How to create your commercial prospecting file?

B2B Prospecting Database 101

What's the purpose and what should it contain?

Definition

A prospecting database is essentially a list of potential customers for your products or services. Unlike the customer database you already have, you don't know the people on this list yet. It serves to feed your sales team for their commercial prospecting activities. There's no need to have millions of contacts in your database—what matters is that this prospect file is highly qualified.

What should a prospecting database contain?

The question we often ask when creating a contact database is: what should I include in this list?

The answer is... It depends! Indeed, depending on your prospecting strategy, you won't need the same information. Most commonly, we find:

• Contact's first and last name

• Their professional email address

• Company name

• Phone number (main or direct line)

• Website address

• Complete postal address or location

I also recommend adding information like their social media profiles and comments, particularly to add details about their interests.

Prerequisites Before Building Your Database

Establish Your Personas, Obviously!

If you read us regularly, you know how important establishing personas is for growth. Well, it's equally important for your prospecting database. If you want it to be high quality and achieve the best possible results in your prospecting, you must work on your personas.

The Prospecting Strategy

You've understood that without a prospecting strategy, it's harder. Beyond the importance of knowing where you're going before acting, the prospecting strategy will define the elements that must be present in your database. If you plan a prospecting process that includes social media and phone, you'll need this information. If you only use email, you won't need it.

Elementary, but not so trivial.

👉 To learn more, check out our article on commercial prospecting.

Buying Your Prospecting Database: Good or Bad Idea?

No need to beat around the bush. We don't recommend it.

There, next point.

More seriously, targeting and therefore the prospecting database are critically important for your results. The problem with prospect databases you buy is that they're very rarely sufficiently qualified. Targeting possibilities are very limited, and you'll need to rework them thoroughly in any case.

Furthermore, they're often outdated and contain generic email addresses (contact@yourdreamclient.com). Database rental has the same drawbacks as purchasing, even if the databases are often slightly more up-to-date. If you do it anyway, think about using tools like Zero Bounce to test email addresses BEFORE using them. If you send emails and exceed 10% error rate (bounce), you can be sure your deliverability will suffer... goodbye inbox, hello spam folder !

Building Your Own Prospecting Database: Basic Method

Free Techniques

Yes, good news—you can work wonders for free. I'll give you a technique that works really well for B2B prospect databases. You'll combine two extremely qualified databases available for free: The SIRENE database and LinkedIn.

With the SIRENE database, you can filter companies with great precision based on their APE code, location, headcount, etc. This company database is governmental and therefore very reliable.

Once companies are identified, use LinkedIn to search for the right contacts that match your personas. Free LinkedIn search can help you a lot—think about also using LinkedIn's feature that suggests profiles similar to the one you're visiting. This way, with one search, you can identify multiple targets. The final step is to use solutions like Hunter in its free version to find your target's email address and/or phone number. Easy, right?

Paid Techniques for Building Your Database

Of course, there's buying or renting databases, but you probably didn't read the beginning of the article carefully.

There are still paid tools that will help you in your mission. The main one worth mentioning is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It costs around $60 per month, but it will remove search limits and give you access to numerous filters to better target your searches.

We can also mention tools for finding contact details that are paid, like Hunter's premium version or Dropcontact. I also recommend looking at Snov.io, which is a complete prospecting tool that will also help you generate your lists using advanced search tools.

Advanced Prospecting Database Creation Techniques

I hope you're ready—that was just a warm-up. In prospecting, you need to be relevant, and for your database to be relevant too, be smart. Advanced techniques actually rely on a simple principle: weak signals.

If you know your targets well, you can list a certain number of weak signals and therefore be more relevant in building your prospect list.

The Social Media Fox

It's no secret anymore—social selling is very effective. Everyone's doing it, but what interests us here is that all these budding "social sellers" are actually working for you. Yes, yes, they're working for you.

Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

Social media usage has exploded and has been accompanied by the creation of numerous thematic groups, particularly on LinkedIn and Facebook. For example, if you're a SaaS solution for SEO help, there are groups and hashtags to follow a subject like #seo for search engine optimization.

Using tools like PhantomBuster, you can extract the list of people who are registered there. Be careful, this is a growth hacking technique, and LinkedIn and Facebook aren't big fans. So use it intelligently.

LinkedIn Posts... From Your Competitors!

Even if you don't like to admit it, some of your competitors are quite comfortable with LinkedIn and pretty good at social selling. Great, so they're working for you. Yes, yes, you see that great post that has hundreds of likes and thank-you comments from people who attended their conference (they're really good, these competitors).

Well, send them a little thank-you card too (no, don't do that, it's not nice to show off). Your list is right there, qualified by your peers.

Google, Always Google

Using Google, an emerging search engine recently, you can find dozens or even hundreds of ideas to generate your prospect list. Without precise targeting, it's hard to know which weak signal is interesting. So think about working well on your personas and your strategy. I can't list all the techniques—I'll suggest a few, but don't forget: be creative!

Job Posting Sites

This is probably the simplest and one of the most effective. A company that's hiring is a company with a need or project. If you're a mobile development agency, you should follow companies recruiting mobile project managers or digital project managers. If you sell an email solution for prospecting, companies recruiting salespeople are surely a good target.

Simple, but you have to think of it.

Federation or Business Association Sites

There are numerous business groupings, and often these groups are thematic. I'll take a simple example: when you sell tools that help innovative tech companies better manage their projects, the French Tech portal would be a superb list! If you couple this list with funding announcements (which are rarely discreet), you'll also know which ones have the means and ambitions to invest.

Specialized Trade Show Sites

There are numerous trade shows—well, at least there were many before March 2020. The principle is simple: exhibitors from a particular sector are brought together for an event, for a significant investment.

The show organizer then works to attract potential prospects for the exhibitors. I suggest you reverse the concept: focus on shows where your targets could be exhibitors. Go to the show website, take the exhibitor list.