Outbound Lead Lists: Convert More Prospects to Customers

The difference between the sales team that consistently meets with the quota and the one that fails frequently is usually reduced to one factor: the quality of outbound lead lists. The best pitch, the best product and the best follow-up can be in place, but you are calling the wrong people, it won’t make a difference anyway.

There is no such thing as building an effective outbound lead list quantity-wise, but it is a matter of precision. It is is finding the specific companies and decision makers that need your solution and have the power to make buying decisions. However, the vast majority of sales teams take list building as a dull exercise that needs to be hurried over instead of the strategic basis it is.

I can show you how to create outbound lead lists which do not simply load up your CRM but in fact, become conversations, meetings and closed deals.

Start With Your Ideal Customer Profile, Not a Database

You must have a hundred percent clarity of whom you are targeting before you touch any tool or database. This is not about abstract definitions such as mid-market firms and technology decision makers. Your Ideal Customer Profile must be precise enough that you would be able to enter a networking event and be able to spot your targets.

Begin with the analysis of your most successful customers. Examine the businesses that have had the best sales cycle, lifetime value, and where people have best embraced your product. What do they have in common? Consider factors like:

• Company size (in terms of turnover and the number of employees)
• Industry and sub-industry
• Technology stack that they already have.
• Growth phase (start-up, scale-up, established)
• Geographic location and presence in the market.
• Decision making and organization structure.

The narrower you are the narrower your outbound energies. Instead of aiming at SaaS companies, you can aim at B2B SaaS companies of 50-200 employees, which sell to enterprise customers, and which have raised Series A or B in the last 18 months.

Identify Your Decision-Maker and Buying Committee

After determining which companies you want to approach, you must find out the individuals in these companies that are significant to your sale. Here is where most outbound activities break – making a call to an individual who does not have the power or desire to get your deal through.

In the majority of B2B solutions, you do not sell to an individual but a buying committee. It is essential to comprehend such a structure. A VP of Sales may be the chief decision maker, but the CFO is the one who authorizes the budget, the CTO is the one who decides based on technical fit and the individual sales managers are the actual users.

Begin your outreach with the person most in the hurt-usually with a person close to the problem you are solving. They will be your internal champion. But also map out other stakeholders to whom you will have to contact as the deal continues.

Layer Your Data Sources for Complete Coverage

There is no single source of data that provides you with all. Lead lists that are the most successful are ones that integrate many sources and present an additional layer of insight.

Start with your first-party data-visitors of your web site, content downloaders, attendees of your events, and other opportunities that did not have an opportunity to close. These contacts are already familiar with your brand, and they are warm contacts compared to cold outreach.

Add next are company databases and prospecting platforms. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been one of the strongest tools of B2B legwork where you can filter companies, roles, seniority, even content posted by the decision-maker. The company and contact information on Apollo.io is complete and has detailed filters. For teams working with larger volumes, tools like ScraperCity’s data extraction capabilities can help efficiently gather contact information from various platforms at scale.

Attention to industry-specific sources should not be ignored either. Existing trade associations, lists of conference attendees, industry journals, and industry specific directories have a great deal of contacts that are highly relevant, which are not available within a wider database.

The Manual Research Component

This is what most sales departments would avoid but unfortunately, they cannot do away with: manual research. Despite the greatest data tools, there is human judgment required to create really effective lists.

Make direct visits to company websites. Read their About pages, team pages and recent blog posts. Browse their vacancies-firms with vacant positions with particular job descriptions have areas of pain you can fix. Examine their social media and recent announcements made by the company.

This manual layer achieves two tasks. First, it will ensure that companies are indeed what your ICP wants in terms other than superficial criteria. Second, it provides you with personalization material to use in your outreach-specific reference that will allow your message to not be lost in the sea of generic messages flooding their inbox.

Enrich Your Data With Context and Intent Signals

The minimal is a lead list that has names and email addresses. The true strength lies within enrichment-based informational layers that assist you in setting priorities in outreach and personalization of messaging.

Firmographic provides you with information about the company: its size, industry, location, technologies and funding status. Contact information informs you of the individual: his position, seniority, length of stay in the job, and career history.

However, intent data-signals are the most useful addition that signals that a firm is currently in-market buying solutions such as yours. This might include:

• Recent advertisements of the related positions.
• Visits to your price or product page on the Web.
• Interaction with your material or materials of your competitors.
• Change in technology at their stack.
• Growth indicators of the company such as funding rounds or office expansions.
• Changes in leadership that tend to cause buying decisions.

Intent signals will assist you in ranking your list. An intent signal displayed on a prospect should be reached out to personally and urgently. The lack of intent in a prospect may place him or her into an extended nurture process.

Verify Everything Before You Hit Send

Bad data is a killer to your sender reputation and time-waster on your team. Bounces and has a bounce rate of more than 5% are damaging to your deliverability, i.e. fewer of your emails are going to inboxes even when the addresses are valid.

Check out your contact details before initiating any out-bound campaign. Make sure that email addresses are valid and are regularly checked. Make sure that the phone numbers are right and you are calling during working days within time zone of the prospect. Make sure that you are still in the roles that you want changes in contacts are always occurring.

There are specialized verification tools that can check email validity and find additional contact information to fill gaps in your data. Building this verification step into your process saves hours of wasted outreach and preserves your team’s credibility.

Segment Your List for Targeted Messaging

One message to the whole list is a formula of average performance. The strength of a good lead list is by segmenting it down into smaller groups that are sent customized messages.

Divide the market based on the company traits: a 50-person start-up does not have the same concerns as a 500-person company. Split by role: a CFO will not be attracted to the same things a Sales Director would want. Target by intent indications: it is better to treat hot and cold prospects differently.

The messaging of each segment must be addressed to their unique circumstance. Mention issues that could be causing them problems with references, use terminology used in their field, and mention benefits that are the most important to their job description.

Any major outbound campaign should have at least 3-5 segments. This will mean more work in the beginning but the response rates tend to be doubled or even tripled than what generic blasts achieve.

Build in Regular Refresh Cycles

Lead lists decay rapidly. Employees switch, firms are purchased, priorities alter and decision-makers switch. What was valid six months ago would be of no use today.

Establish a routine re-fresh into your outbound movement. To make active campaigns, check your lists and renew them every month. Eliminate contacts who have bounced, unsubscribed or those who have been asked not to hear any more. New contacts added as companies increase and new decision makers are added.

Establish triggers: the launch of an announcement of funding, change of leadership, expansion of a company, or an acquisition. Such events usually open up new chances with accounts you have already researched and provide you with the opportune reasons to contact them.

The Continuous Improvement Mindset

What you discover in the process of real outreach should guide your lead list building process. Monitor which parts react most, what sources of data provide the best leads, what enrichment factors are associated with closed deals.

Assess your outcomes after every three months. When the enterprise companies perform better than the mid-market, change ICP. When there are some industries that continuously ghost you when making discovery calls, delete them off your targeting. When predictors of specific intent signal are predictors of deal velocity, then give preference to prospects with specific intent signals.

Common Mistakes That Kill List Quality

Senior teams are predictable in their errors in outbound lists. Avoiding such traps will automatically make your performance better.

Casting with a very broad net: It is easy to create huge lists with the belief that more prospects will result in more opportunities. As a matter of fact, a carefully selected list of a hundred and twenty highly qualified prospects will work better than a diffused list of two thousand marginal fits. In outbound, quantity has never equal quality.

Don’t care about the size of the company: Assuming your average deal size is 50,000 per year, you would be wasting your time trying to target the Fortune 500s, you are too small to fit in their procurement cycle. On the other hand, it is hardly possible to sell a 10-person startups a solution of 100,000. Only those companies that will be able to purchase your solution are worthy of your matching solution and price.

Sending to the C-suite: It is the biggest desire of every person to address the CEO or CFO and these are the most overloaded inboxes in any organization. In many cases, you will be able to get more time and rely on directors and VPs that come in closer contact with the problem, and that can promote your solution to the top.

Bringing up forgetting about timing: Even ideal prospects are not always in buying mode. Calling a company immediately after they have installed a competing solution will imply waiting years before getting a chance. Identify timing indicators: When a contract is renewed, when a company is working on a new fiscal year, or when a company undergoes some changes, which prompts a new initiative.

Compiling lists separately: Your marketing team has a sense of what content works, your customer success team knows what can make a client stick, and your sales team knows what objections will be repeated over and over again. Documenting build lists together, with the wisdom of your go-to-market company.

Structuring Your List for Maximum Efficiency

The result of the formulation of your lead list will determine how effective your team is. Design a system that would enable sales reps to work effectively and follow up.

The following are some of the core fields: company name, company site, company size, industry, location, contact name and title, email address, phone number, and LinkedIn profile. Next add your sales process specific fields: lead source, lead score, assigned rep, status, last contact date and next action.

Apply common nomenclature and data schemas. Do not have some contacts designated as VP of Sales, others as Vice President, Sales, others as Sales VP, standardize all of them. This consistency makes segmentation and reporting to be a reality.

Tag contacts with the associated characteristics: technologies that they operate, pain that they have described, content that they have consumed, objections that they have expressed. The tags are invaluable when it comes to personalization and detection of trends in your outbound actions.

The Human Element Still Matters Most

All this information and technology, and it is quite simple to lose sight of the fact that you are ultimately dealing with human beings, who are busy, suspicious, and are being bombarded with sales pitches.

Even the most incredible lead lists in the world are useless when your contacting is robotic and generic. Take using the research that you have compiled to create messages that are as if they are being spoken by one human being to another, rather than by a sales machine to a target.

Cite something particular concerning their business. Admit a problem their industry is struggling with. Congratulate them on a new accomplishment. Ask a question that is thoughtful, rather than to go on a pitch.

Establishing a good outbound lead list is not easy and fast but that is what all the other components of your sales movement are based on. Take time to do it well, constantly improve your strategy on experience, and see your pipeline get full of actually qualified opportunities rather than dead-end contacts.