Why are Custom Target Account Lists for ABM Actually Cheaper?

Having that in mind, you have to ask yourself if these lists are really as cheap as they first seem. If you calculate the cost per actual prospect, you will see that the answer is no.

Read on to find out how much pre-packaged lists actually cost, but also what the actual cheaper way to get qualified prospects is.

Why consider buying lists in the first place?

Lead generation is great, but acquiring leads, making your ABM lists and closing deals can be a slow and time-consuming process.

Although there are many ways to acquire them, this process can take a very long time (at least six months for significant results, in our experience) and generous resources (large team and budget).

However, sometimes, you just have to meet your sales target and achieve results as soon as possible (e.g. during slow summer months). And that’s usually when focus shifts to targeted list building.

You’ll be happy to know that there is a way to fast-track your prospect list building efforts and consequently grow your sales as well. This quick and ideal solution is simply outsourcing to those whose job it is to find suitable prospects.

But, does taking every possible shortcut mean you will reach your destination in time?

If you know where to look, if you know what qualified prospects are and if you calculate what pays off – quality or quantity, then yes – you just could reach your destination in time.

Buying pre-packaged prospect lists is a waste of resources

Those with less time and money on their hands are more likely to reach out to anyone selling the contacts from the industry they need and buy their prospect lists.

We repeat this warning like a broken record, but – that is the biggest mistake sales departments or business development representatives can make.

First of all, what you are buying through scraped prospecting lists are not actually prospects, but contacts.

These are simply email addresses of people who at some point have worked in a certain industry, company or job. You have no way of knowing whether those contacts are actually in need of your product or service and whether they are updated.

Add to that the fact that 30% of all data is unusable within a year’s time or less, and it’s clear that you are wasting your money.

There are also automated Account Based Selling tools that can find your prospects for you, but the question of whether they are precise enough at catching the exact ones that can become buyers in near future remains.

How many prospects you need to start selling

Of course, not all your prospects are in need of your product or service as soon as you contact them. You need to thoroughly research their pain points, wishes, needs and goals.

If you discover you can help them with any of their problems and aspirations – they are the qualified ones.

In B2B Lead Blog’s lead gen checklist, they say that out of all the prospects you collect (assuming they are targeted and not scraped) only 5-15% are actually sales ready.

So naturally, the more prospects you have – the higher the chances of you closing are.

One of the most common mistakes sales departments make when buying prospects is that they pay more attention to their price and quantity than quality, i.e. how likely they are to actually make the purchase.

There is no point in comparing buying cheap prospect with low likelihood of converting, to buying a selected few with very high chances of actually becoming your customers.

Not to mention how much time your sales team will waste trying to sell to countless disinterested people – time they could spend talking to far better suited companies.

Target account lists are about quality not quantity

Let’s prove this mathematically.

Say, you bought 100 contacts and paid 20¢ for each of them.

20% of them will bounce right away because the lists hasn’t been updated. Another 40% will simply not be contacts with the right title or type of company (eg. your services could be too expensive for them).

That leaves you with 40% of prospects who may or may not become your customers – and 60% of that data you paid for will not be of use to you now or ever again.

You then presume that your leads cost you 20¢, when in reality, counting only the prospects that you can use – each of them costs you 50¢.

Not to mention all the other complications that can arise from such lists.

Firstly, you have no idea what the up-to-date people on list have opted-in for. You will end up emailing people who are not interested in what you are offering. You will get no opens or even get marked as spam because your recipient just doesn’t know you.

And don’t forget the GDPR cold emailing rules!

Potentially, you could end up adding a GDPR fine to the total cost of your prospects – and trust us, you do not want this. GDPR fines are up to €20 million, or 4% of last year’s revenue! How cheaper is buying prospects in bulk again?

And apart from getting marked as spam by your recipients, you could get blacklisted by your email provider. By emailing a large number of invalid addresses (remember, these lists haven’t been updated in probably quite a while), you end up getting a lot of hard bounces.

To your provider, this screams “spammer”. You, your IP address and your domain are screwed.

And just in case you need more persuading, we like to mention the so-called “spam traps” – email addresses that resemble a regular name and company email, but do not belong to anybody and are created specifically for catching spam.

That kind of wrong move puts you, your company and all your sales efforts in danger.

In addition, these lists are usually not pre-arranged for your CRM so you have to format them yourself. Then you have to make your own list of prospected contacts based on your ICP/ BP.

Not only will this take up your team’s time, but you may find yourself looking for freelancers or new employees to take this work off of your hands.

And now you have one or more freelancers that need coordination and briefing, and whose results may or may not be satisfactory.

Then, what happens when you have a new project or want to change the direction or size up your business? Engaging new people in the process can bring more damage than good.

Speed up prospect list building the right way

You should definitely try hand-picked outbound leads that had been carefully selected by an expert team of researchers according to the targeted criteria specified in the ICP/ BP document.

To do that, our clients provide us the so-called list of prospected contacts or the list of companies they did business with, current customers or those in the buying process.

We then use it as a starting point for our further research of similar companies that might be interested in your services or product.

Based on that list we create a bounty list with similar companies and decision makers in each company, and deliver it to our client in a few days or weeks.

All of collected data is fresh with 98% accuracy.

No pre-packaged lists, no outdated information, no waste of money.

Growth hack your sales with custom target account lists

You will save a lot of time and money and skyrocket your sales by acquiring qualified prospects from reliable prospecting sources (do we have to repeat that this is our expertise? Because we will).

All you have to do is provide your ideal customer profile or a list of prospected contacts and we prepare a prospecting list with contacts that are most likely to be interested in your product or service.

Your sales team will do what they do best – sell.

Contact us to do the exhausting job of searching for your potential customers and focus your company on developing your services or products instead.