Social Selling

B2B List Building: How to Generate More Quality Sales Leads

Cody Dufrene
June 13, 2022
Imagine you’ve put together the perfect cold email strategy. You’re excited to contact a prospect. Weeks turn into months trying to reach a prospect with no response. Later on, you find out you have the wrong contact information all along. Many companies discover too late that the data they had on leads is incorrect. This is when you need to create your own B2B list. B2B List building focuses on making a list of prospects with whom you can connect, nurture leads, and later convert them into clients. Every B2B marketing strategy includes making a list, but it is much more specific than a list of companies. You need to get the contact information on the target decision-makers of the companies you are trying to reach.

Why is a B2B email list so important?

In a nutshell, a B2B list is just a list of companies you're interested in hoping to make them clients. You can't create a B2B list right away. Building a B2B list is not as simple as just getting a list of businesses that are interested in the products or services you offer. To build a list of companies you want to become clients, follow the following steps.

How to build a B2B email list the manual way

Figure out who your ideal customer is

Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) is the first step anyone should take when building a list. Having a clear understanding of who your customers are will enable you to exclude those who don't fit your company. An ICP describes the ideal customer you want to do business with. It involves finding out relevant details about the people-their industry, the size of the market, their role and responsibilities in their company. Find out what common characteristics and preferences your current customers share from your sales team. Here are a couple of questions to get you started on putting together an ICP.
  • What industry do they work in?
  • How big is the company they work for?
  • What’s their job title and what primary responsibilities do they fulfill in their company?
  • How do they deal with the most challenging aspects of their job?
If you can't identify your ideal customers from the beginning when building your B2B contact list or B2B contact database, this could prove to be an expensive mistake.

Make a list of your target companies and key decision-makers

Find businesses that fit your ideal customer profile. These businesses ought to have the key decision-makers who have a say in how to run the business. At first, building a B2B list can seem difficult, but it is worthwhile once you get into the flow. If you want to reach out to established businesses, look at the Fortune 100, 500 or 1000 list. LinkedIn can help you find leaders in these businesses. The more established the business is, the more likely it is to pay for your products/services. Learn more about the B2B Lead Generation Process & Strategies To Improve Conversions.

Look up your leads’ contact information online

You need to spend a lot of time searching online for any contact information. Your leads' contact information can be found in company websites, online directories, and LinkedIn. Interviews, media statements and press releases they’ve released are other sources of contact information. You should dig deeper when building a B2B List. Check out guest blog posts, Slack channels, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and industry forums like Quora to find their contact information.

Verify contact information

This is when things may get tough. Once you've made your B2B email and phone contact list, you need to verify the email addresses and phone numbers are accurate and to make sure your list is not just made up of garbage leads. The best approach for phone numbers will be to manually check your B2B contact list and remove any invalid emails or phone numbers. Write a short script and then call the numbers. You just want them to know you're interested in working with them. Tell your prospects your colleague will get in touch next week to discuss how they can tackle this pain point. You can also use email authentication services or software to validate your emails.

Complete your research on your ideal customers

Research and going the extra mile to get in touch with your target audience will lead to a stronger prospect list as the data and knowledge you gain will be important. Take advantage of tools like LinkedIn Navigator to track your prospects. Develop a coherent strategy and schedule to determine which direction to go in creating your B2B prospect list.

The Issues of Building B2B Email Lists

You’ve prepared your B2B contact list. But how much time and effort do you need to spend to create your own B2B contact list? Provided you have good Internet research skills, it may take several weeks or even months to develop your B2B list based on your requirements. Busy sales & marketing professionals can’t afford to waste hours creating a list. They should prioritize turning contacts into customers but recruiting a lead researcher, a virtual assistant, or another dedicated B2B list development resource will raise your costs as well. This gets worse for small and medium businesses, startups and entrepreneurs who can't devote time and money to building their own B2B lists. We know that building a B2B list isn't easy. In fact, it's a tremendous amount of work. With options like Icy Leads, there's nothing to get down about.

Icy Leads can automate and do all the work to build a B2B email list

It works like this: you can log on to the Icy Leads dashboard and you can search in our database of over 15 million company leads and over 575 million leads using our unlimited company filters including job title, industry, location and more.

Wide Range of Search Filters

Our extensive search filters let you narrow the scope of discovering your prospects.

Reach Real People

Get in touch with an actual person or company from our updated database within a few clicks.

Export Data to CSV

Manage your leads much easier when you export verified data to your worksheet.

Accurate and Reliable

Maximize your ROI by staying on top of details so you can reduce your sales cycle and turn more opportunities into possibilities.

User-Friendly Interface

We make it easy to locate companies and target accounts using our text-based search and easy filtering interface. Icy Leads has everything you need in one unrestricted dashboard!

Using Icy Leads as a B2B list builder will help you improve your sales

Filter Your Search Criteria

To find leads in the healthcare industry, navigate to “Industries” and fill in the target industry. For example, you can target “Marketing”. Then select the appropriate option in the drop-down list.

Finetune the Search Criteria

Here, you can filter by revenue, job title, the number of employees and more. You can drop down your list of potential leads/buyers once you've optimized your search criteria.

Finalize Your B2B List

Organize your list of B2B prospects helpfully. Once you have selected the ideal list of contacts, you can reach out to them! Import your prospect list in CSV format by hitting the "Export" button.

Create B2B lists with Icy Leads

Now you know how Icy Leads works, here are some advantages of choosing Icy Leads for B2B list building.

Increased Productivity for Sales Reps

Sales reps spend only 33% of their time selling and the rest of the time doing administrative and research tasks. Investing in a B2B list building tool like Icy Leads will help your reps find more leads within a short amount of time.

Target Companies and People the Right Way

All people have different tastes and unique preferences for their line of business, and you need to offer solutions to their pain points and needs. That's why finding the right leads are so crucial. Icy Leads can help you target the right people and companies by delivering leads suited to your requirements. In Icy Leads, you'll be able to sort your prospects by several filters. This makes it easier for you to pick the prospects you know are going to convert.

Up-to-date, Verified data

Data decays at a rate of 36% each year, making it essential to source data from a reliable source. Besides quality data, Icy Leads offers lower bounce rates.

Enrichment with Data

With a automatic process, Icy Leads will enrich your decaying data and clean up your list of customers.

The Best Way to Get More B2B Leads

If you’re pressed for time, it can be tempting to hire someone to do the research for you or even buy a B2B list. But you'll end up seeing better results (and more money) when you start with a qualified B2B list that offers verified, updated data. Icy Leads makes it fast, simple and much more effective to find better leads for your company. That's how you improve your chance of converting leads into clients.

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