The Ultimate Guide to Building a Lead List

During my time as a sales rep, building a lead list was one of my first activities when I took on a new sales role, territory, or industry vertical.

These lists would evolve, grow, and ultimately work best when they were imported into CRM, and were invaluable for helping me to:

• Meet my productivity goals (and my quota in the long run)
• Segment companies in my territory or industry
• Keep track of my prospect interactions
• Capture important information like competitive install

In this article, I’ll explain more about what a great lead list looks like, and share my ideas about how to build one.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Lead List?
• How to Build a Lead List
• My Tips for Building a Sales Lead List

 

A prospect may have shown interest in a product or service by responding to an online offer, visiting your company’s booth at a conference, or engaging with social media posts.

Many organizations may closely meet your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) criteria and warrant sales reps to proactively reach out to them.

Leads are often categorized and managed through these different stages:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Leads who have engaged with your marketing efforts, and are deemed ready for sales review and converting it to an opportunity.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). MQLs that your sales team has vetted and identified as worthy of direct follow-up.
• Opportunity. A lead meets a company’s qualification criteria (like BANT) to be added to a company’s deal forecast.
• Evangelist. A contact or company may not be an immediate opportunity, but they advocate for your company and its products and services to other companies. The evangelist may work for a consulting firm, a partner candidate, or even an existing customer.
• Customer. A client that has already acquired your company’s products or services are often your best source of revenue, provided they had positive customer experiences.

After leads have been categorized, the process then involves creating and using these lists for lead management, and tracking to ensure they move efficiently through the sales pipeline.

I’ve had many lead list sources over the years, ranging from website visitors and event attendees to telemarketing vendors. I generated many of my own sales leads through cold-calling and networking.

These days, sales reps can access a wealth of prospecting tools to enrich their lead lists, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ChatSpot, Uplead, and PartnerTap.

The Benefits of a Lead List

Selling without a lead list is a slow, disorganized process that usually produces poor results. If you need more convincing, here are five advantages to creating and maintaining a B2B lead list:

1. Enhanced Prospect Profiles

The better your prospect profile, the better your call outcomes. I recommend collecting as much information as possible about the businesses in your addressable market and classifying them in terms of their:

• Industry
• Years in business
• Decision maker and influencer contacts
• Number of employees
• Annual revenue
• Existing technology stack
• Previous interactions with your company, including meetings, social media interactions, and campaign engagement
• Lifecycle stage (MQL, SQL, etc.)

Trust me — without a lead list with this level of granularity, your results suffer. I once cold-called an IT Manager who was fired from his last job because of a failed project involving my (now former) employer’s software. I sure would have appreciated a more detailed lead profile before making that call — he was less than pleased to hear from me that day.

2. Improved Lead Nurturing

Sales and marketing teams can use the information from your lead list to determine the kinds of campaign tactics each lead is added to, such as email newsletters or webinar invites. Then, the prospect’s engagement levels in these campaigns can dictate when (or whether) a sales rep should follow up with the prospect.

When it comes to lead nurturing intel, the more detail the better. You must be able to rely on your lead list to build credibility with prospects, as people like to buy from salespeople who understand them and their unique needs.

3. Better Marketing Campaign Personalization

Another benefit of a lead list is that it simplifies the campaign personalization process. Segmentation by persona, industry, and competitive intelligence can help marketing teams better plan the marketing assets they produce, who they distribute them to, and when in their content calendar. This usually happens at the beginning of the fiscal year or a new quarter.

In parallel, your sales leadership team can then develop your sales plan (grab a free HubSpot sales plan template here) and align your marketing content to support prospecting outreach campaigns.

Pro tip: Enriching lead data with tools like ChatSpot and Sales Navigator can inform the campaign offers and content that your marketing team sends to individual prospects.

4. Automated Lead Scoring

An information-rich lead list provides lead scoring algorithms with insights into what constitutes a strong sales-qualified lead. In other words, it provides sellers with a foundation that helps them tailor their prospect outreach approach based on a set of scoring factors.

Pro tip: Try HubSpot’s Sales Hub for this. It streamlines lead qualification processes by using machine learning to parse historical trend data at a scale that salespeople could never keep pace with.

5. Continuity

When salespeople move on to a different role within your company (or out of your company entirely), it is important to minimize any disruption or awkwardness. In my experience, lead data quality can help convert a lead into an opportunity and a closed deal — or it can scuttle your company’s chances of ever doing business with a prospect.

For instance, I remember one sales role I had where B2B list building was a very manual, research-intensive process. I generated a comprehensive lead list that later, when I had to split my territory with a colleague due to restructuring, helped him hit the ground running. It also helped the company when I left for a previous employer not long after.

How to Build a Lead List

My experiences building B2B lists were pretty typical — although salespeople today might call it manual and tedious. I would start with a blank spreadsheet and build it out from there.

Good news is — there are a lot of tools like Coefficient (which works with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets) out there now to help you automate this process a bit. That being said, this was my go-to process for how to build a lead list.

Step 1: Capture prospect data in a spreadsheet.

I usually started with an Excel spreadsheet which included the demographic information listed above, and these other column headings:

• Good fit for ICP?
• Lead source
• Current technology
• Fiscal year and budget availability
• Decision making influence and process
• Pain points identified
• What the prospect stands to gain by buying from me
• Marketing campaign engagement
• Competitive relationships
• Lead source
• Compelling events
• Interaction history
• Prospect’s sentiment towards my company (advocate or adversary)

Here’s an example of a real-world sales lead list to help you envision how one might look.

Step 2: Supplement lead profiles with high-quality intelligence.

Next, I would generally populate these fields with as much detail as possible, and upload the data into CRM after mapping the headings. Navigating all of these data points in a spreadsheet is prone to failure, especially in the digital age. Enhancing leads with tools like Chatspot AI,

I also worked with colleagues across sales development and marketing to add richer context to leads from other sources. I am an avid researcher and writer, so enriching my leads with detailed notes came naturally to me.

Step 3: Build relationships with prospects.

I always did my best to build relationships with prospects and be a consultative salesperson instead of taking a more aggressive approach. Since I mostly worked with public sector clients, that tended to be the only way to sell to that industry anyway.

Regardless, I recommend taking a relationship-first approach as you develop and grow your lead list. This investment has helped me time and time again. Even if you don’t generate revenue right away, your relationships can generate advocacy champions for your products, services, and your business over time, Direct revenue could result in the long term.

My Tips for Building a Sales Lead List

Based on my sales experience, the following are best practices that sales leaders and teams should keep in mind when building lead lists and gathering the data to populate them.

Tip #1: Define your ICP and your personas.

No matter what industry you are in, defining the kind of company that is the best fit for your products and services will streamline the time and effort it takes to define your target market.

Take the time to identify the characteristics of the organizations and contacts that are likely to value your products and services as you define your ICP and build customer personas.

And have fun with making your personas – give them catchy names and compelling backstories. Segment leads based on how close they are to how you define an ideal prospect.

Tip #2: Subscribe to sales lead enrichment services.

Tools like ChatSpot and Sales Navigator can save your team lots of time they would otherwise spend on market research and lead enrichment.

Similarly, competitive intelligence battle cards like Klue can help your sales team to gain a competitive edge when a prospect is evaluating multiple vendors.

Then, take all the information you have gathered to build out those lead profiles.

Tip #3: Identify and engage with market sentiment through Reddit and LinkedIn.

Listening to customer sentiment on channels like Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook can be key to identifying and enriching lead information.

Many subreddits consist of prospects asking existing customers for their views on products and services from many industries. Engaging in and tracking these conversations on your lead list can be productive, and it’s a good way to lead with a consultative (rather than sales-y) tone.

Well-Managed Lead Lists Maintain Your Prospecting Momentum

My best prospecting days usually occurred when I had a substantial number of leads prepared to call and email with minimal time to make notes in between. I found that the longer I spent between calls doing administrative work or chatting with colleagues, the harder it was to pick up the phone and contact the next lead.

When I was equipped with a well-crafted B2B lead list on my laptop, some powerful talking points, and my headset, I could get into “the zone” and make consecutive sales calls without negative thoughts derailing my momentum.

All sales professionals are told repeatedly that sales is a numbers game. Well, sales lead lists are key to hitting your productivity number, which usually goes a long way to hitting your quota number. And this, of course, is key to a satisfying commission number.

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