What Do We Mean By Build Lists To Generate Leads?
Marketers and salespeople can begin their lead-generating campaign after they have a comprehensive list of qualified leads. Interest or inquiries about your product or service from potential customers are established in this part.
Data collection and access are required in order to generate lists of contact information, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, and other similar information that can be used to contact a potential customer. When this information is compiled, it is referred to as a “lead list.”
List building refers to the process of adding new subscribers to your email distribution list. Subscribers typically provide you with their email addresses in exchange for certain information, an offer, or a free present. It is possible to grow your email list using a variety of methods and techniques.
To build list to generate leads is a critical first step in the process of effective prospecting. It can require a significant amount of precious time and resources, and many of the email addresses and phone numbers are out of date and, frankly, aren’t all that useful anymore.
How does building lists work, and how does it help? Once the information (such as email addresses and phone numbers) has been gathered, it is compiled into a list, which is then utilized by your sales team to contact potential customers.
In a nutshell, lead lists are just a huge contact directory that your sales and marketing teams will utilize to send out cold emails or make cold calls in order to sell your product or service.
7 Steps Of How You Can Build Lists To Generate Leads
Step1: Set up an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
The most common description of an Ideal Customer Profile is that it is an in-depth description of the type of organization that is most likely to become your client, together with the titles of decision-makers inside that company who should be targeted by your sales team.
In other words, it is a set of criteria for how to locate the best possible lead. ICP acts as a filter for your lead generation activities. You’ll need it right at the start of your sales funnel to get people interested.
The ideal customer profile consists of two key components. The first, and by far the most important, identify an organization that is experiencing an issue that your company can solve. The second describes specific titles within this organization that will be used as decision-makers by the company’s buying team.
At the end of the day, the causal relationships between an ICP and sales research are evident: the more detailed a description of your ideal customer that you provide, the more accurate leads you’ll receive in return.
Ideal Customer Profile is about conducting frequent market research and building your sales strategy in accordance with the results. When you offer new products, want to target different companies, or want to grow into new markets, outbound prospecting can be a great tool for developing hypotheses and then analyzing the market response, among other things.
Step 2: Distinguish your Buyer Persona
So, if an ICP instructs you on where to find targeted leads, a Buyer Persona (or BP) will instruct you on how to connect with those leads at each level of the sales funnel. The Buyer Persona contains information on the psychological features, behavioral patterns, and purchasing behaviors of your former, current, and potential customers, as well as information about your company.
Include analysis from both the sales and marketing teams in order to generalize prior purchasers’ characteristics and develop a number of BPs. Analysis of interviews and case studies with various consumers – both present and previous – is common in many BPs.
Creating Buyer Personas will assist your sales and marketing teams in better understanding their potential customers, allowing them to engage more effectively during the purchase (or repurchasing / account expansion/account extension) phases. The Buyer Persona should be developed after conducting a thorough study of all of your customers, interviewing your sales team, and conducting an audit of your sales funnel.
Do not rely on a marketing team to design BP in a vacuum; rather, involve all members in the project. Buyer Personas are always a combination of descriptive and prescriptive marketing data, and the best ones are always the most accurate.
Step 3: Conduct your Research
Even though an ICP typically offers some essential information about your ideal clients, you must still determine what type of additional research you should conduct. Whether you use in-house researchers or outsource specialist research, you must first sort out the criteria for your data in order to generate a highly targeted B2B lead list of prospects. You can choose a certain area of expertise, or you can pull relevant custom data sets to make more persona-based choices and reach out to potential customers.
- Demographic — This includes the fundamentals. Any lead list should have certain demographic information, such as titles, locations, phone numbers, and email addresses, among other things. Because only 27 percent of phone calls are answered, you must make every call count. The use of validated emails helps to avoid bounces from occurring and serves as a valuable indicator of the quality of a lead.
- Technographic — Involves an analysis of web-based technology and applications that have been installed, typically those found on a website. If your sales are dependent on the lead’s existing technology stack (such as integrations or competitors), or if you are a software-managed services provider, this is a must-have.
- Psychographic — Includes in-depth social media investigation into people’s behavioral patterns, career trajectories, and professional interests, among other things. Example: If your company’s offering is an online course on coping with stress after changing careers, you may want to concentrate your marketing efforts on prospects who have made a significant shift in their specialty in recent months.
- Firmographic — Contains a breakdown of the overall number of addressable markets Recent market events, such as funding rounds, mergers, and acquisitions, that may have an impact on the sales process are referred to as trigger events.
Step 4: Filter your collected data and link it to your outreach tools
Where do you find leads once you’ve determined who you’re looking for? LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the most widely used and reasonably effective solution for developing targeted B2B lead lists.
This tool allows sales representatives to prospect more effectively. The formula is the starting point for all advanced lead investigations in Sales Navigator. Researchers compiled a list of primary search keywords in order to generate a new focused lead list. Here’s an illustration: Companies with between 51 and 200 employees are located in California and have CEOs and vice presidents of technology.
This formula may provide two, six, or ten thousand outcomes depending on the input. Does this mean that all of these connections will be able to be added to your spreadsheet as potential leads? No, not at all. Here’s where your investigators earn their keep by sifting the data and curating the leads that are the best matches. Advanced Firmographic, Technographic, and Psychographic data can reveal a plethora of business prospects.
Consider the following scenario: you are looking for Vice Presidents of Technology in Northern California. Your company specializes in chatbot technology that is specifically designed for business-to-business conversational marketing campaigns. As a result, your researchers must sift through the 2k results given by the algorithm in order to identify those who don’t have a chatbot solution in place and those who have an inferior conversational marketing tool in place. It is a time-consuming process that needs concentration, attention, and consistency on your part. It is possible to scrape some websites for data using programs such as WebScraper and Data Miner, but linking all of these diverse data sources and evaluating the information they provide requires a systematic approach.
Researchers, sales representatives, or SDR managers upload data into a CRM or sequencer so that it can be used for outbound campaigns after it has been verified and approved in the spreadsheet. Your lead list is now complete and ready for prospecting.
Step 5: Define your target leads
It is crucial now, with the current economic state, that every business has a well-defined target market. Be reminded that nobody can ever afford to make every human being their market target. Through lead targeting a certain niche, your small business may even be able to compete with the large ones.
It doesn’t mean that you are excluding people who don’t fit your criteria when we say targeting. Instead, it allows you to simply focus your brand’s message on the specific market that is more possible to avail your product or service.
When you’ll have a clear definition of your target leads, it will be very easy for you to decide how you’ll promote and market your products.
Step 6: Plan your approach moves
The first step in any project is to conduct some form of benchmarking. In other words, you’re doing a trial campaign to see how many opens, replies, and leads your team can get with their first email campaign. If customers aren’t opening or replying to emails, no matter how good your product or service is, it will be a flop.
Step 7: Take your necessary time when building leads lists
List building isn’t something that should be only done once and then it’s done. It is an ongoing process and there is no way to tell how long it takes to build a list. There will be times that you will need to find new leads for your email marketing because your subscribers may opt to turn off their subscription from your list. You must update it on a frequent interval because the bigger your list is, there will be a bigger and more updated chance that you can market your business.
The Difference Between An Email List And A Lead List
Direct marketing efforts necessitate the use of a lead list. Potential consumers that fulfill a company’s ideal customer profile are provided with their contact information via this service.
When you use a list provider, you get access to information on organizations and individuals who might not otherwise learn about your business through your own marketing efforts.
Lead lists aren’t the same as email lists, despite what many people mistakenly believe.
To put it simply, an email list is a list of people’s email addresses who would be interested in your marketing services. Email lists are more focused when compared to lead lists.
However, there is one striking similarity between the two. More business leads will lead to higher conversion rates, so you’ll want to use both.
7 Pro Tips For Your Leads Lists Building
1. Keep improving & enriching your existing leads lists
Check the data you already hold. A portion of it could be inaccurate or out of date. In order to reduce lead waste, make sure that the leads you already have in your CRM are up to date. Identifying and removing duplicates should be a breeze with an effective customer relationship management system.
The decisions made by salespeople are subject to constant change. Old contacts should not be deleted; instead, they should be grouped together. At the time, some of them were uninterested, while others already had a plan in place to deal with the problem. It’s possible that a year from now, the question will be appropriate.
2. Dig for new leads constantly
Let’s admit it: without a steady stream of fresh prospects for your business or service, your firm will perish. As a result, the lead generation techniques and concepts you choose to pursue today are critical to the future success of your business.
So that you can attract new customers and grow your sales, you must first identify who your client is, what value offer you give them, what your competitor is presently providing in the market, and where gaps exist for a new entry. In another sense, you ought to conduct market research – whether you hire an outside agency or attempt it yourself.
There is a fundamental mismatch between your drive to grow sales and the desire of your customers to address their problems. After all, attracting new clients is truly about attending to their requirements, not about becoming a solution that’s looking to solve a problem.
3. Make sure to validate the collected data of leads
LinkedIn profiles may not always provide accurate lead data. Double-check using extra resources to ensure that a lead is reachable. You can double-check firm information on a contact’s website. To make sure the emails your researchers come across are genuine, they’ll require an email verification application. You should exercise caution because there are hundreds of email verification software available, many of which are not particularly reliable. Read reviews and use proprietary software to make sure your product will be delivered.
4. Analyze data before action
The more leads you have, the better your future marketing campaigns will be, and the better your future lead lists will be optimized. Platforms for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are now standard tools for managing vast amounts of customer and contact data. Analyze and apply what you learn to the next list-building activity.
5. Maintain a cooperative and interactive environment between different departments
How is your team’s interdepartmental collaboration? Are you working along well with your colleagues in other offices? Do they disregard your project planning system’s comments? Do they shut the elevator doors behind you and do not hold them open?
If your response is a shrug and a “we get by,” you are probably not optimizing your group’s productivity and performance through the development of synergistic connections with other teams.
Collaboration across departments entails more than just “collaborating” with other teams. It entails a common goal, respect and understanding, and a thorough knowledge of each other’s roles in work with the same objective of producing exceptional business outcomes and an exceptional customer experience.
Mutual understanding across departments may help collaboration go more smoothly and effectively.
Assist employees in comprehending the limits and obstacles faced by teams from various departments. Cultivate an interest in one another’s work to enable them to learn about one another’s processes and even propose recommendations for how one team may enhance their process to assist other teams in becoming more productive.
It is critical to foster a mindfulness culture in which team members manage their subjective feelings in order to interact positively and productively with their coworkers.
6. Value quality over quantity
Regardless of whether you do your research in-house or outsource it, each lead has a cost. It’s not always the case that more is better when it comes to quantity. In addition to the pay of the researchers, the tech stack and training are all included in the lead price. Your resources will determine how many potential customers you’ll be able to reach. The more difficult-to-find information you need, the more expensive it will be. A high conversion rate, on the other hand, is a sure sign of quality.
7. Keep searching for emerging tools that can be helpful
While certain parts of list creation need manual labor, list-making software has become a virtual requirement. Numerous list-building solutions provide a variety of features, such as pop-ups, lead collecting forms, and social network freebies.
Building your list of leads is critical for long-term eCommerce success, and you’ll need the finest list-building tools to remain ahead of the competition. There are solutions that combine robust lead-generating capabilities with the tools necessary to automate a number of other tasks.
Compare the various list-building solutions that you come across, since some capabilities will be necessary as your eCommerce shop grows.
- Popups: they are critical for growing your email list. They should be time-based, and scroll-based. Do some research and explore website popup examples to design the perfect popup for your list growth.
- Options for targeting: Are you able to build a popup that is customized to the material your consumers are browsing?
- Opt-in and confidentiality: Ascertain that your consumers may opt from seeing a display and that your sign-up forms include clear opt-ins.
- Fields that can be customized: Are you restricted to requesting only an email account, or can you also request contact information, first names, and birthdays? The more data you can collect, or rather, the more relevant data you can collect, the more effectively you can aim future email messages.
- Can you host landing pages for special offers? These are ideal for when you want a simple interface to ensure sign-up success.
- Is your list-building tool equipped with gamified sign-up forms? It’s a nice-to-have, and it has the potential to significantly increase sign-ups on your website.