Business Development: Zoominfo, D&B Hoovers, Crunchbase, Oh My?

Should we look into Zoominfo? D&B Hoovers? Should we look at intent data? How can we generate prospect lists?

Questions like these are common, but maybe not the right starting point. Most firms love to build lists – I bet if you go into your W: drive you can find about 10 (100?) that were built over the years. Have you asked yourself what you did with those? What was the outcome?

For most firms, building a prospect list is the business development activity, instead of generating conversations once you have it. What will you do with this list once you build it? Add them to your database? Reach out to them cold? Put them in the W: drive for safe keeping?

Another big question to answer is: who is our target? Small, privately held companies or larger middle market companies?

If it’s smaller companies ($1MM – $15MM in revenue size) – you are better off utilizing google maps or a web scraper service to come up with this list. None of the tools we will talk about today or the ones we’ve already mentioned are great at capturing these size clients.

A few considerations before we get going:

• There is no silver bullet here – manual research is critical even with a great starting list.
• Any data will be incomplete or borderline inaccurate

We will dive into exploring a simple way to build a useful prospect list, starting with defining what the purpose of a prospect list is.

Defining the Purpose

If you are building a prospect list, that likely means you have these two thoughts:

1. Leadership wants it
2. New client acquisition

Sometimes this is driven through industry/practice/service line groups. For instance, your manufacturing leader or your assurance partner wants a list of all the manufacturing companies that fit within your Ideal Client Profile (see related AAM article for LLM help in defining your ideal client profile here) within a geographical area. So you have a sales call (oof) with Zoominfo or D&B and they give you a sample list and quote you $5-15k for their platform.

This is all great exploration, but you need to answer the question: What is the most practical use for our prospect list that will generate the results we want?

Some great questions to help you answer this question:

• How are we going to utilize this list to generate conversations?
• Do we want to do cold outreach?
• Is this list just for awareness of who we want to know that we don’t know?
• Are we going to be using this list for event outreach?

The wrong answer is to dump the list into your CRM and send marketing emails. These will be low return and borderline spam to these folks.

The best answer that firms lean into is a combination of the industry or practice group leaders reaching out personally and using the list to generate referrals from the best referral sources at the firm.

Practical path to building an effective prospect list

Once you answer the purpose question for your firm, now it’s time to build the list. You don’t need 100s or 1000s of companies, you need a focused list that represents the best opportunities for your firm. This is based on the ideal client profiles for the firm and the firm’s practice/service or industry groups.

One way to build a prospect list you can be proud of is the combination of:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator -> Apollo.io -> Prospeo.io

Now let’s go step-by-step to build your prospect list, using our manufacturing industry example from earlier.

Searching with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is one of the best business development tools out there. For about $250 a month, you can have access to one of the largest databases in the world.

The basic use case for Sales Navigator is its list building features based on accounts (companies) and leads (people). LinkedIn has over 211 million users in the US, over 30% of US adults use it, and over 33 million of those users log in every day*. The filter features allow you to narrow down those people into your ideal client profile buckets.

If they have a company page on LI, chances are that they are an established company.

For example, using the filters, you can search for manufacturing companies with 51-200 employees with headquarters in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. This generates 544 companies with over 2.5k employees at the director or C-level.

That’s way too many to research to see if they are public, actually in the manufacturing industry, have their HQ in DFW, are still privately held, etc.

You can then filter that further with categories like:

• Changed jobs in the last 60 days
• Posted on LinkedIn in the last 90 days
• Went to a certain university
• Has a common connection
• Are currently in your CRM (if you have one and connect it to Sales Navigator)

Don’t be shy about deleting potential non-fit prospects from this list. It would benefit you more to have a super well-researched, top 25 list then it would a generic list of 200 manufacturing companies.

This will allow you to build a very tight starting point on the very best companies and people to target with your outreach.

Moving your list to Apollo.io

Now that we have a starting list, we can connect and export that list directly into Apollo. Apollo.io has both free and paid versions and can help enrich the data with email addresses and phone numbers.

Using the paid version (starting at about $10 a month) will allow you to build large lists and have access to more data. You have the option to export the companies and the

You can then export that data into excel and see how many email addresses that Apollo has in their database for your prospects.

Enriching data with Prospeo

Apollo’s data will be incomplete. You will need to then take the list of the C-level targets at your manufacturing companies and run them through Prospeo. Prospeo is an email finder and has both free and paid versions.

The paid version at $39 a month allows you to find more email addresses per month and perform bulk uploads. With Prospeo, you can also use this tool to export your Sales Navigator companies directly to excel and skip Apollo all together. This would be useful if you just want to find the email addresses and syntax for those companies.

Tools like Prospeo run queries to find email addresses and provide the most likely syntax for a person’s email address.

After building a list of ideal client prospect companies and their executives with email addresses, you are ready to start generating conversations!

Practical Applications for your List

Now that we have done the hard work of generating the list of manufacturing companies, you will want to figure out the best way to get connected. The easiest way is an introduction!

Before we do that, we need to make sure that we have as much information about these companies as possible, so going back to doing some manual research around the company using their website, Google and LinkedIn to confirm that on the surface, this company would be worth talking to.

Now, going back to our example, we want to take the list to our leader and see if we can find commonalities, priority companies, or referral sources that might know them.

A best practice is to share this list with our most trusted partners and see who might already know them. Can we reconnect with someone at the company? Does a referral source that works with manufacturers already know them?

If we can’t get an introduction, then how are we going to meet these prospects? Are there conferences or associations they might attend? Can the partner send them a personal email or invitation to something?

Bonus: Growing and Evolving your List

Your list will need to continue to evolve, so how should this work? The best way to grow your list is to get with your referral sources and understand their prospects. If we have a good relationship with a local banker who specializes in working with manufacturing companies, can we ask them who is on their radar and collaborate?

Bonus: adding Chrome extensions for Apollo and Prospeo

Adding Chrome extensions for these two applications adds buttons into the LinkedIn page that allow you to find emails, export contacts, and find more information immediately.

Bonus: Google Maps for Small Privately Held Companies

Google has all the answers, so why not start here?

Pull up Google Maps for your geographical area and search for “metal fabricators.” Sort by Google reviews and you should get a sense of the top companies in your community. You can then manually add them into your spreadsheet with a little research via the tools above.

References:

*https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/

apollo.io

linkedin.com

prospeo.io

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Neil Barrow is a business development expert with 15 years of experience in sales and business development. He is the founder of RevOps Advisors, helping firms build or enhance their business development function. He is a Certified Cicerone (beer sommelier) and loves to chat about all things beer! He lives in Fort Worth with his wife of 10 years and kindergartener.