Creating a lead list is one of the first tasks a sales representative undertakes when they take on a new role, territory, or industry sector.
As these lists evolved, grew, and ultimately worked best in CRM, they proved invaluable for helping to:
-
Achieve productivity goals (and long-term quotas)
-
Identify companies within your industry or territory
-
Keep track of your interactions with prospects
-
Capture important information like competitive install
Throughout this article, we'll discuss what makes a great lead list, and share our ideas about how to create one.
What Is a Lead List?
A sales lead list is a collection of prospect or client information. The spreadsheet may begin as a spreadsheet and be uploaded into CRM, or it may be created and stored in CRM throughout its lifecycle.
It is possible that a prospect has shown interest in a product or service after responding to an online offer, visiting your booth at a conference, or engaging with social media posts.
There may be a number of organizations that closely match the criteria of your company's ideal customer profile (ICP), so sales representatives should reach out to them on a proactive basis.
These stages are often used to categorize and manage leads:
- Marketing Qualified Leads - (MQLs). Those leads who have engaged with your marketing efforts and are ready for a sales review and conversion.
- Sales Qualified Leads - (SQLs). A list of MQLs that have been vetted by your sales team and identified as worthy of following up directly.
- Opportunity- Leads that meet a company's qualification criteria (like BANT) are added to a deal forecast.
- Evangelist - Contacts or companies may not be an immediate opportunity, but they advocate for your company and its products and services. Evangelists may work for consulting firms, partner candidates, or even existing customers.
- Customer - When a customer has had a positive experience with your company's products or services, they can often be your best source of revenue.
The process involves categorizing leads, creating and using lead lists, and tracking them to ensure they move efficiently through the sales pipeline.
Our lead list sources have ranged from website visitors to event attendees to telemarketing vendors over the years. As a result of cold-calling and networking, we generated a large number of sales leads.
Today, sales reps can enrich their lead lists with prospecting tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Breeze, Uplead, and PartnerTap.
The Benefits of a Lead List
Selling without a lead list is a slow, disorganized process that usually produces poor results. If you need more convincing, here are five advantages to creating and maintaining a B2B lead list:
1. Enhanced Prospect Profiles
Your call outcomes will be better if you have a better prospect profile. It is recommended that you collect as much information about the businesses in your addressable market as possible and classify them according to their:
-
Industry
-
Years in business
-
Decision maker and influencer contacts
-
Number of employees
-
Annual revenue
-
Existing technology stack
-
Meetings, social media interactions, and campaign engagement with your company in the past
-
Lifecycle stage (MQL, SQL, etc.)
2. Improved Lead Nurturing
Sales and marketing teams can use lead list information to determine what kind of campaign tactics each lead is added to, such as email newsletters or webinar invitations. As a result, the prospect's engagement levels can determine when (or whether) a sales rep should follow up.
More detail is better when it comes to lead nurturing intel. In order to build credibility with prospects, you must be able to rely on your lead list, since people prefer salespeople who understand their needs.
3. Better Marketing Campaign Personalization
Lead lists simplify the process of personalizing campaigns. By segmenting by persona, industry, and competitive intelligence, marketing teams can better plan which marketing assets to produce, when to distribute them, and to whom. It usually occurs at the beginning of the fiscal year or a new quarter.
Additionally, your sales leadership team can develop your sales plan and align your marketing content to support prospecting outreach.
You can enrich lead data with tools like Breeze and Sales Navigator to inform the campaign offers and content that your marketing team sends to prospects.
4. Automated Lead Scoring
With an information-rich lead list, lead scoring algorithms are able to determine what makes a strong sales-qualified lead. The purpose is to provide sellers with a framework for tailoring their prospect outreach approaches based on scoring criteria.
Try HubSpot's Sales Hub. Through machine learning, it streamlines lead qualification processes by parsing historical trend data at a scale that salespeople would never be able to match.
5. Continuity
It is important to minimize any disruption or awkwardness when salespeople switch roles within your company (or leave altogether). Lead data quality can help turn a lead into an opportunity and close a deal - or it can hurt your chances of ever doing business with a prospect.
How to Build a Lead List
Our experiences building B2B lists were pretty typical - though salespeople today might call it tedious and manual. We would start with a blank spreadsheet and build it from there.
Coefficient (which works with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets) is one tool that can help you automate this process a bit. Having said that, this was our preferred way of generating leads.
Step 1: Capture prospect data in a spreadsheet.
We usually start with an Excel spreadsheet including the demographic information listed above, and these other column headings:
-
Good fit for ICP?
-
Lead source
-
Current technology
-
Budget availability and fiscal year
-
Decision making influences and process
-
Identification of pain points
-
What the prospect stands to gain by buying from you
-
Engagement with marketing campaigns
-
Competitive relationships
-
Lead source
-
Compelling events
-
Interaction history
-
Prospects' sentiment towards your company (advocate or adversary)
Here’s an example of a real-world sales lead list to help you envision how one might look.
Step 2: Supplement lead profiles with high-quality intelligence.
After mapping the headings, you populate these fields with as much detail as possible, and upload the data into CRM. When working with so many data points in a spreadsheet, failure is inevitable, especially in today's digital age. Using tools like Breeze AI to enhance leads, contribute to the enrichment of leads from other sources by working with colleagues in sales development and marketing.
Step 3: Build relationships with prospects.
We always did the best to build relationships with prospects and be a consultative salesperson instead of taking a more aggressive approach. Since we mostly worked with public sector clients, that tended to be the only way to sell in that industry anyway.
Regardless, we recommend taking a relationship-first approach as you develop and grow your lead list. This investment has helped us time and time again. Even if you don’t generate revenue right away, your relationships can generate advocacy champions for your products, services, and your business over time. Direct revenue could result in the long term.
Tips for Building a Sales Lead List
When building lead lists and collecting the data to populate them, sales leaders and teams should keep the following best practices in mind.
1. Define your ICP and your personas
Your target market can be defined in a more efficient way by defining the kind of company that is best suited to your products and services.
When defining your ICP and creating customer personas, identify the characteristics of the organizations and contacts that are likely to value your products and services.
Make your personas interesting - give them catchy names and compelling backstories. Leads can be segmented according to the degree to which they fit your definition of an ideal prospect.
2. Subscribe to sales lead enrichment services
Market research and lead enrichment can be automated with tools like Breeze and Sales Navigator.
Klue is a competitive intelligence battle card that can help your sales team gain a competitive edge when prospects evaluate multiple vendors at the same time.
Create lead profiles using all the information you've gathered.
3. Identify and engage with market sentiment through Reddit and LinkedIn
Identifying and enriching lead information can be done by listening to customer sentiment on channels such as Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
There are many subreddits where prospects ask existing customers about products and services from a variety of industries. Tracking and engaging in these conversations on your lead list can be productive, and it's a good way to lead with a consultative approach rather than a sales pitch.
Well-Managed Lead Lists Maintain Your Prospecting Momentum
The best prospecting days often occurred when we had a substantial number of leads prepared to call and email without much time to take notes. The longer we spent between calls doing administrative work or chatting with colleagues, the harder it was to pick up the phone and contact the next lead.
A well-crafted B2B lead list, some powerful talking points, and my headset helped us get into "the zone" and make consecutive sales calls without being distracted by negative thoughts.
Sales professionals are repeatedly told that sales is a numbers game. You need sales lead lists to hit your productivity number, which usually leads to hitting your quota. The key to a satisfying commission number is this.