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If you want to make your sales outreach more efficient and meet your sales targets in 2025, then you first need to learn how to build a proper sales prospecting list.
The reason: All your efforts like, writing copies, personalizing, etc., depend on who you’ll be connecting with, so it only makes sense to have your list beforehand.
While it may look simple, building a good prospecting list is actually quite challenging!
This is where my expertise can help you!
Over the decade I have refined my approach to building a prospecting list through trial and error, and in this blog, I’ll share the exact process and best practices to help you create your own winning list.
Let’s dive in…
Sales Prospecting List: TOC
- What is a Sales Prospecting List?
- What’s the Difference Between a Sales Prospecting List and a Lead List?
- Steps to Build Your Sales Prospecting List
- Best Practices for Creating a Sales Prospecting List
- Close More Deals by Prospecting Better
What is a Sales Prospecting List?
A sales prospecting list contains the details of prospective customers who closely match your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona.
It will help you focus your outreach efforts on the right audience – those who will likely convert.
In my experience, a good B2B sales prospecting list should at least include the following information:
- Demographic Information:
- Prospect’s Name and Gender
- Contact Details – Email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles.
- Job Title
- Firmographic Information:
- Organization Name
- Industry Profile
- Company Details (Company size, location, and revenue)
- Intent-Based Information:
- Buyer Intent Data (Insights on whether the prospect is actively looking for solutions you offer.)
With all this information, you can easily lay the groundwork necessary to drive personalized and meaningful conversations with your prospects.
What’s the Difference Between a Sales Prospecting List and a Lead List?
A prospect differs from a lead in one fundamental aspect: a prospect is someone you don’t yet know, whereas a lead is someone with whom you’ve already established some contact.
A lead list is a more advanced version of a sales prospecting list. In other words, as your sales team starts contacting prospects, it also starts transferring their names from the sales prospecting list to the lead list.
But, it’s not guaranteed that all the names in the sales prospecting list will be transferred to the lead list. After all, not all prospects turn into leads and then customers.
What’s the deciding factor? It depends largely on the quality of your sales prospecting list and how closely it follows your ICP and buyer person.
So, how can you make a winning prospecting list? I’ve got exactly what you’re looking for.
Steps to Build Your Sales Prospecting List
Every solid prospecting list I’ve come across has followed four steps with some minor variations.
On the whole, they remain extremely useful in building prospecting lists in the future:
- Understand Your Product/Service From the Market’s Perspective
- Create Your ICP and Buyer Personas
- Identify Your Prospects and Compile the List
- Begin Your Sales Outreach
1. Understand Your Product/Service From the Market’s Perspective
The first step to building a good sales prospecting list is to understand the product-market fit of your offerings.
The reason behind this is simple: the B2B sales process requires your sales team to be very familiar with why prospects need your product/service and how it will add value to their operations.
To thoroughly understand your offering from the market’s perspective, ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the unique selling points of your product/service?
- How is your offering better than your competitors’?
- What would an existing customer say is the best and the most frustrating part about using your product?
This will also help your sales team understand which pain points your product/service can successfully address and identify prospects.
2. Create Your ICP and Buyer Personas
Next, it’s time to create a laser-focused Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas.
While ICP refers to the target companies that could become your customers in the future, buyer personas are specific individuals who will make the buying decision within the target firm.
For instance, your ICP could look like this:
- Industry: IT and Software Development.
- Company Size: More than 100 employees.
- Company Revenue: $500K to $1M
- Location: United States, United Kingdom and Canada
- Tech Stack: Slack, Zoho HR, and TravelPerk.
On the other hand, the buyer persona will include information about personnel in the target companies, such as:
- Job Title: Co-founder, Founder, CEO, COO
- Goals and Objectives: Improve sales and profitability.
- Challenges and Pain Points: Cost of scaling the sales outreach process.
As you can see, the ICP and buyer persona can help you narrow down and select the right prospects that should go into your sale prospecting list.
3. Identify Your Prospects and Compile the List
Once you have your detailed ICP and precise buyer personas, you can easily start building your sales prospect list.
But what’s the best way to do it?
In my opinion, there are two good ways:
The first is to use LinkedIn – a hub of B2B communication where over 65 million decision-makers build lasting business connections.
For this reason, LinkedIn is also a highly effective source for building a prospect list.
There’s only one problem: you will have to manually search for and save your prospects’ information to your list. This can be very time-consuming if you need to build huge prospecting lists with hundreds of data points.
For my money, I prefer the second and more efficient method: using sales prospecting tools that were built especially for that purpose!
A sales prospecting tool is a dedicated B2B database with advanced search capabilities.
Its dedicated function is to help you build a precise list of prospects that align closely with your ICP and buyer personas. And you don’t have to worry about bulk prospecting: reputed prospecting tools let you build sales prospecting lists of up to 10,000 individuals!
Plus, unlike LinkedIn, a sales prospecting tool also provides you with your prospects’ contact information. So, while you’re browsing through a list of prospects who match your ICP and buyer persona, you can quickly retrieve their verified direct dials and email IDs to enrich your list.
4. Begin Your Sales Outreach
With your sales prospecting list ready, it’s time to begin reaching out to your prospects and initiating business relationships with them.
Remember! Personalization is the key to closing more deals in 2025.
Always tailor your outreach efforts to match a specific buyer persona and utilize all the information you have to personalize your sales pitch.
And that’s it: we’ve discussed the four simple steps to building a killer prospecting list, no matter the target or the situation.
But I would not be living up to my promise if I also didn’t share with you the best practices for creating sales prospecting lists…
Best Practices for Creating a Sales Prospecting List
There are three things that I’ve noticed in every good sales prospecting list:
- Clearly Define your ICP + Buyer Persona + Refine
- Use a Reputed Sales Prospecting Platform
- Double Clean Your Prospecting List
1. Clearly Define your ICP + Buyer Persona + Refine
Good prospecting is simple: it involves refining your ICP and buyer persona till you find the right product-market fit for your offerings.
As we’ve discussed, your ICP and buyer persona comprise very detailed information about who your product/service can help and how it can solve their pain points.
In short, your ICP and buyer person are cheat sheets for effective prospecting. But crafting an ICP or determining the buyer persona isn’t a one-time process.
Every sales conversation, pitch, and cycle will give you new information about what works and what doesn’t.
Based on this new information, I highly recommend that you refine your ICP and buyer persona for sharper prospecting.
2. Use a Reputed Sales Prospecting Platform
As we’ve seen, a sales prospecting platform is a dedicated tool for finding the companies that suit your ICP and the people who match your buyer persona.
A reputed sales prospecting platform, however, does more.
But what differentiates a reputed sales prospecting platform?
In my experience, a good sales prospecting platform will have the following features:
- A stringent data verification process.
- Compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA regulations.
- Integration with popular CRM platforms.
- No hidden fees for exporting prospect information.
- Native and advanced outreach capabilities.
- Multiple data points for every prospect.
- Post-purchase support to help you make the most of your investment.
My recommendation: If you think that a sales prospecting tool can aid your prospecting efforts, try finding one that meets the requirements we’ve discussed above.
3. Double Clean Your Prospecting List
Outdated or incorrect contact information can frustrate your prospecting efforts. Conversely, every good prospecting list always contains updated and verified contact information.
So, how can you ensure that your prospecting list is always enriched with updated information?
If you’re dealing with relatively small lists, your team may be able to verify the contact information manually.
You can use reverse lookup tools or email verification platforms for this process.
If you have an extensive prospecting list, I suggest you use reputed sales prospecting tools with strong verification mechanisms to deliver accurate contact information.
Close More Deals by Prospecting Better
There we have it: in this blog, we’ve discussed everything you need to build highly accurate prospect lists.
To recap, building a sales prospecting list involves three steps: understanding your product/service, building an ICP and buyer personas, and compiling the list.
We’ve also explored the powerful capabilities of a sales prospecting platform: they can help you build highly targeted sales prospect lists that closely align with your buyer personas.
But what if you could find prospects and directly add them to your outreach campaigns?
It would make prospecting and outreach extremely efficient, right?
Well, you’re in luck: several prospecting platforms like Saleshandy help you prospect and launch outreach efforts in one place.
So, if you’re looking for advanced prospecting capabilities and smooth outreach channels in one place, I highly recommend you give one of these platforms a shot.
It might be the only solution you need!
Happy prospecting!