Hey ya’ll, I’m Grace and this month I took on the challenge to set myself up to become a successful sales rep in 30 days. In this project, I landed a job as a sales rep, traveled with the company to work a booth at a trade show, networked at mixers with new and existing clientele, created leads lists for my area, made cold calls and emails, and presented material to clientele.
Check out the full project here!
Without leads, a company doesn’t have the ability to make sales and grow its customer base. Companies can’t rely on their intuition; they need developed strategies for the types of customers they are trying to attract. This is where specific leads lists come in handy.
Creating a leads list can be a daunting and time-consuming process if not well thought out and optimized. This is why over 68% of businesses are struggling with generating leads, and why it makes sense that purchasing lists are still a common B2B practice.
For a large-scale target audience, like every single gift shop in the United States, buying a leads list would be more cost-effective for a company than paying reps to do it. But since I’m the rep for the lower peninsula in the mitten(Michigan), I need a more specific leads list for targeted areas.
Here is how I created a leads list for a specific audience in a specific territory.
Define Your Target Audience
Define your targeted buyer persona and audience to create a specific lead list. Working for a business with a specific field (custom screen print shirts), I was looking for B2B leads.
Since I already know the main market for custom screen print is souvenirs, uniforms, and company merchandise I have several categories I could choose to target.
Living in Grand Rapids, which is beer city USA, breweries are a big market for merch and uniform sales. Two birds one stone, yet it is still a very specific field to target.
The Mitten has breweries all over the state and an abundance of breweries going down into Indiana. Eventually, I will make a list of breweries for each prominent city/town in the lower peninsula and Indiana. But, for this week I want to focus on Grand Rapids.
Search, Filter And Gather Data
For leads lists in the past, I have used LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It is a fast and widespread way to search by area, keyword, and title. For this leads list I looked up the 2021 Grand Rapids Beer Guide as my base for the list, and then I collected all the names, websites, numbers, and addresses in a doc on Google Sheets.
Then I used LinkedIn to see if each brewery had a designated Merchandise Manager, and if so, I inserted their name and brewery into Hunter.io to get their email.
Mom and pop shop breweries don’t typically have a set Merchandise manager listed on their website or LinkedIn, but with a single phone call, I was able to get a contact for each brewery (even if they told me to use the mainline).
Use A Tech Tool For Storage
I have kept lead lists in my Google drive or I have put them in Salesforce in the past. I’ll use whatever software the company I work for uses. Black Metal Apparel isn’t the most tech-savvy company and I haven’t been fully onboarded into the tech they use yet (Shopify). So, since I’m the only rep using these leads I’ve just been cross-referencing them with the list of current clients we have to avoid an embarrassing cold call to a current client.
GR Brewery Lead List
Given that GR is my backyard, I plan to visit most of the breweries in person to show them samples and establish a relationship. For chain breweries, I’ll be calling the merchandise manager or front of house manager to talk or get an email to send our brewery-specific catalog to. The catalog is in the works right now, and my goal is to start calling and visiting these breweries next week!
Updates coming soon on my website!
Wanna learn more about lead lists? Check out these sources I found helpful!
Grace Gurley 
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