Build a better prospect list: Do your homework first
I once sat down with a national sales team that was exclusively focused on new business acquisition. They were working to refine their prospecting efforts and I was helping them to reimagine the creation and flow of their prospect data. I asked them how they currently prospected and the answer in gist was: “We take the whole world of prospects we can identify, sort it from largest to smallest opportunity, and start selling.”
Not an atypical response from a sales person – they are compensated on deal size and it makes sense to take a swing at the largest possible commission. Unfortunately, the sales team didn’t have a record of winning any of those large deals. Their wins came from entities much farther down in size – which meant that the time being spent on the larger deals represented mostly wasted time and resources.
What was the problem in this scenario? It wasn’t the sales team – they were successful, all things considered, and the sales process was largely working. The issue was with their prospect list – a problem that is prevalent across many sales organizations.
Prospect lists are the key to unlocking new business for organizations but often don’t receive much attention. Building the best possible list means covering a lot of data angles before the list gets created. Here are several steps to consider when building a better prospect list:
Is that prospect winnable? This is one of the most important questions to be asked when building a list. Sales teams are eternally optimistic – “You can’t win it if you don’t try!” but the data doesn’t lie. Look at your historical results. If you’ve never won a deal above a certain firm size and nothing has changed in your product offering, it isn’t a prospect. It’s a distraction from actual winnable business. Determining if a deal is winnable usually requires various segmentations and comparisons against market data to make an accurate assessment. Likewise, you need a floor on your list – some prospects just are not profitable for certain organizations. If you’re a startup and you don’t have historical sales data to lean on, see the next point.
What is the value proposition at play? The problem that your product or service is solving is central to defining your prospect list. Most folks in sales understand that intuitively, but it often takes work to incorporate this into slimming down your prospect pool. Most sales teams know “what” they are trying to sell, but it’s much harder to define “why” an organization would buy it. Many sellers resort to price “We can beat your current provider” but the truth is most B2B buyers don’t engage on price. Instead, you must understand why an individual in an organization would care to pause whatever they are thinking about and feel compelled to give their attention to your sales effort. Then comes the tricky part – once you know why a buyer might pay attention, you must find a signal in your prospect data that highlights the buyers that might resonate with your "why".
Is the buyer in motion? The slowest possible way to make a B2B sale is to find a cold prospect and start trying to convince them that they should start thinking about spending some money they weren’t planning on spending. This is traditionally how enterprise salespeople have thought about the value they bring – “I have contacts in lots of organizations and can get people to start conversations.” But the truth here is they aren’t really getting cold prospects to engage, they are instead spending their relationship currency to get a conversation started. True cold outreach is the absolute slowest way to sell a B2B product. However, you still need to fill that pipeline, so you instead need to look for buyers-in-motion in your data. What data markers are available that might be a good proxy for when a company is looking to buy your product or service? What data might suggest that the buyers are in motion and it’s a great time for you to engage? This type of data can take many different shapes – intent, hand-raising, website visits, M&A, leadership changes – the list goes on. Using buyer-in-motion data to refine your list will increase your results by an order of magnitude.
Incorporating these factors into your prospect list means that whomever is creating these lists for your organization needs to have a thorough understanding of your product, sales process, value proposition, and the prospect data available on the market – which often isn’t the case. But if you can arm your list providers with the right knowledge, your teams can build better prospect lists – which means that when your sales team start their selling motions they will be talking to actual prospects – not cold calling down a mostly useless list.