A robust prospect list is crucial to establishing a solid customer base, as it provides your business with many potential customers who can be hooked up with your products and services. 

There is much more that you can do than sending emails in cold. By researching and gathering data for the ideal targets, you will be able to build a solid prospect list and increase the number of actual customers. 

What Means “Prospecting” in Sales

Sales prospecting is when you identify, research, and execute the initial outreach to customers that fit your market target. For sales reps, this is one of the most challenging points, as often it is when they approach directly to a customer in cold. But when done correctly, it could be one of the most significant factors in the overall success of the sales team.

Every company has its own style and manners when dealing with a potential customer. Still, it all comes down to two different strategies: Outbound and Inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing is the direct approach. This means when we do phone calls, emails, advertising on traditional media (Radio and TV), or billboards. Sales reps work from a long list of companies that fit their demographics and reach out to them with cold emails or phone calls to further qualify them.

Meanwhile, Inbound marketing is about sharing content to generate opt-in leads, who will willingly share their contact information in exchange for content that touches their points. This can be blog posts, articles, videos, use of social media, or focusing on SEO content. 

Most companies are moving to this last approach, but the best strategy is to do both. Doing cold calling or sending cold emails can be very effective when it's done properly. 

What is a Prospect List

A "sales prospect list" is a list of customers and companies who seems to fit your product and services. 

All the prospecting efforts that the sales team could do will, ultimately, depend on the quality of the prospect list. It should be full of interested and qualified leads who have a big chance of buying your product or service. Otherwise, no matter how good your sales team is, you won't sell anything to a customer that doesn't fit your ideal buyer, and it will end up wasting time for your sales reps. 

Difference Between Prospect and Lead

When we talk about sales, these two concepts can sometimes be mixed. But both have different meanings. 

A lead is a company or an individual who has provided its contact information. This shows interest in your product or service. But a lead may not fit your target profile. 

Conversely, a prospect is someone (company or individual) that fits your profile. Still, it hasn't shown interest in your business yet. It can be someone who consumes your content or participates in events or webinars but hasn't shown interest in purchasing anything from your company. 

A prospect could quickly meet your ideal buyer profile but can end up being unqualified as it may don't have the budget currently or getting your product isn’t their priority. 

Prepare Your Prospecting

When drafting your prospect list, there are several key data points to determine who should make the cut. 

You will need to understand what you are selling and to whom and extend the research to make a strong prospect list.  

Know Your Product

It's crucial to understand what you are selling. Your sales rep needs to have a very deep understanding of your offering. Increasing product knowledge will not only refine your skill to pinpoint qualified prospects but will also help to close more deals and improve your sales abilities. 

It’s also a good idea to seek the advice of a product expert, sales manager, or peer. The more you know, the easier it will be.

Know Your Target

Any salesperson must have a thorough understanding not only of the product but of whom it will fit best. 

They should be familiar with the demographic benchmarks that make the business a good fit, as well as the pain points and influencing factors they would encounter in talks with any key decision-maker. 

To create a prospect list, take a fresh look at your best customers rather than depending on outdated profiles.  

Research

Before making any sort of phone calls or emails, spend time researching the company you are targeting. You should visit their website or their social media pages to learn more about the company's brand, audience, and values. 

You can set Google Alerts to inform your salespeople of the latest news in their field or industry.

This back-end research will ensure you're prepared to reach out to only the leads that seem promising and to lucrative sales opportunities. Also, it will save you time in eliminating all the leads that should be disqualified through further discovery. Detailed research will shape your content into well-regarded leads as you move through the rest of the sales process.

Gather Data and Begin Your Prospect Outreach Campaigns

With all the pre-concepts about making a prospect list already covered, it's time to search for potential clients. 

With the modern world moving toward a digital era, you can use the power of the internet to your advantage to reach out to prospective customers. There are plenty of tools out there.

Historical and Existing Customer Data

You should begin by looking at your historical data or existing prospect data. It could have a low volume of ideal prospects for you, but it's a fine start. 

Combining historical customer and prospect data will help identify deals that fell through for no apparent reason. Sometimes priorities can shift for the worst or in your favor. Follow up with former customers, lost prospects, or those incomplete deals. 

You can also ask existing customers for referrals. It's an effective way to add new contacts to your prospect list. But don't limit yourself to just asking customers. Prospects are usually happy to recommend their connections or colleagues who might be interested.  

Social Media

It has become a powerful tool with a staggering amount of information. And not only LinkedIn, as it's well-known to be more professional, but each of the social media platforms has proven to be a viable business tool. So, you are at a bad start if you don't use social media as part of your sales prospecting routine.

Consider each platform's search functionality. Some will play a more pronounced role than others. We mentioned LinkedIn, where sales professionals can do searches based on job title, company size, etc. 

However, on other platforms, you should be more creative. For example, on Twitter, users can look into brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags. To find the best prospects, check for words and phrases associated with your product's pain points.

Google Alerts

It's recommended to use Google Alerts to receive notifications about any important event, brand mention, industry news, and much more. 

If something happens to X company that could fit your buyer profile, you can reach out to them with some previous knowledge. 

Purchase Data for the Prospect List

Then we have the fastest and easiest way of all. Just buy the prospect list. There are many sources from where you can purchase prospect lists based on your target market. These data providers offer a host of advanced search capabilities, so you can generate a list of qualified prospects by your criteria.

Their tools also offer the necessary contact information. But if you choose this method, you should double-check the data. The accuracy of these prospect lists cannot be relied upon, and some could not have up-to-date information.

How to Write Your Prospect List

With the data gathered, there are some considerations to consider when making a proper prospect list. 

Create Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

To target more accurately, you need to narrow down your prospect pool. For this, sales managers must create their ideal "buyer persona," known as the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will help you to identify which form from the list can be ideal customers.

There are some parameters that you need to consider to create your ideal customer profile: 

• Industry: Check from which industry your customer comes.
• Company Size and Geographic Location: Do these customers come from a company of the same size as yours? Where is it located?
• Title: Check who are your different profiles concerned with at different stages of the buying process.
• Revenue: Consider the minimum revenue of the company that you want to target.

Once this is done, you can proceed with refining your search and focusing on more profound issues. Some of them are:

• Challenges: What are the problems your customers face? How can your service or product solve them? What they already try?
• Pain Points: What pain points are they facing, and how does your product relieve them?
• Customer Lifetime: Check how valuable it is for the customer. How much money do they contribute over their lifetime tenure with your company? And does their value correspond with their company size, industry, etc.?
• Referral Potential: Check how much your average customer refers to your business. Which customers have the most referral potential? 
• Loyalty and Advocacy: See which factors lead customers to become brand advocates.

The buyer persona outlines the probable attributes of the decision-makers within your prospect list. The more you know about them, the better.

Check Your Prospect Info

You have your buyer persona ready. But what should be included in the prospect information? There are some critical points that you shouldn't miss.

A well-detailed prospect profile must have any relevant ICP data and buyer persona details, company name, contact name, email address and website, phone number, any other important information about the company/individual, and the company's LinkedIn profile. 

These profiles can go from very detailed to just as simple as possible. Collaborate with your sales or marketing team to determine the data points they need to be available in order to engage with prospects.

Check Company Websites

If you have issues figuring out the company's leaders, you can always refer to their website. 

Many have an "About Us" section or a "Leadership" page where you can see the key decision-makers, learn more about their roles, and obtain their contact details.

You can also verify if someone is still working for the company or not. It's useful to ensure you are not collecting bad data and outdated contacts.

Organize Your Sale Prospect List

You will want to prioritize your list according to who is more willing to buy. Aim to spend more resources on those who have a clear need for your product and the money to invest. 

In order to categorize your sales prospect list, you need to define if you want more deals, larger deals, or closing them faster. Knowing your benchmarks and objectives will help you to shape the list accordingly to the most urgent priority. 

There are some key points that you should take into account to hone the prospecting list even further:

• If the prospect is a good fit for your company.
• Do you understand their stakeholder's and key decision-makers motives for the company?
• Does the prospect have any constraints that can affect the deal?
• Are you familiarized with the potential customer's market?
• What is the possible lifetime value of the client?

Answering these questions will help you to define how many resources should be dedicated to a given prospect. How much value can you provide to them against how much you gain in return?

As you go through this stage of the prospecting process, you will find that some leads have constraints. Don't let these hold you back. Some leads can be left suspended while they still receive automated content until they move higher on the priority list. Sometimes, a "no" is not definitive. It could be that they can afford your product right now.

Write Your List in Excel

Suppose you have doubts about where or how to dump all the information into a feasible document. In that case, you can simply do it by yourself in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. If you need a key, you can get one at a low price in RoyalCDKeys, including the whole Office package and its latest version. 

A prospect list template should include key information about your contacts, such as their full name, companies, contact details (phone number, email address), LinkedIn profiles, their companies' size and location, and any other relevant information or notes. Some may include their first contact date, when they should follow up, and who referred them.

You can just fill cells with this info, making a simple table. Or, if you are in a hurry, we have some templates example that you can use in Excel.

Prospect List Template

As we stated before, this example comes with the very basic info you need to include. You have the table already done. All you have to do is fill it with your data. You can get it for free on Quickmail.

Sales Lead Tracker

This template is more specific, focusing more on the sales numbers you can get from your leads rather than writing down your contact information. You can combine it with the previous template and create a prospect list on a different sheet. You can get it from the Microsoft website for free.

Conclusion

Creating a comprehensive prospect list will guide you in finding leads, resulting in positive sales. 

One won't get much further if they keep trying to sell a product to someone, individual or company, who would never think to even check it out. So, deep research to have those potential customers will pay much more than just sending a bunch of cold emails, hoping someone will catch the hook.