How to Build the Perfect Sales Prospecting List

Being in sales, you’ll probably know how crucial prospecting is to sales success. Doing it right allows you to work more efficiently and stay focused on the prospects that count – you know, that ones that might *actually* convert into paying customers.

And to get there, you’ll need a robust and relevant sales prospecting list to kick off the sales prospecting process. Once you have this carefully curated list of potential customers, you’ll know exactly who to contact.

But the thing is, building one isn’t easy.

So many salespeople end up with prospecting lists that include irrelevant contacts; in fact, about 40% of salespeople don’t target the right audience. Another 41% say they waste too much time talking to prospects who have no intention of becoming customers.

So, we thought it was a great idea to cover how to build the perfect prospecting list so you can dedicate your time, energy, and resources on prospects with the highest chances of converting. Here it is.

Who is the ideal prospect?

Before we answer this question, let’s quickly recap what sales prospecting actually is: sales prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers or buyers who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Once you’ve identified your prospects, the next step is to add them to your CRM so you can begin lead nurture and getting them down the sales funnel until they’re ready to convert into paying customers.

To find out who your ideal prospects are (and begin your sales prospecting process), you need to identify what kind of companies make the best customers. Then, you’ll want to define your buyer personas, or the decision makers within the companies who will ultimately sign the deal.

Defining your ICP

You probably have a general idea of which criteria to include already, especially if you already have customers – and *especially* if you’ve already read our guide to creating your ideal customer profile (cough cough… with an ICP template included… cough cough).

Three must-have considerations include criteria like industry, company size, and location. But, you’ll want to get more specific with your criteria checklist too. The general types of criteria – like company size and location – will produce very large prospecting lists, and include companies that won’t be so relevant.

Here are three quick steps for determining who your ICP is:

• Evaluate your current customers: Which do you consider to be the best (eg. closed the fastest, highest average deal size, highest CLV, offered the most referrals, or the ones you have upsold to)?
• Predict who will stick around long-term: Are they fully utilizing the product? Do they have full understanding of the capabilities of the solution? Have they seen improvement and ROI since using it?
• Identify the commonalities: Once you’ve identified 10-20 of your best customers, can you spot any additional attributes they have in common?

The answers to these questions should highlight the common traits of your ideal customers, which you can add to that ICP template of yours.

Defining your buyer personas

Then you’ve got to determine who your ideal prospects are by creating buyer personas. And before you ask: yes, we have a guide (and template) for buyer personas too.

Quick definition: Buyer personas are fictional characters that represent all of the possible decisionmakers a salesperson on your team should aim to speak to in each company that fits your ICP.

Here are the main criteria to consider when determining what your buyer personas look like:

• Title and seniority: What titles do these decision makers have and where in the organization do they rank? Does it make more sense to aim for mid-level managers and department heads, or is it crucial to involve C-suite executives at the early stage of the sales process?

• Decision-making authority: Do they have the ability to make purchasing decisions? Will you need to speak with additional stakeholders down the line?

• Personal goals: How is the prospect’s performance evaluated at work? What are their current goals?

• User: Will the prospect be the one to use your offering?

Once you identify which traits characterize your ICP and flesh out a few key buyer personas, you will know 1) which companies to pursue and which to ignore, and 2) who within the organization you should reach out to.

How to build a sales prospecting list

Now that we’ve established how to determine your ICP and customer personas, you should be ready to start building a sales prospecting list.

There are four simple steps for how to make a prospect list in sales:

1) Find companies that match your ICP

With your ICP criteria in front of you (ie. industry, company size, maturity, revenue, tech stack, service region, and so on), you’re ready to begin your search for new prospects.

The way you search for relevant companies depends on your criteria. For example, if your primary criteria is industry and service region, you could be able to use tools as basic as Google Maps. Let’s say you are selling industrial dishwashers to restaurants. In this case, you could simply use Google Maps to identify all of the restaurants in a given region.

If you sell social media management software to startup marketing teams, you will probably need to take a different approach. Tools like G2, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn could help you search for and narrow down potential customers by a range of criteria, such as company size, latest funding round, and number of employees.

But all these things are pretty manual, monotonous, and time-consuming.

With prospecting tools like SimilarWeb Sales Intelligence, you can instantly create a comprehensive list of relevant prospects based on a range of granular criteria.

Instead of pouring hours into your search, you simply input your criteria and hit search. The Sales Intelligence tool analyzes over 100 million websites worth of data to build a complete list of prospects that are ready to buy your product.

2) Identify the right decision-makers

After you have your list of prospects, the next step is to find out who the right decision-maker is within the companies you want to reach out to. And with that, it’s time to grab those customer personas.

Say you sell human resource management (HRM) software to enterprise companies. If you’ve determined that your top customer personas are Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs), HR VPs, and Chief Benefits Officers, you’ll want to find the individuals who hold these roles in each of the companies on your prospect list.

That’s one great thing about LinkedIn – you can search for the exact roles you’re looking for. It’s a particularly good platform for understanding more about the prospect, what they do, and what interests them which is always great for outreach sales emails.

BUT…

What if you could combine your lead generation efforts and decision-maker discovery in one platform?

Quick answer: you can with Similarweb Sales Intelligence.

3) Find their contact information

Without the means of contacting your prospects, that prospecting list of yours ain’t very useful.

Once you’ve identified the right individuals to reach out to, it’s time to start hunting down their email addresses and phone numbers.

Again, there are a bunch of tools that can help you with that – some examples include Swordfish AI, DiscoveryOrg, Uplead, Clearbit, AeroLeads, and so on. Of course, you can resort to contacting them through LinkedIn but we all know it has its drawbacks.

BUT… here comes another “but”.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence can streamline this prospecting task for you too. Yep, that means you can generate leads using our range of filters to make sure they fit with your ICP, you can find the right decision-makers for your sales pitch, and you can get all their contact information in just a couple of clicks.

On top of that, you can download the relevant (and direct) contact information from your entire prospect list straight into your CRM or to your desktop on an Excel spreadsheet.

That’s what you call ‘easy prospecting’.

4) Scoring your leads

Finally, you’ll want to rank your list of prospects by priority of who you want to target – or who you should be targeting – first. This is known as lead scoring.

Although every prospect on your list technically fits your ICP, there may be more strategic, reliable, or valuable prospects than others. Or, you might determine that one customer persona, say mid-level marketing managers, are actually slightly better targets than marketing VPs as they respond quicker, encouraging shorter sales cycles as a result.

Oh yeah, that’s another thing Similarweb Sales Intelligence can help you do.

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The importance of maintaining your prospecting list

So you’ve determined your ICP criteria, built out a few customer personas, identified individual prospects, found their contact information, and scored them.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

But the work isn’t over yet – to be honest, it never really ends.

Building a prospecting list is not a one-and-done job. It needs continuous maintenance and refinement to make sure it’s evolving alongside your sales team and business goals.

Here’s a few of the best ways to manage a list of prospects and keep it fresh:

• Keep your contacts current: As time goes on, your prospects will get promoted, change roles, switch companies, and retire. That’s why it’s important to periodically refresh your prospecting list and update any job changes. Otherwise, you risk wasting time crafting sales emails to prospects who are no longer relevant, and fail to reach those who are. Job changes and promotions are also great trigger events for reaching out or sending a follow-up email.

• Update your notes: Similarly, you’ll also want to keep your notes for each prospect’s company updated and current. The best way to do this is to set up Google alerts or Similarweb Sales Signals for each prospect’s company to stay abreast of any newsworthy changes, such as mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, executive changes, or other potential buyer triggers. Following the companies’ social media profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook could also help keep you in the know.

• Keep growing it: Expanding your book of business is probably one of your top sales goals. In order to do that, you need to convert more customers, which means nurturing more prospects. That’s why you should always be adding to your prospect list. Do this by running your searches on your prospecting tool at a regular cadence and add any new results to your prospecting list.

• Make sure it stays relevant: As time goes on and your sales strategy changes, your ICP criteria and customer buyers might change too. As a result, you’ll want to update your prospecting list to make sure everyone included is still relevant. If they aren’t, you will need to find new prospects that best fit your current business needs and sales goals.

• Keep re-ranking it: Naturally, with prospects getting eliminated and new ones being added, you’ll need to re-rank and score your prospecting list so your SDRs always know who to prioritize.

4 common sales prospecting mistakes to avoid

For busy salespeople who’ve got a lot on their plates, with some added pressure from their bosses, building a prospecting list can seem daunting. Even if you use an automation tool to create the list, you’re still responsible for analyzing your customers, defining your ICP, and determining your customer personas.

But taking shortcuts can create more problems than they resolve – here are four common sales prospecting mistakes that you want to avoid when building an efficient and effective prospecting list:

1) Buying low-quality lead lists

Never, and we mean never, purchase a lead list. If you do, you’ll end up with mostly junk contacts, broken emails, outdated roles, and totally irrelevant companies.

That combination is one that you almost definitely (/definitely definitely) want to miss.

It will do the opposite of speeding up your prospecting process. If anything, you’ll spend more time cleaning up the list than it would have taken to build one yourself.

2) Casting a net that’s too wide

If you’re making your ICP too general, you’ll end up with lots of prospects who wouldn’t actually make a good customer. That = not a good use of your time and resources.

Instead, take the time to really analyze your customers and determine a more robust and specific set of criteria with which to define your ICP.

3) Casting a net that’s not wide enough

Okay so, this scenario is less common, but it still happens. You might be being too specific with your ICP criteria, meaning you end up missing out on great potential customers.

While it’s important to pursue companies that have the necessary traits you’re looking for, you’ll also want to be flexible and test potential with companies that bring something new to the table as a customer.

4) Lack of alignment with marketing

You may or may not have heard us go ON about the importance of sales and marketing alignment. You know, smarketing.

Close alignment with marketing is crucial to effective sales in general, but it can be particularly helpful when building a prospecting list. Often, marketers are involved in developing customer personas, as they rely on this information when building targeted campaigns. By working together and gaining their input, you can create more comprehensive personas that aid in your outreach.

Working side-by-side with marketing also helps with continuity throughout the buyers’ journey and beyond, which is great for customer experience.

For other brilliant ways sales and marketing can successfully work together, check out Smarketing: Our Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment.

Build a prospect list quickly with Similarweb

You may have noticed the words ‘Similarweb Sales Intelligence’ sprinkled throughout this guide to prospect list building, and for good reason too.

Similarweb Sales Intelligence simplifies and speeds up the process of building a sales prospecting list (and the rest), helping you to sell way more efficiently. Here’s how:

• Advanced search: Use our lead generator tool and its huge range of filters to create a list of prospects that fit your ICP
• Contacts: Find the contact information of the right decision-maker you want to speak to, within each account you want to target
• CRM sync: Download the contact information straight into your CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce) or onto an Excel spreadsheet
• Lead scoring: Make the most of our lead scoring mechanisms to help with your lead qualification and prioritization
• Insights generator: Spruce up your industry, competitor and account knowledge with our handy insights generator, and website performance data
• Sales signals: Get alerted to company updates, including role changes to make sure your prospecting list is kept up to date, as well as new business, upsell and cross-sell opportunities

Sound good to you? Book a demo or talk with one of our experts to find out exactly how Similarweb can work for you and your sales goals this year.

FAQs

How can I create a targeted prospecting list?

Define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and gather contact information from online databases, professional platforms, and industry-specific directories that match your criteria.

What are the benefits of using a prospecting list?

A prospecting list allows you to focus on potential customers who are more likely to be interested in your offering, saving time and resources. It enables personalized outreach and helps track and measure the effectiveness of your prospecting activities.

How do I keep my prospecting list up to date?

Regularly review and validate contact information, using data cleansing tools or services to remove duplicates, update outdated details, and verify email addresses.

How can I optimize my prospecting list for better results?

Analyze your prospecting list for patterns or trends among successful leads, adjust your targeting criteria, tailor your messaging to address specific needs, and continuously track and measure results for ongoing improvement.