To increase your revenue, you need to acquire new customers and develop a partner network. To achieve this, you must start by creating a high-quality B2B prospect list. Discover how to do this in 3 simple and practical steps.
Have you recharged your batteries during the holidays and are now more motivated than ever to grow your business ? Then you don't have a minute to lose in finding new clients! From now on, your marketing efforts must be targeted, relevant, and well-coordinated. Indeed, despite all your efforts, if your B2B is of poor quality or if you don't know how to fully optimize it , you risk falling further from your objective, or even missing it altogether. Specifically, you need to define your target audience, build your prospect database, and optimize it using a PRM ( .
Step 1: (Re)Define your target
First, you need to determine which buyers you can meet and exclude those you can't. Do this even before identifying your potential buyers (personas) . It's crucial to consider your buyer profiles (or ideal buyer profiles) before creating your buyer personas (target audience). It's important to understand the difference between these two concepts.
The buyer profile
As a reminder, the buyer profile identifies the companies that best match your offer. To identify them, you can ask yourself questions such as:
- Who actually needs my offer?
- Which industry or sector should be approached first?
- Are your best customers in a specific sector or from different industries?
You can measure the size of these companies based on the number of employees, customers, revenue, etc.
The buyer persona
The buyer persona, on the other hand, is a fictional representation of your target customer . Naturally, you need to be as precise as possible when defining it. You must take into account specific data , including assumptions about demographics, purchasing behavior, motivations, and objectives, etc.
Note that in B2B, your target audience often has different problems and expectations. However, to achieve results, you must ensure your contact list categorizes your targets according to common issues . This will help you create a personalized sales pitch. Remember, a personalized campaign guarantees a return on your marketing efforts. And the more you refine your selection criteria, the more successful you will be.
It's a fact that in B2B, it's generally best to approach top decision-makers : founder, managing director, CEO, etc. However, sometimes your best contact will be lower in the hierarchy . This could be, for example, a department head (marketing, finance, purchasing, etc.) or a C-level employee, etc.
Therefore, once you have selected your sector of activity, you must target your prospects effectively. Ask yourself specific questions such as:
- What problems will you solve for your buyer personas?
- Where will your target audience go to find information?
- What types of social networks do they use?
- What does a typical day look like for your persona?
- Etc.
The answers to these questions will help you create and enrich your database of qualified BtoB prospects.
Step 2: Build your B2B prospect database
Before deciding anything, please note that you have two options:
- build your own database of qualified prospects,
- or buy a BtoB prospecting .
Create your own database of qualified prospects
Are you convinced that you're better served than by yourself? Or do you simply not yet have a sufficient budget to delegate the preparation of your sales prospecting and buy a premium tool? Because you can indeed create your own qualified BtoB prospect file .
There are generally 6 fields that you should basically include in your prospecting file:
- Company Name
- Contact's first and last name
- Contact position
- The email address,
- The phone
- Link to LinkedIn profiles
You need to customize and complete this list according to your prospecting .
You can then collect data and categorize it based on your targeting. It can be helpful to refer to your best existing customers to identify similar targets and focus your efforts on them.
To stand out from your competitors and generate new leads , you need to appeal to your target audience. Your prospecting plan must therefore be based on a high-quality, up-to-date database . In other words, your database must be dynamic, not static.
You also have free tools like good old Microsoft Excel or Airtable that can serve as a platform for your sales prospecting file. You can also use the SIRENE database , LinkedIn, or the Hunter extension for Google Chrome to extract the email addresses of your targets .
However, to keep your contact file up to date, you will have to do everything manually, which is not practical at all.
Purchase a B2B prospecting file
There are many B2B prospect databases that you can buy or rent online . And the question of buying prospects or a contact list is precisely one of the biggest dilemmas for marketing and sales managers… Indeed, these lists can have three major drawbacks:
- data quality is sometimes poor (outdated or incorrect contact details, position already filled, etc.)
- High prices don't necessarily equate to quality (it's hard to know what to expect)
- Prospecting companies that don't know you can damage your brand image.
In any case, you don't necessarily have to do everything manually. Sometimes, the best decision is to delegate your sales prospecting to a good marketer and provide them with the right tools .
Step 3: Integrate your database into a PRM tool to get the most out of it
Today, there are PRM (Prospect Relationship Management) tools that allow you to save time and increase efficiency. A good lead generation and management tool can be a highly profitable investment , as it helps you optimize the management of your prospect database and improves your conversion rate .
We highly recommend Magileads' integrated PRM . You can import your database from Google or LinkedIn in just a few clicks. You can also enrich it with the platform's database of 20 million qualified B2B prospects
What's really interesting about this tool is that it allows you to create a complete sales funnel to conduct omnichannel prospecting from A to Z. In concrete terms, you can target your prospects, note their engagement, personalize your messages and test them with the A/B testing , conduct your prospecting campaign and evaluate your strategy through KPIs.
This allows you to ensure that the prospecting file you have invested so much time and effort in actually brings you new customers.
