How to Build a B2B Prospect List for Cold Outreach That Actually Converts

So, you need customers, and you’re considering cold email outreach. Great! The first step is building a solid prospect list to target. While it might be tempting to buy a ready-made list and start sending emails right away, the truth is that a one-size-fits-all approach rarely delivers good results.

The key to successful cold outreach is having a highly targeted prospect list. It does take some time and effort, but it’s absolutely worth it. A well-researched list helps you reach the right people—those who genuinely need your product or service—leading to better responses and essentially getting you more customers. Without this foundation, emails can easily get lost in spam folders or go unanswered.

The good news? With the right approach, building an effective prospect list isn’t as hard as it seems. In this blog, I’ll walk you through exactly how to do it step by step.

Understanding Your Company’s Starting Point

Before diving into prospect research, you need to know where your company stands. Your approach to building a prospect list will differ significantly based on your company’s stage:

Early-Stage Start-ups

If you’re still validating your market and product-fit:

• Focus on gathering feedback and testing different markets
• Target diverse company types to understand who benefits most from your solution
• Keep initial lists smaller and more focused for quick iteration
• Prioritize quality over quantity to learn from each interaction

Established Companies

If you already know your ideal customer profile:

• Focus on scaling outreach to similar companies
• Build larger lists of pre-qualified prospects
• Target specific decision-makers you know convert well
• Optimize for volume while maintaining quality

Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company and person that would benefit most from your product or service. Think of it as a blueprint of your perfect customer—the ones who:

• Get the most value from your solution
• Have the problems you solve best
• Are most likely to convert and stay long-term
• Have the budget and authority to make purchases

Without a clear ICP, you risk wasting time and resources targeting companies that aren’t a good fit. It’s like trying to sell winter coats in a tropical country—wrong audience, wrong need.

Why Your ICP Matters

Your ICP helps you:

• Focus your prospecting efforts on the right companies
• Write more compelling outreach messages
• Identify genuine sales opportunities faster
• Improve conversion rates by targeting better-fit prospects
• Save time by avoiding poor-fit companies

How to Define Your ICP

Break down your ideal customer into these key areas:

Company Criteria

• Location: Target specific countries
• Sector: Identify relevant industry verticals
• Size: Define revenue and employee count ranges

Others factors that could be interesting depending on your company, product & service: growth stage, investment stage (whether they have raised capital)

Decision Maker Profiles

Break down your prospects into three key categories. This will allow you to send campaigns to different levels of decisions makers to see which one gives you better response rates:

1. Decision Makers
   • C-suite executives in smaller companies
   • Department heads in larger organizations
   • Those with budget authority
     
2. Influencers
   • Directors and senior managers
   • Team leads who can champion your solution
   • Technical evaluators
3. Internal Champions
   • Day-to-day users of your solution
   • Those most impacted by the pain points you solve
   • Team members who can build internal consensus

Finding and Qualifying Prospects

The first step in building an effective outreach list is identifying the right people within companies that fit your target market. This is where tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator come in. Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s premium tool that allows you to search for individuals based on their job titles, industries, and companies. It’s like LinkedIn but it has a lot more filters and ability to find new people within certain criteria.

For example, if you’re looking to target Buyers at retail companies, you can use Sales Navigator to search for {RETAILER NAME} and filter results by job title. This will provide you with a list of people who match your ideal profile.

Once you’ve identified potential prospects, the next step is to gather their contact details and organize them in an Excel spreadsheet. This process typically involves two key steps:

1. Prospect Research
   • Searching companies and job titles that align with your target audience.
   • Reviewing profiles to ensure they are a good fit for your offering.
     
2. Scraping Contact Details
   • Collecting email addresses and other contact details.
   • Organizing the information in a spreadsheet which will allow you to import into your chosen system for your cold outreach emails. 

There are two main ways to carry out this process: manually or using sales databases. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks, depending on your goals and resources.

Manual Prospecting

This involves manually searching LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, identifying prospects one by one, and copying their information into a spreadsheet. You can do this yourself or outsource it to freelancers on platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer.

Pros:

• Higher quality prospects – as someone has reviewed their profile to see whether they are relevant
• More control over the information you collect for each person – this makes it easier when re-targeting your old prospects
• Better response rates due to personalisation
• More control over targeting – sometimes the databases are incorrect so you may have people showing in the wrong department 
• No recurring tool costs

Cons:

• Time-consuming process
• Higher cost per lead when outsourced
• Requires ongoing effort and management
• Scaling can be slower

Using Sales Databases

Sales databases like Apollo, ZoomInfo, Seamless Ai and similar platforms provide access to large pools of potential leads with automated data collection features. Essentially you can look up specific job titles and company filters, it creates a long list of prospects. Then you can export the prospect information and contacts.

Pros:

• Quick access to large databases
• You can export prospect information including contacts and emails which saves a lot of time
• You can import straight into your CRM systems to integrate easily 

Cons:

• I have found the data can be inaccurate, so prospects pop up in the wrong titles and departments – which can affect response rates when sending your cold outreach emails
• You have less control over the information you’re exporting – It’s not always complete. Or the categorisation is not how you’d do it. For example “Department” might not be how you’d like to categorise them. It’s not a big problem but when you start to grow your database, it makes it harder to re-target people again without this segmentation
• Subscription costs can add up
• Less personalised outreach
• Requires additional effort to validate and clean data

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Both approaches have their place, and the right choice depends on your budget, available resources, and the level of personalization you want in your outreach. In the next section, we’ll dive into how to effectively execute each method and maximize your results.

Best Practices for Data Collection

When building your prospect list, you want to collect certain information about the prospect which will help you to: 

a) personalise your cold outreach emails to improve response rates
b) segment your cold outreach email campaigns into different ICPs to assess which type of prospect gets higher response rates
c) segment your database for retargeting later

I would recommend focus on collecting these essential data points:

Company Information

• Company name
• Industry/sector
• Location
• Company size
• Website
• Revenue (if available)

Contact Information

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Job title
• Company Name
• Department
• Seniority
• LinkedIn URL

Qualification Data (Optional)

• Relevant technology use
• Growth indicators
• Recent company news

The Hybrid Approach

For optimal results, consider combining both manual research and sales databases. This will give you the benefits of both approaches whilst minimising some of the downsides.

1. Use sales databases for initial prospect discovery & exporting contacts
   • Searching and finding a list of people to contact that are relevant who match your targeted Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) 
   • Exporting prospect contacts – sales databases will give you key information, Name, Job title, Company Name and allow you to export to excel
     
2. Manually qualify the most promising leads –
   • After exporting the prospect list from the sales database I’d recommend manually reviewing the prospects to make sure they seem relevant. Check LinkedIn profiles, bios and about pages to see whether they are working in the departments that usually have the pain points that your product or service can help. Are they users or customers of your product? If not, don’t include them.
     
     
     
   • That being said, there may be prospect in other departments s that you’d like to “test”.
     For example, let’s say your business mostly sells to Account Managers at marketing agencies, however your solution also might be helpful to the Head of Finance because some features could help with their reporting.
     
     You’re not sure, but you’d like to test whether this could be a new avenue to try. 
     
   • In this case I’d recommend running a test campaign. Identify 100-200 prospects who are Head of Finance in your chosen industry. Run a campaign targeting their specific pains and how you could solve it.
     Then you can compare the response rates you get with this new campaign vs the typical Account Managers. 
     
3. Add additional data to the prospects from the sales database export
   For my campaigns, I usually add additional information to my spreadsheet for the prospects like Department and Seniority that isn’t usually added from sales databases as part of the export. (If they are, I have found they are not accurate.)
   
   Adding these two columns allows me to segment my prospect database.
   I usually send campaigns by seniority and department, this will allow me to see very quickly where we get better responses.
   
   Here’s an example of 3 different cold outreach email campaigns I could potentially run to test different ICPs. This is how it would look:
   
   Campaign 1 – Chief Technology Officer
   * Seniority – C suite
   * Department – Technology
   ** Response rate: 6%
   
   Campaign 2 – Head of Technology
   * Seniority – Head of
   * Department – Technology
   ** Response rate: 5%
   
   Campaign 3 – Head of Data
   * Seniority – Head of
   * Department – Data
   ** Response rate: 2%
   
   As you can see from the response rates, campaign 1 had the best results with a 6% response rate. This tells me that targeting the C suite in technology departments is getting the best results. When I do my next campaign I can focus on these prospects to continue to increase my response rates, meetings booked and in turn increase customers and revenue.  
   (**response rates are for example purposes only, not actual results)
   
   If I had put all these prospects in the same campaign and ran together it would have been harder to identify what worked and what didn’t. This can be done by yourself or you can outsource to freelancers on Upwork, Freelancer.com Fiver etc
   
4. Validate contact information before outreach –
   • There are tools like NeverBounce and others which checks the email address validity. This is very important to do. If you see a lot of bounce rates in your campaign because the emails are not correct this affects the overall health of your campaign. Your emails can trigger spam and it will limit the amount of inboxes your emails land in.
   • This approach gives you the scale of automation while maintaining the quality advantages of manual prospecting.

Next Steps

Building a quality prospect list is just the first step in a successful B2B outreach strategy. Once you have your list, you’ll need to:

1. Set up proper email infrastructure – using alternate domains to protect the health of your domains
2. Create compelling cold outreach messages – A/B testing different messaging, setup automated emails
3. Create follow-up outreach email sequences to allow you to check in with prospects and ask for feedback
4. Track and optimise your results – create further campaigns targeting your best performing ICPs, creating new campaigns tweaking some messaging to further improve response rates

Remember: The key to high-converting prospect lists isn’t just about finding the right companies. It’s about sending highly personalised emails to a very targeted list of people. Highlighting a specific pain that these people face, then offering your your solution that will solve their specific pain.

By doing this you will significantly increase your response rates to your cold email outreach campaigns.

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