Welcome to Module Three, lesson one, finding prospects researching and creating lists. In this lesson, you will learn the process for finding prospects creating the contact lists, you will need to power your prospecting efforts. You'll be armed with everything you need to make this first critical step in the process successful for you. So how exactly do you create a list and turn this into a real live sales prospecting campaign? Well, you've already kind of gotten started with it. But the last module really focused a lot on the tools.

And when I asked you to begin creating lists, I anticipated that you would probably spend some time going into the researching phase to figuring out what what tools are right for you. So hopefully, you've had a chance to sort of get your feet wet with figuring out how best it is for you to go about doing this research. And now we're going to create a full blown list for your first sales prospecting campaign. So again, I want to address this, can you just buy lists, you can. But I know this is the most time consuming part. And in the beginning, that is especially the case, but purchase lists are not very accurate.

They tend to be a lower quality for a lot of reasons. They can also be very expensive. Once you get really good at this in terms of you knowing exactly what it is that you need in each list to make it really targeted and really successful. You can train someone else to help you create these lists. Or you could outsource it at that point or even buy them. But the point is, you first need to know exactly what needs to be in the list.

What doesn't need to be in the list and specifically where to find this information, what makes it good so that other people can produce the results for you in a way that is actually really effective. So Let's start with this how large to these knit list needs to be I know, it's really overwhelming to think, Oh my gosh, am I gonna have to just sit and create hundreds and hundreds of names and it just takes forever and there's just no possible way, this is not sustainable, I totally get it. Your list do not actually have to be that large. And in fact, the more targeted they are, the less huge they need to be. You might have heard of some people sending out just huge blast, hundreds and hundreds. But you know, a lot of these people are actually trying to keep multiple sales reps busy and fed.

And these are big companies. And that's why this process is adaptive for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. I'm teaching you how to be much more targeted, and also how to do smaller blasts. And one of this one of these is what we're going to speak to right now. So here's there's a couple things here for reply rates. You can expect that about eight to 12 percent of the people that you email to will reply.

About 3% of those will move on to the discovery call phase. So, if your prospecting blast is 30 people per day or 90 people per week, let's say if you blast Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays, you can expect to have three discovery calls scheduled per week at you know, block out an hour of time per call for your preparation, your call itself and a little bit of follow up. So that's an hour each. So if you block out one hour per discovery call, that's three hours a week, in terms of the calls itself. How quickly does a qualified lead typically move through the process for you opportunities can be really time consuming. So you're going to also want to adjust either the size of your blasts or the frequency of your blasts to accommodate for that if you're starting to feel really overloaded with opportunities.

That's a good problem to have. Pull back on sales prospecting, to make sure that you can stay on top of the volume and continue to provide everybody with the attention that they need. Especially in the opportunity stage, you need to respond quickly. People expect really fast turnaround, don't overload yourself there. Also, when you do get this new gameplan of opera, or this new influx of opportunities, what is your game plan to handle it? A lot of people have a lot of other things they're doing in their business, you're not just a 100% 24 hours a day sales rep.

So do you have the ability to step away from certain tasks, tasks and be able to handle the opportunity pipeline? Is there a potential that you could have someone help you with certain things that you do not have to be doing each day so that you can focus on this this is really important, and it requires your personal attention. So what's your plan there? Also, cash flow is your need to increase revenue. Have a new, pretty critical if you need a lot of revenue coming in, maybe you've got a big team to support, maybe you have some sales reps who haven't been getting enough leads, whatever the situation might be. You can adjust your blast for that as well.

So you should be clearing your schedule, really have everything you can and prospecting at a much higher rate if you really really need to generate sales if you need money. If you need cash flow, you need to be focusing on this. That's just the way that it is especially if you're trying to grow your business without that safety net of, you know, venture capital investment or something like that. Building larger lists are more or less are not necessarily the same thing. So also keep that in mind. You could blast smaller more frequently you could blast larger all at once it's really up to you, you'll start to learn how your particular Customer response and be able to just but what I call when you're ramping up your efforts when you're really focusing on it, I, when I say, you know, 75% of your time is spent, dedicated to the pipeline and degenerating to prospecting and generating leads and moving those through the opportunity pipeline, I call that a blitz.

And that's actually one of the bonuses in this course is how to run a blitz, if you really are in that critical spot where you need to generate a lot of cash, or just bring in some money pretty quickly. So I like to just tell people start with the assumptions of eight to 12% and a 3% conversion to a discovery call. Again, this is not a guarantee, it's going to be different for everybody. Some people are going to do less and some people are going to do more, but just start there, just for your planning purposes. So the information that you need for your list, we went over that kind of in the prior module, but you're going to need their name for First and last, you're going to need their company's name, of course, and their title, their business email address, we don't want to be emailing their personal email addresses, and also their contact phone number, it's not always easy or available to get their contact phone number, sometimes you'll only be able to get maybe the general line or something like that.

And even that is fine. But it's good to have this because, um, if you choose to do a voicemail drop, which will increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, you're going to need to call them so it's good to be able to just have that phone number right there. Rather than go through the internet and like research, pretty much looking for their phone number when you're doing the voicemail drops. So other helpful information to have is what city that they either they are located in or what city their company is headquartered. And if you know, I prefer to use the city they're located in and the reason for that is all use that particular information in the CRM to reach out to prospects if I might be traveling to a certain city. So I want to when I'm traveling to a city, the point is to maybe meet up for coffee or a face to face meeting.

And so I want to meet up with the people who actually are in that city. Also, industry is really helpful just so that you can speak specifically to industry specific news and data and information in the custom fields that we'll be going over shortly. And then a category so if there's particular categories in the industry, that always helps to personalize the emails, and then we'll talk about the custom fields in just a moment. So we're gonna go through this, but I recommend you use Google sheets or Excel and organize the tabs into individual blasts. So if you decide you're going to start off doing, you know 20 a day, blast 20 contacts per blast and sending one blast per day, you I would recommend creating a new tab For a day, a blast for one day, maybe naming the tab the date. So you know, Monday, July 1, you know, 2016, or whatever the data is, and then maybe the name kind of behind it.

So you might say, for me, it'd be like accessories, brands from, you know, magic, or something like that, which is a show, just so that I can quick glance, know when I sent the blast and who I sent it to, or who I targeted it to. And then I like to just keep my list in Google Drive. It needs to be really easy to access them really easy to know where everything is. And, you know, for me, we do a lot of things in Google Drive. So that's where I keep everything. I highly recommend that you have someone else.

Do a quick proofread of your blast and review the list for typos who don't want to spell someone's name wrong. You don't want to have something incorrectly capitalized. And that's just something that We'll guarantee that they're not going to reply to you. So check their names, check their spelling, check their nicknames, if their name is Robert do they go by Bob, you know, look for that stuff and LinkedIn and Google is a great place to do that. Another thing I like to do just as a rule of thumb to keep things really easy is I keep everything in my list lowercase just so that the case sensitive stuff doesn't get weird. I always do lowercase everything except for obviously uppercase first, first name, last name, you know if their letter or have their name just because you'll start to see as as we do the class where you could start having case sensitive weirdness, and it just makes it easier to have that not be there.

So before we hop into real quick, just walking through a basic evil, the E blast template, I want to just kind of point this out. This is a tweet from Aaron Ross, who wrote Predictable Revenue. He said, If you have excellent lead creation practices that are built on a strong foundation, even if your sales process is bad, you'll still do well. Aaron Ross lead sales at Salesforce. And that was you know, many years ago now he pretty much teaches large companies like Acquia and things like that how to do this outbound sales prospecting process. Aaron, you know, is does things for large sales teams and things like that.

But the point that he's making here is an excellent lead creation practice. It's built on a strong foundation means you have really you have a lot of leads. So even if you don't have a process at all, which you will, because we're doing that you're still going to increase your sales. So that is the importance of this process and why I'm having as part of this course, we're manually creating our content. tackle lists and leads to start because it all begins with this foundation. So we've hopped on over here to a sample spreadsheet, I have this in Google Drive right now.

And you can see this in your downloads area over to the, I think it's to the left. So here along the top, you'll see the columns I have it's very simple first name, last name, company, their title, their email, their phone, the city, their industry, the category, and then custom fields. So here you'll see you know, the only things that I have capitalized are the things that are actually proper nouns. So first name, last name, the company, the title CEO is typically capitalized. You know, the city, San Francisco, also capitalized and all that information entered in here very consistently. But you'll notice here the industry outdoor is lowercase the category also lowercased and then here's the custom fields.

So the thinking behind these custom fields is that there are typically three bullet points or pain points that are you know, more than more than three or less but for the most part I like to say you can address these three things sort of without overwhelming somebody in an email. And typically when you write the email you're going to speak to what are the specific pain points or specific benefits that you have to someone in the outdoor apparel, outdoor and or apparel industry. So for instance, the custom you know field one might be you help them be more efficient. The custom field two might be you help them meet their critical print deadlines, and the custom field three might be you drive better online conversions for them, now. Do you have to To fill these all in, No, you do not have you could have just one, you could have only two, you could have five, you could have zero, but these will actually help you.

With your email campaigns. This having this in here will help them sound more personal like you've actually written that email personally to john smith in one sitting and it'll also help them sound be a lot more effective because you're really speaking directly to the pain point here efficiency that apparel companies tend to experience. So let's say for instance, this blast was not apparel retailers, but it was, let's say accessories. One of the pain points that I might address may not be be more efficient, it might be more accurate, accurately portray the color and material of the product, because that is a well known pain point that a lot of accessories brands might have. So I hope that's really clear. You'll see down here too, here's the tab.

So I've made this tab, San Francisco apparel retailers, you know, I don't have the date in here, because this blast isn't assigned to a particular day. But I would recommend you add the date and then have the name for what it is. And then you can open the next tab, a new tab for the next blast and name it, you know, Los Angeles apparel retailers, or whatever it is that you're going to do. One of the things that you can do as well is kind of do sort of a waterfall technique. So one thing that I will do is when I have these lists created, I may have my team research, hundreds of, you know, apparel retailers in general. And then what I'll do when I get this Google Sheet with hundreds of apparel retailers, is sort them, you know, let's say by city or by industry or something like that, and then start splitting them into campaigns.

So I'll say this, this is everyone from San Francisco who's doing apparel. And I'm going to do another one. I've everyone from here that's doing apparel. And then I'll start copying and moving the contact sheets over into tabs, but everything kind of waterfalls from one big tap, or from one big sheet. So that would be how you could eventually evolve this to where a team would be helping you with that. So then you would just receive the spreadsheet all filled in, and then you would either decide who received the blasts on what day or you could give instructions to your team from their thing, this looks great.

The data is really clean and you know, everyone in here is, you know, relevant and targeted for me. Next step is please separate them all out into individual tabs by city and put them in their own tabs within the spreadsheet, for example, and that is how you would you know, orchestrate that process in house for you to make it easier. So I just want to end here with saying, I know this is going to be time consuming, and it's going to be not something that you really wanted to sit and spend time maybe creating a list. I don't know, maybe you love it. But either way, this is such an important foundation. And once you start your sales prospecting and actually start running the campaigns, which we'll be doing here soon, you're going to see how much it benefits you to have a great strong, super solid list.

The other aspect of this is think about how, as the numbers work, and you work those numbers, you know, 3% discovery calls and you know, those convert to clients. These people on this list are all going to be a potential client for you now, do you really want these people as your clients, it's really important now don't go rabbit holing through your list, cleaning it up, and second guessing everybody and deleting names or something. But that is why the practice of really defining who our ideal customers are and creating lists based off of that from sources we found where we feel confident that, you know, the people that we've discovered, you know, hang out on this site or go to this trade show or whatever that might be, are your ideal customer flows into this process, what process would then flows into actually becoming customers for your company, it's really important to make sure all this foundation is really, really tight.

So you're doing a great job. I know that this part is tedious. But it's really important and I promise you, you will not have to do it forever. So if you have questions, or if you find anything that's working really great, a good way to research and a new way to make the list. I've heard so many different cool ideas, head on over to the Facebook group. We'd love to hear it or if you're having trouble Please head on over there.

And let us know we would love to help you out. We will see you in the next module.