If you aren’t finding qualified sales leads, the chances are that your lead list isn’t ultra-refined.
When you build a basic list of your ideal customer profile, (ICP) you run the risk of failure, wasting time and money.
You can’t just say: “I need leads in the healthcare space; so let’s target all the hospitals in North America. And reach out to all the CEOs.” This kind of list is way too broad.
Even if you had perfect copy for LinkedIn and cold email outreach, you still wouldn’t get those qualified leads with a vague lead generation list.
So, you want to go after prospects who:
- Need what you’re selling
- Have the budget to buy from you
- And, go after the right decision-makers who have the purchasing power.
The only way to do this is by obsessing about building a list of prospects who are 90% likely to say yes to you.
Unfortunately, we have noticed too many sales professionals use the “spray and pray” approach. They just go after everyone, hoping for some booked meetings.
But this is too risky.
This is why we are going to share with you how we build ultra-refined prospect lists that guarantee 1 qualified lead per day. You can incorporate this list-building strategy into your own outreach.
(And if you don’t have the time, or would like one on one advice, hop on a free 15-minute consultation call with us.)
Note: We use a number of list-building principles to build lists for any industry. But we are going to give you some examples so that you can see how we would do it for these 4 verticals, (healthcare, finance, tech, agencies) and also how you can apply these principles to the industries you’re targeting
Here are the basic principles to follow:
First, look at data – Who has been buying from you?
You might have an idea of who your ideal buyer persona is, but in order for list building to work, you have to look at data. Have a look at who has purchased from you within the past 6 months… What do these buyers all have in common? When you build a list based on data the chances of you reaching out to the right potential customers will be so much greater. So for example, let’s say you are looking for leads in the healthcare space because you’re selling healthcare equipment. Ask yourself the following questions to get a clear view of who to target:- Which kind of healthcare company has purchased from you? (Hospitals? Clinics? Psychologists? Vets? Health insurance? Non-profit?)
- What’s the company size? (400+ more hospital beds? 3000 employees? Revenue of over $30 billion dollars a year? Or is it only small clinics buying?)
- What services do these companies offer? (Day clinics? Psychiatric? Emergency?)
- Where are these companies located? (USA? Europe? Africa? 50 miles from New York?)
- Which departments are on their payroll? (Marketing? HR? CNO?)
- Which job title is buying from you?
- People (company size, department size, job title.)
- Money (Revenue, funding)
- Time (When was the company founded? Are companies start-ups?)
- Intent data (Which companies are looking to buy your product/service?)
- Hiring (Are they busy hiring new job titles?)
- Social media signals (How many followers do they have on Facebook etc?)
Also, look at events and attributes
An “event” is looking at something a company has gone through that you can track.- Are the companies that have purchased from you, hiring new positions?
- Have they just gone through some PR disaster? Or have they just reached over $10 billion in revenue?
- Are they running a new ad campaign?
You can find “events” by looking at the following platforms.
- Raised money: Angel.co, Crunchbase
- Acquired: TechCrunch, Angel.co
- Hiring: Indeed.com
- Nominated or won an award: Google Alerts, industry website/directory, company website
- PR disaster: Google alert for keywords (“Company” AND “Disaster”) OR (“Customer” AND “Outraged”)
- Just started a new ad campaign: SpyFu.com
- Just hired a new role: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, company website
- Entered a new market (know they don’t know everything): SpyFu.com, LinkedIn News, TechCrunch, Google Alert (“Enters New Market”)
- Holidays (4th July, Anzac day), Google Calendar
- Seasons – winter/summer: Google Calendar (for cyclical sales events)
- Company anniversary: LinkedIn, Who. is to see when the website domain was 1st acquired
- Featured on product hunt: Product Hunt
- Just got a really bad employee rating: glassdoor.com
- The size of the company
- The location
- How many employees are there
- What technology are they using?
- How many visitors visit their website each month?
You can find “attributes” of companies in the following places:
- Company size: LinkedIn, Angel.co, Crunchbase
- Company revenue: LinkedIn
- Office location: LinkedIn, Google Maps, Yelp, Foursquare
- The same CEO for 5 years in a row: LinkedIn.
- Technology used: BuiltWith, Datanyze, NerdyData, LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Website is not optimized for mobile (NerdyData)
- More than $30k/month spent on ads: SpyFu.com
- Twitter followers: FollowerWonk
- Monthly visits: Alexa, SEMRush
- Webinar attendees: just join one in the middle and see the number of people showing up
- Podcast downloads: iTunes, iTunescharts.net
Next – Build a look-alike list and find contact information
Once you have found a pattern between buyers, you can then build a look-a-like list of prospects using certain tools. At SalesBread we make use of prospecting tools such as:Linkedin Sales Navigator
Bombora
Data Miner.io
Phantom Buster
Crunchbase
Clutch
The pricing of these tools varies. Some are not as expensive as others, so in order to find the right tool for your needs, you going to have to do a bit of research. But this article discusses prospecting tools we can’t live without.At SalesBread we pay thousands of dollars each month for these prospecting tools. We do this, so you don’t have to.
The most important thing to remember…
A lot of times, Zoominfo, Apollo, Crunchbase, etc, are not always the best places to start your list-building efforts based on your vertical. Why? Because you want to find the most accurate data. And sometimes the best place to go for this kind of data is directly to the source. Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re looking for hospitals with a certain number of hospital beds. Sure, you can get this info off Zoominfo, but it won’t be as accurate as American Hospital Association.Refine your list even further – Plug it into Linkedin Sales Navigator
Once you have your list, you can then plug it into Linkedin Sales Navigator and filter it by your 2nd-degree network and by recently posted. Why do we do this? Because stats and experience have shown us that, when a prospect is in your second-degree network, they are more likely to accept your connection request. You will also need to filter this list by recently posted on Linkedin.Here are some list-building examples for 4 different industries
1. Healthcare
Let’s say that you are selling hospital beds. As mentioned earlier, you can use different data providers, but it’s always best to go to the original source of data. Perhaps you’re looking to sell to hospitals but they need to have a specific amount of beds. So you wouldn’t start with a tool like Apollo, especially if you are looking for advanced hospital data. At SalesBread we would go directly to the AHA database.- Bed count
- Phone numbers
- Address
- Hospital count
- Organizational control (Whether its non-profit or not.)
- The hospital’s URL, which you can use to discern the hospital’s Linkedin page.
These databases can even give you information such as the head nurse at these hospitals. So whenever building a list remember to go to the main source of information.