6 tips for making a prospects list

They are numerous reasons for which you would like to have a list of people in your current market segment. This may be preparing for phone prospecting, or evaluating the size of this market segment, doing market watch or whatever... As I am preparing a post on this subject, I will mainly focus on phone prospecting.

Although this can take a tremendous amount of time, this is not so difficult. You have plenty of tools to help you doing that:

• I hope you already installed Google Analytics on your website? If not go do it now !!! and do not forget to come back after ;-). If you look at the service provider view, you will be able to determine the company of some of your visitors (in my case and Golaem website, it is roughly 10% of visitors). Obviously you won't have any name, and will have to go through the receptionist (or look at my last tip), but anyway you know that someone in this company is interested by your company. Better than that,  you may even know by which product they are interested if you look at the content/service provider association! This significantly increases your odds of realizing your goal when calling.

• Twitter followers. Not only yours, also look at your competitors' ones! If they are interested in your competitors they are chances that you will be able to interest them! On top of that, twitter may be an alternative way for contacting the good person directly.

• Search directories, association or societies members, conference exhibitors lists... The internet is full of thematic lists that you can take advantage of...

• Subscribe to industries newsletters, and thematic job boards... Each week that's a new bunch of prospects, delivered directly in your mailbox! On top of that, you know what they recently announced or achieved, or that they are recruiting for new projects, and what these new projects will be about. This is of incredible value because it gives you some context to call your prospect. You can start the conversation by "congratulations for V4 release last week" or "I know you are currently setting up a new CRM, and I have some solutions that may be of interest to you..."

• Ask your current customers or prospects. They may know better than you who could be interested by what you have to say and give you a few names. Starting the call by: "I call you because one of our good customers, Mr. X, told me you could be interested by our company..." assures you at least some minutes of attention instead of being hang up on...

• Finally, if needed, you can take some time to get contact information for the companies you found. Watching at their LinkedIn page may help you to get some names of the people you want to talk to (CTO, VP of business development, buyers, CEO ...).

What else ? Do you have other tips to make prospects list ?

B2B sales funnel, follow up and estimate future revenues

The sales funnel

For a B2B companies, following customer contacts and opportunities is a crucial activity.
Many people advocate for classifying customers but without giving a scale to do it...

I think scale may differ depending on the company, but here is the one I built:
  1.  Awareness
  2.  Interested
  3.  Qualified Lead
  4.  Asked for evaluation
  5.  Signed NDA
  6.  Evaluation Sent
 -1. Discarded

It leads to the following sales funnel representation (sorry it does not look like an actual funnel !). Click enlarge it.

What should you do with it ?


1. Keep a centralized version of the funnel (on your favorite CRM, or even on an excel spreadsheet), input each lead into, and input the date at every change of status.

2. Input ALL leads : the ones you get meeting with, but also the visitors of your website (you are using google analytics right ?!), the followers of your twitter corporate account, people you meet at trade shows...

3. Review it every week, sort all leads based on their status: the higher the score, the more recent the last change of status => the higher the priority

4. Take action with the most leads possible (based on their status), obviously starting with the highest priority. Call the evaluators to know how you could help them, send gentle reminders to the one who did not yet send the NDA, keep in touch with interested people...

5. Discard ! When you think there is nothing more to be done with a lead, just discard it... You need to keep your energy for the others.

6. If you need to take a break with a lead (like they say: "ok I am busy now, please contact me in february", or you say "ok, I will send you our next version to be released in one month"), do not forget to add a comments in your funnel, or to set a reminder.

7. Derive metrics from these data. They will help you to track your progress when trying different markets or sales methods. They will also be useful if you try to raise money and want to present the evolution of your company over time...



What could you measure with it ?


More important than the actual figures, you need to track the evolution over time.


1. The number of people entering the funnel.


2. Conversion rates : how many interested people ask an evaluation ? how many evaluators actually buy your product ?

3. Length of your sales cycle : what is the mean time between an expression of interest and a deal made ?

4. Average customer value. How much money do they spend at the end of the funnel ?

Given all these metrics, you will be able to estimate the average value of your sales funnel, and anticipate your future revenues.


What about you ?

Do you have a different sales funnel ?
Do you use it for other purposes ?