5 Steps To Build A Sales Prospecting List In 2025 [+Tools]

Sales prospecting is finding and reaching out to potential clients who will likely buy your product or service.

It is a crucial step in the sales process, as it helps you build a pipeline of qualified leads that you can nurture and convert into loyal customers.

But how do you build a sales prospecting list that contains the right prospects for your business?

Which tools can you use to make your lead generation more effective?

In this article, I will answer all the questions regarding perfect prospecting lists and how to find leads on LinkedIn.

Here’s a detailed breakdown:

1. What is a Sales Prospecting List?
2. Benefits of Sales Prospecting Lists
3. How To Build a Prospecting List In 5 Steps?
4. 5 Best Tools To Build Sales Prospecting Lists
5. 2 B2B Prospecting List Excel Templates

By the end of this article, you will clearly understand how to build a sales prospecting list that will help you generate more B2B sales leads and grow your customer base.

Okay, let’s dive in!

What Is A Sales Prospecting List?

A sales prospecting list is a collection of potential customers that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona.

You can use a sales prospecting list to reach out to potential prospects who are likely interested in your product or service and qualify them as leads for your sales funnel.

A sales prospecting list can help you generate more sales opportunities, increase your conversion rate, and grow your customer base.

A good sales prospecting list should contain relevant and accurate prospect information, such as:

• Company name
• Company size
• Industry
• Company location
• Job title
• Contact name
• Email address (business and personal)
• Phone numbers
• Other notable information that can help you build rapport and address their pain points, such as company expansion plans, funding initiatives, technology stack, etc.

A well-defined and organized list of prospects can help you save time and resources and improve your sales performance.

You can use a sales prospecting list to:

• Segment your prospects based on various criteria.
• Prioritize the most promising ones.
• Tailor your outreach and follow-up strategies accordingly.

Benefits Of Having Sales Prospecting Lists

Sales prospecting lists are essential to generate qualified leads that lead to meetings and, ultimately, conversions.

By refining your strategy with your sales lists and prospect information, your team learns, grows, and develop

Here are the benefits of having Sales Prospecting Lists:

1. More Customers: To reach a larger audience and attract more potential customers, resulting in more sales opportunities.
2. Better Targeting: Precise targeting, ensuring that marketing and sales efforts reach the right audience.
3. Higher Revenue and ROI: Higher conversion rates, resulting in increased revenue and return on investment (ROI).
4. Optimized Conversions: Higher conversion rates because leads are more likely to be interested in the offered product or service.
5. Better Insights: Maintaining a prospecting list provides valuable insight into customer behavior and preferences.
6. Channel Management: Management and optimization of sales and marketing outbound channels.

How To Build A Prospecting List?

Here is how to build a prospecting list in 5 easy steps:

1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile
2. Build your prospect list on LinkedIn Sales Navigator
3. Export prospects with Evaboot
4. Find your prospects’ emails
5. Upload your prospect list in your CRM

Let’s dive into each step in detail.

1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile

The first step to building a prospecting list is to discover and define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona.

An ICP describes the type of company that fits the best to your product or service.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of the individual decision-makers within your target companies.

By creating an ICP and buyer personas, you can narrow down your target market and focus on your business’s most relevant and qualified prospects.

To create an ICP, you need to consider factors and demographics such as:

• Company size
• Industry
• Geographic location
• Revenue
• Growth stage
• Technology stack
• Pain points
• etc…

To create a buyer persona, you need to consider factors such as:

• Job title
• Goals
• Motivations
• Fears
• Preferred communication channels
• Decision-making process

You can easily create buyer personas with online tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona or Xtensio’s User Persona Creator.

You can also use surveys, interviews, or social media to gather prospect data and insights from your existing customers or contact lists.

To complete these steps, you must clearly understand what you are trying to sell.

As a salesperson, you must grasp:

• What does your product or service do?
• The pain points it solves for your customers
• How do your existing customers like to use it?
• What outcomes can prospects expect from your product or service?
• How do these outcomes address the challenges and pain points of your users?

Understanding your unique value proposition lets you identify which customers will benefit from your product or service.

2. Build your prospect list on LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Once your ICP and buyer personas are well-defined, you can look for them using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool for salespeople to quickly and easily identify and connect with potential customers.

With Sales Navigator, sales reps can access an extensive database of prospects and leads, including detailed information about their job titles, company size, industry, and more.

The first step will be to build a list of companies matching your Ideal Customer profile.

For that, you can use the account search filters:

• Headcount
• Location
• Industry
• Growth
• Etc…

You can find other filters to find the companies that would be perfect clients for your business.

It’s time to save all these companies into a list:

1. Tick the checkboxes
2. Click “Save to list”
3. Click “Create New list”

Now, let’s find your buyer personas in these ICP companies.

1. Go to “Lead” search category
2. Go to the Workflow filter
3. Click “Account Lists”
4. Pick the list you just created

All the people working in these companies will appear on the right.

Obviously, we don’t want to reach out to everybody.

We must find our buyer persona inside that list.

For that, we are going to use lead filters like:

• job title
• years in current position
• keywords search

Here, I added “CEO” to the job title filter, and LinkedIn gave me all the CEOs of the companies on my list.

This is an easy and efficient way to identify the right buyer persona inside ICP companies quickly.

Once you are happy with a search, you can even save it. LinkedIn will alert new leads matching your search criteria every week.

Great!

Now that you have a list of qualified prospects, the next step is to export the data with a LinkedIn scraping tool.

3. Export prospects with Evaboot

To export your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to a CSV file, you can use the Evaboot Chrome Extension.

You can see a demo of the tool here:

Once installed, the Chrome Extension will add a new button on your Sales Navigator.

This button will allow you to export up to 2500 leads per day from LinkedIn Sales Navigator with all the data on their profiles on company pages:

• LinkedIn Profile URL
• Job title
• Job description
• Company Website
• Company LinkedIn URL
• First name, Last name
• Lead Location
• Company Location
• Company Industry
• Company Size
• Exact number of employees in the company
• Years in position
• Number of connections
• and more…

Evaboot is also a great tool for:

1. Cleaning the data (emojis, uppercases, typos)
2. Detect false positives in your search results
3. Scrape RGPD-compliant email lists and phone numbers

4. Find your prospects’ emails

Once you export the lead list into a CSV file, you can click on “Find emails” to find the professional emails of your prospects.

Evaboot will also verify these emails so you can control your bounce rate and protect your email reputation.

Here is what the file will look like:

Safe means that we are 99% sure that the email exists.

Riskier shows that the company’s email server is a catch-all, so we can’t say if the email exists.

If you also want phone numbers, you can use Evaboot with Datagma.

That being said, lead data is not static.

B2B data decays by 2.1% per month, meaning 22.5% of your exported leads could be outdated within a year. Job titles change, companies evolve, and outdated information leads to wasted outreach efforts.

To solve this, Evaboot offers URL Enrichment, allowing you to upload Linkedin URLs stored in your CRM to enrich them with Linkedin Sales Navigator data.

How it works:

1. Log in to your Evaboot account and go to the “URL Enrichment” feature.
2. Upload an old list of LinkedIn or Sales Navigator URLs.
3. Name your CSV file
4. Launch enrichment.
5. Wait a few minutes while the data updates, then download your refreshed list as a CSV file.

And here you go!

We recommend updating your lead lists every 3-6 months to maintain accuracy. This ensures your database stays fresh, relevant, and effective—so your sales efforts never go to waste.

For a visual step-by-step guide, check out the video tutorial:

5. Upload your prospect lists in your CRM

You got leads. You got emails.

Now you have to store them somewhere.

For that, you can use a CRM line:

• Pipedrive
• Hubspot
• Salesforce

Pipedrive is a good fit if you are just getting started.

If you are a small marketing team you can go with Hubspot.

If you are an enterprise with a really big sales team, you can go with Salesforce.

Once your leads are uploaded into your CRM, you can start doing manual outreach to these leads and keep track of your interactions with them by taking notes.

If you want to save time, you can also use email and LinkedIn automation tools like:

• LaGrowthMachine
• Lemlist
• Expandi

They allow you to automate email and LinkedIn messages and follow-ups so you can focus on building relationships with people who replied to you.

Since your prospecting list has LinkedIn profiles and emails, use both channels to contact your leads.

Here is a video showing how to use LaGrowthMachine to reach your prospects.

Multichannel outreach will increase your chances of reaching out to your new prospects in all possible ways.

5 Best Tools To Build Sales Prospecting Lists

Building a sales prospecting list can be daunting, especially if you lack the right sales prospecting tools.

Here, I will introduce you to 5 of the best tools to build a sales prospecting list building.

These tools are:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Zoominfo
• Wappalyzer
• Crunchbase
• Lusha

Let’s look at these tools and how they can help you create and manage your prospecting lists.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful sales intelligence tool that allows you to find and connect with prospects on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network.

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can:

• Use advanced search filters to identify and target your ideal prospects based on industry, location, company size, job title, etc.
• Get personalized lead recommendations based on your preferences and sales goals.
• Save and organize your leads into custom lists and sync them with your CRM.
• Access verified email addresses and phone numbers of your prospects with Lusha integration.
• Engage your prospects with personalized messages and InMails.
• Track your prospects’ activities and get real-time alerts on their updates, such as job changes, content posts, or company news.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a must-have tool for any sales professional to leverage the power of LinkedIn for prospecting.

You can start a LinkedIn Sales Navigator free trial or request a demo on their website.

2. Zoominfo

Zoominfo is a go-to-market intelligence platform that provides high-quality B2B data and insights.

This LinkedIn Sales Navigator alternative offers you features like:

• Lead generation: Find new contacts, strong relationships, and quality leads.
• Customer engagement: Interact with customers through sales calls, email, phone outreach, and your company website.
• Chrome Extension: Easy company insight access from your contact’s LinkedIn profile.
• Website visitor tracking: Engage with decision-makers who explore your business website.

Zoominfo is a comprehensive sales prospecting solution that can help you generate more leads, increase conversions, and grow your revenue.

3. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a powerful web technology profiler that helps you explore the technologies used by any website.

With Wappalyzer, you can:

• Identify the web frameworks, CMS, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools, and more.
• Use technology filters to find websites that use specific technologies or combinations.
• Get detailed information about each technology.
• Export your results to CSV or JSON for further analysis or integration with other tools.
• Get an extension to get instant insights on any website you visit.

Wappalyzer is a useful tool for sales prospecting that can help you find and qualify prospects based on their web technology stack.

Use it to tailor your sales pitch and demonstrate how your product or service can complement or improve their existing solutions.

4. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a leading platform for finding business information about private and public companies.

With Crunchbase, you can:

• Access millions of company profiles with every type of company information.
• Use advanced search filters to find and target companies based on various criteria.
• Get insights into the latest trends and news in your industry or niche.
• Create and export custom lists of companies that match your criteria and sync them with your CRM.
• Enrich your data with third-party integrations like Zoominfo, Lusha, Clearbit, and more.

Crunchbase is a valuable tool for sales prospecting. It helps you find and research relevant and attractive companies to your business.

You can also use it to monitor the market and identify new opportunities or threats.

5. Lusha

Lusha is a contact data provider that helps you find and verify prospects’ email addresses and phone numbers.

With Lusha, you get:

• Accurate data enrichment: Automatically updates your CRM with accurate and valuable data.
• Dashboard analytics: Streamlines your team’s performance and credit management
• Chrome Extension: Adds decision makers to sequences and lets you email them with one click.

Lusha is an essential tool for sales prospecting. It can help you find and connect with your prospects faster and more easily.

You can also use it to improve your data quality and reduce bounce rates.

B2B Prospecting List Excel Templates

When it comes to sales prospecting, having a structured and organized approach is key.

An Excel prospecting template can be a game-changer for sales teams.

It allows them to track leads, manage follow-ups, and streamline sales.

Here are my two Excel templates:

1. Prospect List Template
2. Account List Template

1. Prospect List Template

A prospect list should contain the following:

• First name
• Last name
• Job title
• Company
• Email
• Email verification status

That is the minimum you must have for a prospect list.

If you are serious about prospecting and your export data from LinkedIn, you should aim for this:

• LinkedIn Profile URL
• Email
• Email validity
• Job title
• Job description
• Company Website
• Company LinkedIn URL
• First name
• Last name
• Lead Location
• Company Location
• Company Industry
• Company Size
• Exact number of employees in the company
• Years in position
• Number of connections
• Company Type
• Company creation date
• Company description
• Company Specialities (Keywords describing what the company is doing)
• If the profile is open or not
• Profile Picture
• Company Logo

The more data you get in the first, the more data you can choose from to build your prospect lists.

So, getting a tool that gives you a lot of data and selecting which data is relevant to your specific prospecting use case is better.

2. Account List Template

LinkedIn is also a great source of data for building account lists. You can extract account lists and searches from LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Evaboot.

Here is the data you will get:

• Company Website
• Company LinkedIn URL
• Company Location
• Company Industry
• Company Size
• Company Type
• Company creation date
• Company description
• Company Specialities (Keywords describing what the company is doing)
• Company Logo

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These templates can save you time and help ensure you don’t miss any opportunities.

With fields for all the necessary contact details and notes on follow-ups, these templates provide a clear roadmap as you build your first sales process.

Conclusion

Building a successful sales prospecting list is critical for any business looking to increase sales and improve outreach.

Understanding your ideal customer profile, collecting accurate data, and using effective tools and templates can help create a powerful prospecting list that drives results.

And remember, the key to successful prospecting is continuous improvement and adaptation.

FAQ

How do I get a prospecting list?

Here are the 5 basic steps you need to follow to build a prospecting list quickly:

1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile
2. Build your prospect list on LinkedIn Sales Navigator
3. Export prospects with Evaboot
4. Find your prospects’ emails
5. Upload your prospect list in your CRM

What is a prospect list in sales?

A prospect list in sales is a datasheet with potential customers’ names and contact details. These lists can be mobile contact lists or email lists. B2B sales teams use these lists to contact customers who match their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

What is a prospect list of customers?

A prospect list lists potential clients who might benefit from your products or services. Marketers may also call this their email list, but it doesn’t have to be email-specific.

What is prospecting and examples?

Prospecting is the process of finding and contacting qualified leads to convert them into customers. Sales reps do this one-on-one through outbound activities.

For example, SDRs make cold calls, send emails, or use LinkedIn InMails to reach people who fit their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to pitch their product or service.

What do I need to create a prospect list?

A good prospecting lead list should contain relevant and accurate prospect information, such as:

• Company name
• Company size
• Industry
• Company location
• Job title
• Contact Name
• Email address (work and personal)
• Telephone numbers
• Other pertinent information that can help you build rapport and address their pain points, such as company expansion plans, funding initiatives, technology stack, etc.

A well-defined and organized prospect list can help you save time and resources and improve your sales performance.