• Creating your prospect list
• Finding contact details
• Qualifying prospects
• Engaging leads

You can also find out which content appeals the most to your prospects so you can move more leads through the funnel.

Wrap Up

Your prospecting list is one of the most critical elements of your sales and marketing campaigns. An optimized sales prospecting list can give you better odds of landing new accounts and driving revenue. Use this guide to unlock the considerable benefits that an effective sales prospecting list can bring to your business.