3 Ways of Getting a Prospect List

Sandra Wilk
Nov 4 · 5 min read

Getting a quality prospect list is one of the chief ingredients of a successful cold email campaign. And there are at least three ways of building such a list. Not all of them will fit in with your lead generation process. Pick the one that suits your company best.

Let’s see how the three possible scenarios could unfold.

Scenario #1: you DIY a prospect list

The busy bee that you are, you decide to make time to create a list on your own. That’s awesome! The DIY approach gives you the best (the most personalized) results.

Alas, it is also the most time-consuming method. Let’s see how it goes:

First, you determine who your Ideal Customer is. If you have your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) in place — great! You’re one step ahead. Then you set out to find out where those people are online. Whichever place draws them, you follow. You become a regular, engaging in conversations and other interactions with them, such as sharing their content or upvoting their answers. This way you learn about their daily work routines, the problems they face — as well as the roots of those problems — and see what ideas spark their interest. You also learn their language.

After some time, you’re getting real close to your goal. Whew! Now that’s a lot of hours spent on building online relations. But trust me on this one — this is going to pay off.

Now all you have to do is collect a list of names, companies, titles and some additional references (for example, the prospect’s stand on a certain topic). You know this kind of information is gold — you can then use it in snippets to create highly personalized emails — you know, the ones that will start you the most conversations with prospects.

Now you choose one of the prospecting tools to collect your prospects’ email addresses.

Et voila!

Now that, my friend, is a quality prospect list.

If you pick this method, not only do you get to know your prospects, but also are able to create a highly personalized email copy.

The downside of this approach is, obviously, how time-consuming it is.

Scenario #2: You outsource building a list

You know how important a quality prospect list is, but don’t want to take the trouble to do the tiresome task yourself, so you take the smart route and decide to outsource it.

You hire a freelancer or designate a person within your company who’s going to create the list. The catch is, though, that you need to provide training to make sure they know your ICP down to the last detail. They have to be able to decide which info might be relevant and useful for personalization snippets in your cold email campaign.

This means you need to make time for onboarding and training such a person, whether they’re an in-house employee or a freelancer.

This way will obviously be more expensive than building the list yourself and more time consuming than ordering a list from an external company, but it will give you second-to-best results in terms of personalization.

And personalization is key. No one likes to receive generic messages.

Aim at getting a good first impression, not throwing leaflets around.

Scenario #3: You order a list

You strongly believe that finding the right balance between saving your time and creating a quality prospect list is crucial. So after giving it a thought, you decide to order list building from a company who offers such services.

You meet up with one of their consultants so they can learn about your ICP and pick the best prospects for your company. Then, they tell you what data they’d be able to collect for you.

Usually, they offer a wide range of data, such as name, company, job title, emails, phone numbers, and websites, sometimes perhaps the technology their using at the prospect’s company. They won’t get you contextual data, though. And it’s hard to write a really good personalized email without it.

On the plus side, though, this way allows you to save both time and money. There’s no need to hire and train anybody, but at the same time you get to explain your ICP to the list building company, so you can be sure they know who to look for.

Depending on the targeting (and the specific info you need), you might be able to strike the right chord in your prospects with this approach.

Bonus — Scenario #4: You buy a ready-made list

Spoiler alert: don’t do it.

Juggling between meetings, emails and phone calls you can’t spare the time for building a prospect list yourself, and since you’re on a tight budget, you don’t really want to hire anyone to do it for you. You decide to take the easiest way out: buy a ready-made list.

Now you’re sitting there, thinking you’ve saved some time and staring at your list of 200k Heads of Marketing in the US. You compose a message, add some nice custom fields such as {{First_Name}}, {{Company_Name}} and {{Website}}. You click ‘send’ and get giddy with excitement at how well you’ve dealt with this task and what great results you’re going to get. You proceed to other tasks and get a 90% positive reply rate. Right? Wrong.

More like: you send out emails, but the great results that you expect never come. Instead, you get many hard bounces, get mistaken for a spammer, and ruin your email deliverability (and domain reputation.)

And you know what? At the end of the day you don’t really save money, either.

Here’s a handful of reasons why you should NEVER buy a ready-made prospect list:

  • The email addresses might be invalid.
  • They might have been valid once, but people change jobs, companies go bankrupt or change domains. And when you send to a non-existent email, you get a hard bounce.
  • If you get many hard bounces, SPAM filters might recognize you as a spammer (yeah, even if you’re not one). What’s the result? Your email provider blocks you from sending any emails at all. Also, your IP — so your domain as well — may get on a blacklist. This means that not only your deliverability might suffer, but your domain reputation as well.
  • You don’t know your prospects, so you can’t personalize — not to mention highly personalize — your messages. This most probably will result in a poor reply rate. And your engagement rate is important for future deliverability.
  • Also, many other people might have bought the very same list as you. Let’s take a guess: would your prospects be likely to answer yet another email from someone they don’t know and, possibly, might not have any business in starting a business relation with? My guess would be no. And if they get really irritated, they might manually tag you as a spammer.

What’s the moral of this story?

Don’t. Buy. Ready. Made. Lists. Ever.

I’m sure there are more than three ways of getting a quality prospect list, but those are the ones I think to be the most useful. Analyze them and pick the solution that is right for you. Just don’t buy a ready-made list. Ultimately, your goal is to gain as many new valuable business relations as you can, not as many leads as possible.

Woodpecker.co

A tool that sends automated follow-up sequences from your mailbox

Sandra Wilk

Written by

I’m a content writer. My fascination with the written word and a love of challenges brought me to work at Woodpecker.co.

Woodpecker.co

A tool that sends automated follow-up sequences from your mailbox

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