If you’ve worked in sales for any length of time, you know that success depends on the quality of your sales prospect lists.
Sales is a numbers game, but most sales professionals caution against casting a wide net in the hopes of catching a sale. Instead, they find success by creating and reaching out to well-targeted lists of the most qualified prospects.
Unfortunately, identifying the right people and the best way to reach them is no simple task. It requires a deep understanding of your products and services, an extreme familiarity with your customer base, and access to the right sales tools and information.
Whether you’re new to B2B sales prospecting or an established veteran, it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends for developing strong sales prospect lists — accessing advanced buying signals, high-quality B2B data, and the best sales AI assistants on the market.
What is a Prospect List in Sales?
A sales prospect list is a carefully curated and organized collection of potential customers that identifies likely candidates for purchasing your product or service. Your list of prospects typically includes key details such as contact information, company size, industry, and other relevant data points that help prioritize and personalize sales outreach efforts.
The effectiveness of a prospecting list is determined by the accuracy and relevance of the data, which should align with your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and target market. This list serves as a foundation for the sales process, enabling a structured and systematic approach to reaching out, qualifying leads, and converting prospects into customers.
What’s the Difference Between a Prospect List and a Lead List?
A prospect list identifies potential customers that fit an ideal customer profile — but who have not yet engaged with the company. They are the targets for initial outreach efforts.
In contrast, a lead list includes individuals or businesses that have already shown interest in your products or services through some form of interaction. This positions them further along in the sales funnel and more likely to convert.
The main difference between the two lists lies in the stage of the sales process: prospects require initial outreach and leads are closer to making a purchase decision.
How to Get a List of Prospects: Building a Sales Lead List
1. Understand Your Offering
Before you can identify who your best sales prospects are, you must first understand what you’re selling.
To be a truly exceptional sales rep, your product knowledge must surpass the basics and dive deeper into specific use cases, feature sets, and customer success stories. Not only will increasing your product knowledge improve your ability to pinpoint qualified prospects, it will help you answer difficult questions, speak confidently on calls — and close more deals.
Sales teams often have lengthy onboarding processes. 76% of sales reps say their enablement and training helps prepare them to make their quota.
Start this process by asking yourself the following questions:
- What problem is your product designed to solve? If your product is able to solve several problems, which one appears to be the most important?
- Is there something about your product that typically helps you close difficult deals? Just as important, is there something that could cause you to lose deals?
- Could you explain how to use your product to your grandparents? To a fifth-grader? Without having it in front of you?
- What would a valuable customer say is the most frustrating part of your product or service? The most helpful?
- Would you be comfortable using the product you’re selling in your day-to-day life?
If you can’t answer these questions, seek the advice of a superior, a product expert, or a peer. The more you know about your products and services, the easier your job will be.
2. Understand Your Buyer
Understanding your buyers and the factors that drive their purchase decisions will help focus your prospect pool.
For the purpose of creating a sales prospect list, we recommend taking a fresh look at your best customers. As you research them, it’s important to notice their common characteristics. These will help guide your efforts to create a highly-targeted prospect list.
There are multiple ways to conduct prospect and customer research, including manual data analysis, market intelligence tools, and customer surveys. No matter which research method you choose, there are certain data points you must pay close attention to.
Cornerstone Data Points
- Industry – Do your best customers work within a certain industry or set of industries?
- Company size – Do your best customers come from companies of a similar size?
- Job title – Are your buyers typically managers? Senior managers? C-level employees?
- Revenue – How much money do your customers typically earn in any given year? Is there a certain threshold level for your best customers?
Advanced Data Points
- Biggest challenges and pain points – What problem do they use your product to solve? What challenges and pain points do they experience?
- Important success metrics and goals – How do they measure success? What goals are they trying to achieve with your product? What goals have they already achieved?
- Product likes and dislikes – What do your customers like the most about your product? What do they dislike? What are their must-haves when it comes to new purchases?
- Technographics – What tools do they already use? Do they use tools or platforms that integrate with your products? Do they use a competitor’s product?
- Engagement preferences – Do your best customers prefer to engage by phone, email, social media, or in person? Is there a particular time they’re most often available? How many times does it typically take your customers to engage with sales outreach?
- Communication styles – How do your customers talk about the industry? The market? Your product? Do they use a casual tone or a more formal tone? Do they prefer more technical conversations? Do they want you to lose the industry jargon?
Granular Data Points
- Key motivations and buying triggers – What makes this prospect purchase new products? Is there an event or set of events that signals their readiness to purchase?
- Customer Lifetime Value – How valuable is each of your customers? How much money do they contribute over their lifetime tenure with your company? How does their value correspond with their industry and company size?
- Referral potential – What types of customers have the most referral potential? How much business does your average customer refer to you?
- Product use – What determines a customer’s likelihood of making bigger purchases, expanding their feature set, or being upsold on another offer?
- Advocacy – Is there a possibility of a preferred customer becoming a brand advocate?
- Brand value – Do your best customers lend credibility to your company because of their brand value? How does this added value impact your ability to make more sales?
3. Organize Your Information
At this point in the process, you should have two data sets. One contains important information about your products and services, the other contains important information about your best customers and ideal prospects.
Now, it’s time to merge them into the beginnings of your B2B prospect list. To start, ask yourself one question: Who is my product made for? Or, to put it a different way, who needs my product? Using the information you gathered thus far, you must figure out the answer.
Your final result may look something like this:
Company
Medium-sized businesses in the manufacturing, shipping, and logistics industries that make more than $10 million in revenue annually.
Buyer
The initial inquiry is typically made by someone in a management position, but a senior manager or higher-level employee often has the final say.
This buyer often struggles to manage multiple technologies at once to streamline information regarding payments, audits, route planning, and carriers.
Their success is based on efficiency and eliminating bottlenecks in the process, measured in time and expense. They are busy and straightforward. They prefer communicating by phone and they often want to get right to the point.
Skip the small talk.
Motivators
Your best customers often make large purchases after several important trigger events. Important triggers include the implementation of new industry regulations or any breaking news of high-profile security breaches.
This indicates they value legal compliance and safety above all else. As you release new features and products that improve efficiency, mitigate risk, and heighten security, your best customers will have no issue spending more money with you.
Added Value
The customers who spend the most money with you are certainly valuable. But the ones with the highest customer lifetime value are often smaller businesses that spend less money, but advocate for your brand online and recommend your products to their peers.
You’ve narrowed down your research into a digestible list of target characteristics and features, but there’s still more work to do. Up until now, we’ve only talked in hypotheticals. But simply knowing what types of people and companies to target will only get you so far.
To build the ultimate sales prospect list, you must identify the real companies and buyers who fit the mold you’ve created.
4. Identify Your Key Players and Accounts
Now that you’ve gathered and analyzed your best customer data, you have a good idea of what you’re looking for in a prospect. Where does your search begin? We recommend a combination of the following channels, outlets, and tools to build the most comprehensive prospect list:
Social Media
If you’re not using social media as part of your sales prospecting efforts, you’re missing out. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X(Twitter), have proven to be a valuable business sales tool.
To identify qualified sales prospects on social media, consider each platform’s search functionality. Some platforms will play a more obvious role than others. Take LinkedIn for example: A B2B sales professional can conduct searches based on criteria like job title, company size, and department.
But with other platforms, you’ll have to get more creative. On X (previously Twitter), users can monitor brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags. To find qualified prospects, you should monitor words and phrases associated with the problems your product solves. Or, keep tabs on mentions of your competitors.
As you spend more time within each platform you’ll discover quick and easy search functionality to incorporate into your prospecting efforts.
Google Alerts
We recommend using Google Alerts to receive notifications about important trigger events, brand mentions, industry news, legislation, and more.
Let’s look at a quick example. A corporate compliance training company rolls out a new course in preparation for an upcoming change in privacy legislation. After setting a Google Alert for that particular law, a sales rep with the company receives a notification that Company ABC was recently fined for not complying with the regulation.
This prompts them to not only reach out to Company ABC to pitch their new compliance course, but also to look up and reach out to Company ABC’s biggest competitors who will undoubtedly be scrambling to protect themselves from similar fines.
Job Listings
Online job boards can provide valuable insight into a company’s priorities.
For example, if a company suddenly posts an inordinate amount of digital marketing positions, this may indicate a shift happening within their organization. If you’re in the business of selling marketing technology, this hiring increase indicates that they might be primed to invest your marketing tools.
Historical Customer and Prospect Data
As a sales professional, you know that buying decisions can change on a whim. Maybe the person spearheading a specific project left for a new job. Maybe organizational priorities suddenly shifted. Or maybe, your contact went on vacation and forgot to follow up.
However, no matter the reason, a lost deal is rarely ever lost for good.
We recommend combing through your historical customer and prospect data to identify deals that fell through for seemingly no reason. Just as priorities and circumstances can shift for the worse, they can also shift in your favor. Follow up with incomplete deals, former customers, and long lost prospects.
Existing Customer and Prospect Data
An easy and effective way to add new contacts to your prospect list is to ask existing customers for referrals.
According to Harvard Business Review, customers acquired through referrals not only make more purchases compared to those who join through other methods, but also have a greater impact on bringing in new customers. Referred customers generate 30% to 57% more referrals than others, even when accounting for their overall activity.
Referrals aren’t just limited to customers either. Have you ever had a deal fall through despite building a great rapport with the prospect? Even though you don’t always secure the deal, that doesn’t always mean your efforts were a waste of time.
Prospects are often happy to recommend the names of colleagues or connections who might have a need for your product. Next time you’re on a customer call, don’t be afraid to ask for a referral.
Sales Intelligence and Data Providers
A sales professional can use social media, set Google Alerts, and skim job listings to compile the ultimate prospect list. But, without the necessary contact information, these efforts will prove to be futile.
If we could only choose one tool to use for sales prospecting, we would undoubtedly pick a sales intelligence platform. Modern B2B data providers offer a range of advanced search capabilities that allow you to enter your prospect criteria to generate a list of qualified prospects.
But remember, it’s critical to use a variety of channels to gather prospect information and verify your data. The best sales prospect lists contain information from multiple sources.
5. Prioritize Dynamic Data
Business data is not static. People change jobs, companies are bought and sold, and products regularly evolve and expand to new markets.
This constant state of change causes the average sales prospect list to decay quickly. This can render your list unreliable in a matter of months, weeks, sometimes even days. If your sales data can’t keep up, neither will your sales team. For this reason, businesses must make fresh, dynamic data a top priority.
ZoomInfo Buying Signals
ZoomInfo provides users with a vast array of buying signals, from straightforward to more complex. These buying signals are delivered in an organized, timely, and contextualized way so that sales reps are armed with high quality intelligence to close deals faster. Here is a comprehensive list of ZoomInfo buying signals:
Buying Signals
Funding: Major funding rounds in the last 90 days.
Buying Group changes: Promotions and new hires within a buying group over the past 30 days.
Key Personnel Changes: Promotions, new hires, and departures over the past 30 days of contacts you’ve previously engaged with.
Competitive Research : An account is researching a competitor or a competitive topic.
Technologies Add/Drop (Competitor): A target company has started or stopped using a technology related to one of your competitor’s offerings.
Technologies Add/Drop (Complementary): A target company has started or stopped using a technology related to a complimentary product.
Product Launches: Initiatives related to the release of new products, services or features.
Partnerships: Initiatives related to service agreements, outsourcing agreements, agreement mediations, contract extensions and other collaborative efforts.
Awards: A company, product, or individual employee is being recognized in a formal capacity, including placement on “Best” and “Top” lists.
M&A: The consolidation of companies or assets through various types of financial transactions.
IPO: All efforts related to an initial public offering or a stock market launch where company shares are sold to institutional and individual investors.
Projects: All news and internal insights related to department-specific initiatives that are being planned, currently on-going, or recently completed.
Pain Points: Challenges a company or organization might encounter that could have negative impacts.
Podcasts: Challenges a company or organization might encounter that could have negative impacts extracted from podcasts with key company representatives.
Layoffs: At a company in your ICP/Account List.
Hiring Plans: Growth or reduction in the number of roles posted in a department or buying group at a company in your ICP/Account List.
Earning Call Summaries: Insights into strategic direction of public company earnings calls.
Websight Spike: A Target account recently visited pages on your websites and domains.
Review Page Visit: Page visit of product pages.
Account Level Intent: A target account is actively researching one of your intent topic clusters.
Personnel Signals
Buying Group Changes: A contact in the Buying Group joined or departed your Target Account
New C-Suite : A new contact has joined the C-suite in your Target Account.
New C-Suite in Buying Group: A new contact in your Buying Group has joined the C-Suite
MPOC Departed : A main point of contact (MPOC) has departed one of your Target Accounts.
MPOC Joined: An MPOC at a current customer moves to a non-customer, good fit company.
Podcast Mentions: A key team member has participated in a podcast with a given title.
Contextual attributes with CRM Sync
Account Fit Score: Accounts with the greatest potential for success.
Account in CRM : This company exists in your CRM
Customer/Prospect/Partner: Account Type field classification from SFDC (Customer, Prospect, Partner).
CRM Record Owner: Display CRM record owner on person profile.
Building the Ultimate Sales Prospect List
There’s no exact formula for creating the ultimate sales prospect list. Sales professionals must have an in-depth understanding of their customers, their products, and the different channels needed to build a prospect list.
Contact ZoomInfo to learn more about our leading marketing and sales intelligence solutions. In addition to our extensive business database, our platform has the ability to automate critical data maintenance processes, alert you to important changes in your data, and deliver timely updates about the contacts and companies you care about most.