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Ever spent hours and hours manually scraping LinkedIn or using disconnected free and paid tools to find out the correct emails and phone numbers, trying to put all the pieces together only to get close to zero responses?
It’s time to take a closer look at the current list you have because a bad list is what can make or break your cold outbound strategy.
If you get it wrong, you’ll only be faced with no booked meetings or deals. With a wrong list that’s not targeted, you’re basically shouting into the void.
Building a great targeted list used to be very costly and time-consuming. Well, not anymore. And we’ll talk about that in a bit.
Before we jump right in, let’s stop and acknowledge this shocking statistic:
Back in 2019, Backlinko conducted an email outreach study. They analyzed 12 million outreach emails. Among other key findings, what grabbed our attention was this shocking statistic:
Here are 6 easy-to-follow steps on how you can build a targeted list.
Before you even start building your list, you have to clarify within your relevant team who should be a part of this list.
If you want to target only decision-makers and C-level, ensure everyone is on the same page and focus on targeting only your ICP. Anyone who doesn’t fit that profile simply shouldn’t be part of that list.
Key ICP Factors:
Marketing and Sales teams should collaborate together to define the ICP as early as possible, and clearly define the target industries, target company sizes and their revenue. The pain points of your ICP: “What are they struggling wit?” and “Where does your product or service come in?” should also be part of that discussion.
Geography and their current tech stack can also help you define a more thorough ICP profile(s).
Now’s the time to match your ICP with companies and contacts. As we briefly mentioned above, this step of the process used to be the most daunting one. (It still can be if your sales team is doing this step manually).
But there are plenty of tools out there that can help you compile your targeted list from web scraping tools to company databases like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay, Apollo, and Genesy in a matter of seconds.
This step goes back to what we talked about in the beginning: if you have the wrong list, you’re just shouting in the void. You’ll end up with no booked demos, eventually making it harder to scale your business.
That’s why it is important that when you enrich your list, you also verify that those contact details exist and are accurate.
Once you clean up your data and enrich it with all the information you need, you will also avoid high bounce rates, which can harm your email deliverability.
As you already know, not all accounts are equally valuable. Some accounts that have engaged with your brand before and are closer to buying your product or services, may place them with a higher score compared to a company that has never heard about you before.
It’s important to note here that, even though one company may [currently] have a higher score compared to one that has yet to hear about you, that doesn’t mean the company or account that is nowhere near to being a warm lead is less worthy. They may not just be a high priority when compared to a lead that is already warm and close to subscribing to your services.
However, this is highly subjective, which is why you will have to decide on a scoring system on your own and ensure that everyone is on the same page about the scoring criteria.
Some scoring criteria ideas:
This step is pretty straightforward. It’s always a good idea to keep your list organized to avoid any confusion. However, one thing we want to emphasize here is: automation.
If you can use a tool to automate some or most of your repeatable tasks in order to free up your time to focus on tasks with a higher value, we strongly recommend you to do it.
A targeted email list is never static. People change jobs; companies go bust; other companies get acquired; key decision-makers keep changing.
If your list is not kept up to date all the time, you risk contacting either the wrong people or deactivated emails that keep on bouncing back.
Ways to Keep Your Email List Fresh at All Times:
Before you undertake any initiatives and work on any campaign strategies, you have to be reminded that the list you are using to send all the work you’ve worked hard for may be hindering your efforts.
It’s the same train of thought as with your ICP. However, defining your ICP should be considered as “Step 0” - without this research being done and approved, you cannot move ahead with bold steps.
We want to leave you with this: the last step after you build your targeted list is to come to terms with the fact that it will never be perfect. Lots of pieces keep on changing which can indirectly affect the accuracy of some information included in your list.
This is why Step 6 is so important and has to be done continuously before getting too comfortable using an outdated list that can do more harm than good when it comes to ROI.
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