To increase your turnover, you need to acquire new customers and develop a partner network. To achieve this, you must start by creating a quality BtoB prospecting file. Discover, in 3 simple and concrete steps, how to proceed.  

Have you recharged enough energy during the holidays and are now more motivated than ever to develop your business ? So you no longer have a minute to lose finding new customers! From now on, your marketing actions must be targeted, relevant and well coordinated. Indeed, despite all your efforts, if your BtoB prospecting base is of poor quality or if you do not know how to optimize it 100% , you risk moving away from your objective, or even missing it. Concretely, you must define your target, build your prospect base and optimize it through a PRM.

Step 1: (Re)Define your target

First, you need to determine which buyers whose needs you can satisfy and exclude those whose needs you cannot. Do this before even identifying your potential buyers (personas) . Indeed, it is important that you think about your buyer profiles (or ideal buyer profile) before embarking on the creation of your buyer personas (target). It is important to carefully nuance these two concepts.

The buyer profile

As a reminder, the buyer profile designates the companies that best match your offer. To identify them, you can ask yourself questions like:

• Who really needs my offer?
• Which industry or sector of activity should you approach as a priority?
• Are your best customers in a specific sector or from different industries?

You can measure the size of these businesses 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 specific as possible when you define it. You must take into account precise data including demographic assumptions, purchasing behavior, motivation and objectives, etc.

Note that in BtoB, your targets often have different issues and expectations. However, to produce results, you must ensure that your contacts file lists your targets in such a way as to classify them according to common issues . This will help you create a personalized sales pitch. Remember, a personalized campaign guarantees the profitability of your marketing efforts. And the more you refine your selection criteria, the more successful you will be on this point.

It is a fact that in BtoB, it is generally preferable to approach senior decision-makers : founder, general manager, CEO, etc. However, it happens that your best interlocutor is placed lower in the hierarchy . This could be, for example, a department manager (marketing, finance, purchasing, etc.) or a C-level employee, etc.

So, once the sector of activity has been selected, you must accurately target your prospects. Ask yourself specific questions like:  

• What problems are you going to solve for your buyer personas?
• Where do your targets go to find information?
• What types of social media 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 BtoB prospect base

Before you decide on anything, know that you have two options: 

• build a base of qualified prospects yourself,
• or buy a BtoB prospecting file.

Create a base of qualified prospects yourself

Are you convinced that you are best served by yourself? Or do you simply not yet have a sufficient budget to delegate the preparation of your commercial prospecting and purchase a premium tool? qualified BtoB prospects file yourself .

There are generally 6 fields that you should basically put in your prospecting file:

• Company Name 
• Contact's first and last name 
• Contact position 
• Email-address, 
• The phone
• Link to LinkedIn profiles

You must personalize and complete this list according to your prospecting strategy. 

You can then collect data and list it from your targeting. It may be interesting to refer to your best existing customers to identify similar targets and concentrate your efforts there.

To stand out from your competitors and generate new prospects , you must please your targets. Your prospecting plan must therefore be based on a qualitative and up-to-date file . In other words, your database must be dynamic, not static.

You also have free tools like the good old Microsoft Excel or Airtable which can serve as a platform for your commercial prospecting file. You also have 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 at all practical. 

Buy a BtoB prospecting file 

There are many BtoB prospect databases that you can buy or rent on the internet . And the question of buying prospects or a contact file constitutes precisely one of the biggest dilemmas for marketing and sales managers... Indeed, these files can have 3 major disadvantages:

• sometimes poor data quality (obsolete or incorrect contact details, position already replaced, etc.)
• high prices do not necessarily rhyme with quality (difficult to understand), 
• Prospecting companies that don’t know you can harm your brand image. 

In any case, you don't necessarily have to do everything by hand. Sometimes, the best decision is to delegate your commercial prospecting to a good marketer and provide them with the right tools .

Step 3: Integrate your database into a PRM tool to get maximum results

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 very profitable investment , as it helps you optimize the management of your lead file, and improves your conversion rate .

We particularly recommend the integrated PRM of the Magileads solution . You can import your database from Google or LinkedIn in a few clicks. You can also enrich it with the database of 20 million qualified BtoB prospects that the platform makes available to you.

What is really interesting with this tool is that it allows you to create a complete sales funnel to carry out omnichannel prospecting from A to Z. Concretely, you can target your prospects, note their engagement, personalize your messages and test them with the AB Testing , conduct your prospecting campaign and evaluate your strategy through KPIs.

You can thus ensure that the prospecting file on which you have invested so much effort really brings you new customers.