Building a list of your ideal clients
Building a great prospect list starts with really understanding who your ideal client is. Think about the companies that would benefit most from your solution - what size are they? Which industries do they operate in? Where are they located? Most importantly, who are the decision-makers you need to reach?
Once you have a clear picture of your ideal client, here are some tools that you can use :
LinkedIn Sales Navigator — Best to get started
Leadsourcing — Easy to track your website visitors, easy to set up
Apollo — Inexpensive leads, easy to use
Trigify — to find leads based on social activity
Clay — for advanced list building
Having a very targeted lead list is not only crucial to make sure that they are the right fit for your business but it will also help us create a copy in our outreach that stands out and resonates with them.
Key search filters (Sales Nav, LinkedIn Search or Supergrow):
Location-based
Industry
Employee count
Connection degree
Posted in last 30 days (this shows they’re active)
Example lists to scrape:
→ Attendees of a LinkedIn event
→ Members of a group (ScrapeLi)
→ People who have visited your site (Leadsourcing)
→ Your competitor followers (PhantomBuster)
→ Existing connections in target industry and that have posted recently (Sales Nav)
Personally, I’ve had the most success with leads extracted from posts and groups using different tools and track from Leadsourcing but it may be different in your industry.
When do you think is the best stage to start reaching out to leads. For example if you are still developing an MVP, should you contact them at the stage where you just have a landing page or perhaps when you have a landing page with mockups and a demo also. What elements do you think are important to have in place to ensure the most effective reach?
If you are still developing an MVP, I would say you can also start to reach out to leads who will be your ICP to try your product. You will need to build a feedback loop with users to 1. iterate the product, 2. understand their true pain points and try not to over-build something that potential users won't use at all.
You can simply show them a demo or one-page teaser, get their initial thoughts and keep their contacts warm. Another good thing about reaching out early is you can keep them warm from time to time, and it will cut your time significantly when your MVP/ product is launched.
What elements do you think are important to have in place to ensure the most effective reach?
1. Try to focus on 1-2 ICPs first (Ideal customer profiles instead of targeting too many)
2. always test with your outreach content to ensure you are getting higher response rate from time to time (even they rejected, it means your reach out template is working)
3. Depends on your target audience channels, always have omni channel in place for outreach. E.g. Email + LinkedIn, Facebook + Instagaram, X or Reddit etc.
Hope these help.
Thank you!
My very pleasure!