As soon as you start a business, you quickly realize how time-consuming and energy-consuming lead flow management is. And the mess quickly sets in. You know, however, that the growth of your business depends essentially on your ability to convert them into customers. This is when you need to set up an up-to-date prospecting file or database.

Indeed, keeping a good prospect file helps increase your turnover. This is an excellent marketing lever that allows you to carry out your customer acquisition strategy. It is actually a real commercial compass insofar as it allows you to focus your sales efforts on your priority targets. If it’s up to date, it helps you clearly understand the needs of your prospects and anticipate the expectations of your existing customers. Well used, it allows you to organize your commercial actions and manage the follow-up of your contacts.

What is a prospecting file?

Concretely, the prospecting file or prospecting database is a list of prospects. As a reminder, a prospect is a potential customer, that is to say a person likely to be interested in your products or services, but who has not yet made a purchase from you. The prospect file contains all the essential information about them. These include their contacts, contact details, needs, and even social media messages with them.

What are the advantages of having an up-to-date lead file?

You have certainly understood the reasons for keeping a good lead file. However, you may still be wondering if it really should be among your priorities, given that other ultra-important tasks await you in parallel. So think about these reasons to have an up-to-date prospecting file.

Save time and maintain a steady flow of business

Prospect data is gathered in one place. This makes it easier to find information about a particular prospect. The same applies to information updates.

Plus, how you need to process and nurture your cold, lukewarm, and hot prospects can’t be the same. For example, someone who already knows you will always be more likely to become your customer than someone you need to convince from scratch. This gives you a better chance of conversion if you talk to 100 people who want to know more about you than if you talk to 1,000 people who aren’t interested. As you can see, having a database of prospects allows you to maintain a steady flow of business.

Understand and better communicate with prospects

The interests, consumption habits and expectations of prospects are recorded in the file. Their stage of advancement in the conversion funnel is also defined. You can then better situate yourself in relation to the strategy you will use to convince him to buy your offer. You can thus accompany them more appropriately in its progression within the sales funnel. Also called « conversion funnel », the latter corresponds to the journey made by a prospect until his conversion into a customer.

The data is arranged in order, so it is easier for you to customize the emails to send to the customer. You will maintain better communication with your potential customers.

Establish a good business strategy

With a better knowledge of your prospects’ needs, budget and habits, you are able to provide them with relevant offers. It becomes more obvious for you to refine your marketing campaign. Concretely, you can define your buyer persona, note the engagement of your targets and feed them with relevant marketing content.

How to create a free prospect file in BtoB?

To create your lead file for free, you can use basic software like Microsoft Excel. You can then list the useful information you collect about your contacts. Some dedicated programs are also interesting, but they often require a certain amount of time to get started. A regular update must also be made so as not to be mistaken about the current needs of your prospects. Indeed, they evolve very quickly.

You can list, for example, trade show attendees, contacts from web forms. A trick is also to filter your competitors’ promotional posts to find contacts. In any case, you must choose the tool that best suits your business. This allows you to carry out your strategy.

Buying a BtoB prospect database: is it a good idea?

In case you feel overwhelmed by your different tasks in addition to prospecting, or you simply lack prospects, it may be interesting to buy a database of qualified BtoB prospects.

Indeed, buying a prospect database can also be a great investment in terms of time and profit. However, be careful that it corresponds to the prospects you are targeting and contains up-to-date information.

In this regard, note that Magileads provides you with its database of 20 million qualified BtoB prospects in addition to its all-in-one offer in marketing automation. The multi-tenant and omnichannel SaaS solution also allows you to manage your commercial prospecting from A to Z like a pro, and in an automated way.