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What is Meant by Prospect List Building
Let’s quickly define some terms before diving in:
In this post we’ll be referring to list building in a prospecting context which typically refers to a putting together a strategic set of contacts for a specific outreach campaign or event. This could be for a drip campaign, a mass email blast, or a set of people you may want to meet with during an outreach trip to another city.
List building serves the purpose of categorizing individual contacts by some logical grouping. There’s no universal grouping method, as you may have a geographic list for one event while a drip campaign groups by industry or persona. A single lead will likely be on multiple lists over time.
The strategy for list building is generally the same for both leads and prospects. Your outreach strategy will probably be different between the two, but they will still follow a pattern of funneling a generic set of contacts to a more specific set. As such both prospects and leads will be referenced here.
The Big Picture: A Basic Strategy for B2b List Building
In general list building boils down to building a leads database then filtering that down to the leads that make sense for the campaign you’re working on. Many times you may want to further break these down for better timing, reaching out to multiple contacts at the same company, etc.
The process of list building starts with a very general focus on your lead pipeline and the focus narrows down to a specific goal as the process continues. To make the best use of time, we can generalize higher-level building blocks to make list building quicker.
Building your Leads Database
It is entirely possible to start from scratch with every campaign and build lists without a database to pull from, however this misses a lot of opportunities. Starting a lead database will open up new opportunities for qualifying more leads and identifying opportunities for focused campaigns.
Database building is much more broad than list building, this is the absolute top of the outbound portion of the funnel. At this point you may be going to LinkedIn and searching very broadly (perhaps by title like ‘Head of Widgets’, or for companies in an industry or with X employees).
You should have a general idea of what titles it makes sense to reach out to, but don’t need to be terribly picky. The one qualifying factor here is that the customer at least potentially fits your Ideal Customer Profile. If your ICP is mom & pop flower shops nobody from Microsoft should be in the database.
Typically as you add to the database you have a specific campaign, market, or persona in mind. Your database will start off as a bit of a hodge-podge of these different groups but pretty quickly become a broad mix of target customers for your business.
From your lead database you should have an ample amount of contacts with which to start shaping your outreach list for your campaign.
Shaping Your Lists with Personas
Some email lists will have a very broad audience, for example a drip campaign that automatically starts after a web signup or first contact. However, most lists should be at least somewhat targeted at who the contact is and what their relationship to your company is.
Your ideal customer profile will help you figure out which companies to talk to, but you also need to know who to talk to in that company. This is covered much more thoroughly in the B2B Role-based Prospecting Guide, but here are some key points:
- Find the job titles of the people who move the ball forward and prospect those titles on sites like LinkedIn
- Make sure you’re not reaching out to people who can’t/won’t get you to the decision maker
- Don’t always go directly for the decision maker, you may have to work your way up
- If you’re looking at multiple industries, the titles you go after may be different for each industry
Some targeted lists will want to roll out the sequence in a way that divides up who at a company is contacted when. For this, we use a tool called waves.
Segmenting Your List for Higher Conversion Cadences
Waves allow you to contact multiple people at a company without reaching out all at once or manually controlling the process. You may have a set of people at a company you’d like to reach out to, but only reaching out to the next person in the case that they don’t respond, are out of office, or some other reason. Waves enable exactly that.
This will not be the right tool for every company or sequence, but is an excellent tool to have available.
By reaching out, checking engagement, then reaching out again to another contact at a company you increase your chances of making positive contact with that company while reducing the chance they feel spammed or slip through the cracks because your first contact didn’t respond.
Automation: The List Building Secret Weapon
The ultimate secret weapon to list building is removing all of the admin work surrounding them. Instead of doing the manual work of deciding for each lead what persona they match or whether they qualify for a list, automate the process.
Using declarative lists you define your criteria once and auto-populate the list from your database. Meaning as you prospect, your list can grow automatically without you having to tag, assign, edit, copy, etc. All you have to do is get the lead in the database, the system does the rest.
Using automation also will reduce the area for human error, meaning your lists should be cleaner. Any SDR or AE will tell you that intuition can play a big part in finding the right people, so Ashpool allows for manually editing those automatic lists as well.
There you have it, what list building is and how to do it well. You can get started trying out some of the techniques described in this article really quickly, all you need is LinkedIn and a spreadsheet (though hopping in the Ashpool Early Access makes it a lot easier!)
