What is B2B List Building?

The business world has numerous terminologies that may not be common for most people. When starting a corporate job, working with clients, or building your own company, it is very important to know the basics B2B List Building.

With the rise of modern technology, most businesses nowadays involve the use of internet marketing strategies. Here is a guide of B2B List Building, a very important determinant to the success of any marketing strategy. Here is everything you need to know about B2B list building.

What is B2B?

The term B2B or B-to-B stands for Business-to-business. It refers to transactions conducted between businesses or companies, rather than between companies and individual consumers. B2B transactions usually involve wholesalers and manufacturers, or wholesalers and retailers. Business-to-business arrangements also tend to happen in the supply chain industry, which involves companies buying raw materials from other companies to be utilized in their manufacturing process.

What is B2B List Building?

B2B List building is defined as the process of making a list of contacts with whom a business can communicate to generate and build leads. Having a B2B list is proven to be very advantageous for businesses because it is a source of contact information of relevant professionals in a particular industry. B2B list building is vital for your business, so you would have a clear idea of who to target and contact.

Companies that provide B2B listing services make sure that they make their B2B lists as accurate and efficient as possible. It would be devastating for companies to have stale information in their databases. It would be a waste of time and effort to try to reach prospects and find out that the available information is wrong all along.

How to Build Your B2B Contact List?

There are a number of ways in building your B2B contact list. You have an option to purchase or rent a B2B contact list. This might seem like an easy and swift solution; however, there can be some downside to this. First, you must consider finding a trustworthy list vendor. Make sure that the list you get is up to date, as some lists may have been obtained from a database that has not been updated for a long period of time.

Studies have shown that data kept in B2B contact lists decays around 22 percent annually. This means that even if you skip the hassle of building the list yourself by simply buying it, you would still have to verify whether the contacts are still valid and up to date. Because of this, experts advise that it is always better to build your own B2B prospect list manually. This way, you can save a huge amount of money, and you can be sure of better and more accurate results.

Keep in mind that your company’s email program will only be effective if you have a great contact database.

How to Build Your B2B prospect List?

Here are some things that you can do to build your own B2B prospect list manually.

1. Create an ideal customer profile. This helps you focus your target to businesses that are best suited to your company. Preferably, include those that are most likely to become paying customers. Through making an ideal customer profile, you can lessen the chances of wasting your effort going after unproductive prospects. Some of the important aspects to consider in building an ideal customer profile include:

– The size of the company;
– The company’s background;
– Your prospect’s targeted age group;
– The company’s goals and vision;
– Challenges faced by the company.

By having this checklist, you can now narrow down your list.

2. Find B2B contacts on the internet. You can use search engines, social media networks, company websites, and professional networking sites to find contacts that best match your ideal customer profile. LinkedIn is a very good site to search for prospects. It has the option to filter lists to narrow down your search to what is most significant for you and your business. For instance, you can filter according to your prospects’ region, company, industry and other useful features.

Other good sources of contacts include forums, blogs, and press releases, and user groups.

3. Build your B2B email List. After you have found your ideal prospects for B2B, the next thing for you to do is compile your B2B email list. To do this, you will need to manually input them from your sources into an Excel worksheet or other programs you may have. Carefully copy and paste the details including the name, company, phone number, website, and email address.

4. Verify contact details. Even though you have built your B2B contact list manually, there can still be room for error. It is vital to check if the email addresses and phone numbers in your contact list actually work. You can use online tools to verify emails. In the case of phone numbers, the only way to check is to call up your contacts to verify. At this stage, you may find contacts that do not work, and eliminate them from your B2B contact list.

5. Start Networking. The ultimate goal of building a B2B email list is networking and making connections. Now that you have created your B2B email list, the next step is to reach out to them. Effective networking relies on the medium used and the ways you would be able to start a conversation. Focus on the important points you would tackle so that the leads can turn into actual permanent prospects. Then, depending on the response of the leads you can segment, your B2B prospect list could go further.

For instance, the best thing to do if you have been receiving cold responses from your leads is to cross them out of your B2B Email list. On the other hand, if you receive agreeable responses from leads, you can include them in your list of prospects to further compel them and turn them into paying customers.

B2B List Building Services

Building a B2B list involves a lot of research, analysis, and decision-making. It can undoubtedly be exhausting and doing this all by yourself can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there are a lot of reliable companies that offer B2B List Building services. Using a B2B List Building service can help you save time which you can spend on other important aspects in growing your business.