When sales prospecting, having a good prospect list can be a very large factor in the level of success you have. The cold call script we use and what we say during our prospecting has a large impact on how well our conversations go. If we’re not working from a good list of target prospects, our valuable time might be wasted on the incorrect prospects. Because of this, if more time is spent on building a good target list it greatly improves our probability for success.

Identify the Ideal Prospect

Identifying what our ideal prospect looks like is the first step in building a good target list. While we may have the ability to sell our products to a big or very diverse market of prospects, it’s likely our products or services fit best and/or better with a certain segment.

Identify what this segment looks like in terms of characteristics and build your prospect list around those because having the focus primarily on that segment creates the best results. That doesn’t mean we won’t sell to the other segments, but from an outbound sales perspective, the focus should be on the prospects who fit best because they’ll be more likely to purchase.

We can look at five characteristics and determine what ideal prospects look like for our products or services to identify our ideal prospects.

  • Geography: Think about what geographic area we should focus on. We can usually sell our products and services everywhere or at least in a big area. We improve our sales prospecting results by focusing our efforts in one particular area.
  • Size: Identify the company size which fits best with what we have to offer or identify what business size will be easiest to do business with. A good way to narrow that down is to identify a range of annual revenue or employee count.
  • Industry: Identify what industries fit best with your products or services when creating a prospect list. When consuming your products, are there one or two industries that gain more business value than others?
  • Title: Determine the best individual or title which you should connect with. Most likely, there is a particular individual in the organization in terms of level and functional department which you should focus on.
  • Current state: The ideal current state for your prospects is an important thing to identify for your prospect list. This includes details for your prospect’s current state in the area where your products or services fit.

Build Primary List

Begin building a primary target list once you know what your ideal prospect looks like. This can be a list of all of the prospects that you know about or with whom you already have a relationship. Refer to it as your warm list.

Build Secondary List

Use different services to build a mass cold list after you have gone through or have identified your warm prospects. An example, there are services that allow you to build a list by going online and inputting your ideal prospect characteristics as well as producing a list of thousands of target prospects in minutes.

 

SalesScripter provides helping sales pros to build a prospect list.