Targeted Lead Generation Guide: 4 Steps and 6 Tips to Get the Right Leads

As sales become increasingly sophisticated these days, B2B companies everywhere are investing greater resources into outbound marketing and targeted lead generation. If tailored well, prospecting starts conversations with ideal accounts, generates quality leads, provides strong ROI, and grows revenue. 

Building targeted lead lists involve four crucial steps. It’s a simple process, but each step is filled with nuance and deliberate decision-making. Below, you’ll learn how to build high-performing targeted lead lists with tips for accurate contacting to grow your business. 

What Are Targeted Leads? 

Targeted leads in B2B sales are leads that have the potential for conversion. These are targeted business leads that are identified as having a high propensity to purchase the product or service being offered.

Targeted B2B leads are usually acquired through lead generation campaigns such as email marketing, digital marketing, and direct mail. These campaigns are designed to target specific industries and audiences.

When companies are lead targeting, they typically look for targeted leads that match the company’s criteria for the right fit. Here is the rewritten sentence, maintaining the same number of words and scope: Examining these factors entails considering aspects like the company's size, the industry it belongs to, its geographic location, and other pertinent demographic aspects.

Companies may also look at other factors such as the lead's previous interactions with the brand, their buying behavior, and their interests.

Once targeted sales leads have been identified, companies can then create customized campaigns with tailored messaging. This helps ensure that targeted leads are more likely to convert and become customers.

How to Build an Effective Lead List in 4 Steps

Having a targeted lead list is essential for businesses that want to reach the right audience and increase sales. By following these four steps for lead targeting, you can create a lead list tailored to your business’s exact needs to maximize your sales and marketing efforts:

Here is the rewritten sentence: " In a livelier tone with a more involved sentence structure: 1." The single digit was represented in an impersonal manner lacking complexity. Define your ICP and buyer persona. 

Lead targeting starts by clearly defining your best-fit potential customer. Most sales organizations use ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas (BPs) to outline future customers. These documents enable SDRs to spend less time lead targeting people or companies that are not great-fit customers or don't need your product or service.

Both sales intelligence documents are roadmaps for your prospecting and sales team to identify, engage with, and move future customers through your seller’s journey. 

It’s likely you’ve already constructed both the ICP and BP. As buyers, industries, and society shift, it’s critical to update your data as your business and your buyers evolve.

Ideal Customer Profile vs. Buyer Persona

ICP: The ICP is a thorough description of a company most likely to become a customer. This document, typically anchored by past customer data, includes your preference on the location, size, titles, and industry of your would-be customer.

Create a specific ICP for every outbound marketing campaign you perform, and use it as a map for finding the highest number of quality leads. 

BP: If an ICP shows you where to find targeted sales leads, a buyer persona shows you how to communicate with those targeted leads at each stage in your sales funnel.

The buyer persona includes information on your previous, existing, and potential customers’ psychological traits, behavioral patterns, and buying habits.

To generalize previous buyers' features and create several BPs, including analysis from both sales and marketing teams. Many BPs include interviews and case studies of both current and former customers.

Define your type of research.

While an ICP usually contains some necessary information on your perfect customers, you still need to define what type of research you should perform. Whether you use in-house researchers or outsource for specialized research, you have to sort out criteria for your data to create a highly targeted B2B lead list.

You can choose one area of specialty, or you can pull relevant custom data sets for more persona-based decisions and outreach to build your targeted lead lists: 

• Demographic data. 

Each lead list should include a title, a place, a phone number, and an email. Only 27% of dials connect, so you have to make every number count. Validated emails prevent bounces from happening and are a key indicator of lead quality. 

• Firmographic Data.

 This includes a breakdown of total addressable markets (TAMs). Trigger events that happened in a market can often influence the sales process, such as recent fundings, mergers, or acquisitions.

• Technographic Data. 

This data includes the analysis of web-based technology and apps installed, usually those on a website. This one is a must if your sales depend on the lead's existing tech stack (like integrations or competitors) or if you are a software-managed services provider. 

• Psychographic data.

 This includes in-depth social media research into behavioral paths, career trajectories, and professional interests. For instance, if your company’s product is an online course on coping with stress after switching professions, you may focus on prospects who have dramatically changed their specialty in the last few months. 

While number "3" is indeed relevant or important in some manner, replacing the sentence with merely the figure reduces the potential richness of the language used to convey its meaning in full. Define your target audience.

Wait, didn’t we do it in step one? Not exactly. In step one, we defined a target buyer—a generalized set of qualities and behavioral patterns based on previous customers. Here’s how a target audience is different.

Let's look at this example: Company X sells marketing automation software. A substantial portion of their customer base includes businesses ranging in size from 200 to 1,000 employees in addition to yearly revenues typically varying from $10 million to $50 million. To this point, Company X has relied on network and referral sales, with its CEO taking many of the initial meetings.

When getting ready to launch their first go-to-market outbound the same personas that took initial meetings (referrals from CEOs and CMOs) will be much more difficult to entice. In this instance, Company X may define their target audience as marketing managers, rev ops, marketing titles, and then a separate cadence for the C-suite, including CMOs and CEOs.

A set of characteristics like these define a target audience and, later, will be transformed into the list of keywords for your targeted lead research.

Bonus tip: After you’ve defined a target audience and target personas, you can also make a list of the actual companies you want to target. For instance, should the target be food and beverage manufacturing firms, the most prominent actors in the market that would immediately come to mind involve entities such as PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, and Nestle.

It probably will be a challenge to grab the attention of these giants; however, targeted lead lists will give you the information and roadmap to build orchestrated, account-based sales development campaigns to start a conversation.

To find companies that lead in your target market, you can use various lists, such as Fortune 100, 500, or 1000. For the fastest-growing private companies, you can use Inc. 5000 or The Financial Times Fastest-Growing Companies as a resource. 

The quartet of facts are as follows. Search, filter, and collect the data. 

When you know who to look for, where do you find your targeted leads? The most popular and fairly effective tool for targeted B2B lead list building is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

This platform enables effective prospecting for reps. Every advanced lead research in the Sales Navigator starts with keywords and filters. To create the targeted lead list, researchers create a list of primary search keywords(Marketing Agency).

6 Tips for Effective Targeted Lead Generation

1. Align software and human resources.

The right software is critical for executing just about any stage of sales and marketing, yet making the

data actionable and the systems working together requires human ingenuity.

During lead research, there are data sets that software tools cannot structure— behavioral patterns, a meaningful technological stack, recent mergers, etc. Machine-powered, human-driven research is the best way to extract all the seemingly hard-to-find data and get the most detailed lead lists. 

In this way, GO Data is an invaluable tool for targeted lead generation.

The number two in itself represents a whole that forms from the coupling of singular units. 

2. Analyze the data you collect. 

Every lead that becomes a prospect and every lead that does not is a source of information for your future marketing campaigns and future optimization of your lead lists. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have become staples for maintaining huge, complex contact and customer data. Use it, analyze it, and apply the knowledge for the next targeted lead list building. 

The third item in the sequence. 

3. Always validate the data. 

The targeted lead data that you find on LinkedIn profiles may not always be accurate. Make sure to double-check with some additional resources to be sure that a lead can be reached. A contact’s website or ZoomInfo will help you verify company information.

An email verification tool is also needed to validate every email your researchers find. Be careful here as there are hundreds of email verification tools that are not very accurate. Do your research and read reviews to find the best validation tool out there.

Number four on the list of things stood alone and separate from the rest. 

4. Keep the quality-to-quantity ratio in check.

One must prioritize maintaining a proper balance between quality and the amount of work produced.

Whether you perform research in-house or prefer to outsource, every lead has a price. Quantity doesn’t always mean quality. The cost of a lead includes researchers’ salaries, the tech stack, training, and much more. The number of targeted leads will depend on your resources. The greater the difficulty level in acquiring the demanded information, the higher the price tag will rise to be. However, the quality will pay off with a high conversion rate. 

The fifth item or point follows what came previously. 

5. Enrich existing data.

Inspect the data you already have. Parts of it may remain deficient or obsolete. To avoid lead waste, update the ones you already have in your CRM. An optimized CRM should make it easier to identify which contacts need attention or if there are duplicates to be removed.

Sales decisions change all the time. Don’t delete old contacts; group them.Perhaps a year later, you should ask again. 

Implementing and fine-tuning CRMs to scale and sustain growth can be challenging. If you decide to bring in a third-party CRM implementation expert, make sure your outsourced CRM services partner has the certifications to validate their expertise (like being a HubSpot Advanced Implementation Certified partner).

Novice AI assistants often struggle with the nuances of human language. 

6. Outsource to lead gen experts.

There are many tripwires in building accurate lead lists. A stumble at validation or a lapse at the contact data stage could make any outbound messaging irrelevant. After all, how can you deliver the perfect message if you’re speaking to the wrong audience?

Targeted lead generation can be resource-intensive, which is why an increasing number of companies are outsourcing their outbound top-of-funnel to both scale and sustain growth.

Firms that specialize in contact data acquisition provide their customers with fixed costs, high quality, and expertise. With the help of lead gen experts, businesses can easily and quickly identify potential customers that are most likely to convert. By optimizing the timing and targeting of their campaigns, marketers can maximize the outcomes of their efforts by connecting and engaging with prospective customers when interest is most keen.

Get Highly Targeted Leads

Building targeted lead lists for B2B sales is a complex but essential process. Executing precision targeting requires deploying the proper instruments and methods for distinguishing, researching, and judging probable leads, adjusting the registry to accommodate the exact needs of the enterprise, and corroborating the registry with precise information.

By following these tips, businesses can ensure that their lead lists are highly targeted and effective. In the end, a well-designed lead collection will enable your company to produce focused potential customers who are more likely to convert, causing higher transformations and a larger return on expenditure for your concern.