How To Best Target Your B2B Lead List

Sales professionals know that not all leads convert to paying customers. To maximize the potential for a return on the time, money, and resources your business has invested in sales outreach, you need to rely on a targeted B2B lead list. That means segmenting your business leads based on characteristics such as geographical locations, job titles, employee counts, and revenue. By narrowing your prospects to fit your target audience, your sales team can focus their efforts on outreach to prospects that best represent your organization’s ideal customer. It’s an act of qualifying leads intelligently. Here’s how to do it:

Develop an Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed description of your ultimate customer. When you’re developing an ICP for B2B leads, your primary goal is to determine what kind of business would garner the most value from your product or service. 

The easiest way to develop your ICP is a three-step process that relies on your existing customer base:

1. Identify your best customers. To define “best,” analyze factors such as the longevity of your relationship, the total return on your investment, and how fast the customer converted. Broadly speaking, those with a record of loyalty, high spending, and willingness to buy from your business are ideal customers.
2. Determine what they have in common. Look at factors like the industries in which they operate, their locations, how big they are, and how fast they’re growing.
3. Prioritize the characteristics. Not all the commonalities between your customers are meaningful, so take the list of common attributes you’ve created and whittle it down to the most relevant factors. You might find, for example, that small businesses on the cusp of expansion are your most loyal and consistent customers, in which case size and growth potential are the two most meaningful characteristics.

Build Your Targeted B2B Lead List

Once you’ve developed your business’s ICP, use it as a reference to build a contact list of high-potential leads. You could enact common capturing methods via websites, social media, or email, but those efforts can be time-consuming. Lead generation tools can help simplify this process. 

With BizLeads, for example, you can easily compare business profiles to identify prospects relevant to your ICP and generate actionable insight. You can also apply relevant data filters for a laser-focused search of your ideal customers. Moreover, because of BizLeads’ multistep verification, you can be certain of the accuracy of the data you’re provided.

Segment Your B2B Lead List

Now that you have a list of potential and verified leads, the next step is dividing them into groups based on shared traits. You’re essentially repeating step two of your ICP development, except now you’re dealing exclusively with prospects that align with your business. 

Your sales team can approach segmentation in several ways:

• Geographic: With geographic segmentation, you categorize leads based on their physical location. 
• Demographic: Segmentation by demographics categorizes leads according to socioeconomic factors. In the world of B2B, that means looking at the target organization’s decision-makers, who ultimately decide whether to buy from your business.
• Psychographic: Opinions, interests, and lifestyles are the factors that relate to psychographic segmentation. In B2B sales, you might appeal, again, to the decision-makers or consider the audiences these businesses target.
• Behavioral: In a business-to-consumer context, behavioral segmentation relates to how individuals interact with brands. But when you’re targeting businesses, it relates to factors such as their purchasing habits, the benefits they want to realize, and what you can do to win their loyalty.

No matter how you go about it, segmentation allows your sales team to enact tailored efforts that appeal more directly to leads. That sort of personalized approach helps your organization nurture prospects at every step of the sales funnel, allowing potential customers to realize how your product or service can provide them with the value they’re seeking.

As a senior-level decision-maker at your organization, you want to identify tools that streamline revenue-building processes. BizLeads is a powerful B2B sales-prospecting platform powered by American City Business Journals. Providing a trove of private-company intelligence, including millions of professional contacts, it’s an essential tool for increasing revenue by qualifying high-potential leads.

Ready to learn more? Schedule a 15-minute BizLeads Demo today and test drive the platform with a free seven-day trial.