If you’re in B2B sales or marketing, you know how tough it can be to generate new pipeline and customers through outbound outreach. Blindly emailing and calling any company under the sun is a surefire way to burn time and money. You need a more strategic approach.

The key is focusing your efforts on targeted accounts that align with your ideal customer profile. But how do you identify and select those prime targets? Where do you start when building account lists optimized for your unique business?

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through a proven, step-by-step process for creating customized target account lists tailored to your needs. This is essential groundwork that sets you up for outbound success.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Researching your current customers to identify your ideal buyer profile
• Building an initial target list leveraging internal and external sources
• Segmenting and prioritizing accounts based on attributes like industry, size, tech stack etc.
• Enriching your data by finding key contacts and pain points for each target
• Developing personalized outreach strategies for engaging your best-fit accounts
• Measuring performance to continuously refine your approach

Let’s get started with step one – really understanding who your ideal customers are.

Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile

The first step is gaining a clear understanding of your ideal customer. This includes defining buyer personas, gathering details on current customers, and outlining the core criteria that makes an account a good fit.

Start by analyzing a sample of your existing customers and look for common patterns:

– Company Size/Revenue 

– Industry Vertical

– Tech Stack/Tools Used

– Geography/Locations

– Use Cases or Applications

Develop 1-2 buyer personas that detail job roles, pain points, and motivations. Also gather info on the buying process: who are the decision makers and influencers? How long is the sales cycle? This will come in handy later when determining who to contact within target accounts.

With this ideal customer research, you can begin building an ICP or “ideal customer profile” framework. This should outline the key qualifying criteria to identify accounts with the highest potential to become customers. 

Having a strong ICP will serve as the north star to guide your account selection and outreach. For example, core criteria could include:

– Company Size: $10M-$50M in revenue 

– Industry: Software/SaaS, Manufacturing, Financial Services

– Technologies Used: Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft Azure

– Geographic Region: West Coast USA 

– Use Case: Digital Transformation and Cloud Migration

Keep the ICP requirements relatively broad at first – you can get more granular with segmentation later. The goal of the ICP is to create a profile that helps quickly determine whether an account merits further outreach.

With your ICP defined, you can move on to building a target account list aligned to this ideal profile.

Build Your Initial Target Account List

Now that you have an ICP to use as a guideline, it’s time to create an initial master list of target accounts for outbound outreach. This involves leveraging both internal and external sources to build a robust list of prospects.

Use Your Current Customer Base

Your existing customers can be a goldmine for expanding your target account list. Analyze accounts similar to your current clients to uncover more prospects that resemble your ideal customer profile.

– Review Existing Customers: Segment your customer base by criteria like industry, size, tech stack and regions to find common patterns. Identify accounts that are similar to current customers.

– Request Referrals: Ask current customers if they can provide introductions to other companies that may benefit from your product. Referred accounts typically have higher sales conversion rates.

– Mine Account Spheres of Influence: Identify key stakeholders at existing accounts and research who they are connected to at other companies, including previous employers, LinkedIn connections, etc.

Leveraging your current customer base and their networks can help reveal natural extension opportunities to quickly build up your target account list.

Look at Your Competitors’ Customers

One of the fastest ways to build an initial list is researching accounts that currently buy from your competitors. These companies are already validated as requiring solutions in your space.

– Identify Competitor Customers: Visit competitors’ websites and look for listed customer case studies and testimonials. Compile these company names.

– Use Data Tools: Subscription data tools like ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg can identify what accounts your competitors sell into for a given industry.

– Talk to Contacts: Ask your network if they can confidently name any companies using your competitors’ offerings. 

Prospects already paying competitors show market validation and may be more easily convinced to consider alternatives like your product.

Leverage Tools to Find Prospects

Various sales and marketing tools can generate lists of target account prospects that fit your ICP criteria.

– Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Tools: Solutions like 6sense, Demandbase, and Terminus can run ICP-matched searches to find qualified, in-market accounts.

– Intent Data: Capture businesses demonstrating research intent for products in your space via Bombora, G2 Crowd, etc. 

– Lead Enrichment Tools: Solutions like Clearbit, DiscoverOrg, and ZoomInfo can append firmographic data to build targeted prospect lists.

– CRM Search: Many CRMs like Salesforce allow creating segmented prospect lists based on characteristics like industry, size, and location.

Today’s data-driven sales & marketing technology makes it easier than ever to generate customized target account prospect lists.

Search Industry Websites and Publications

Don’t forget to scour industry-specific websites, publications, and directories to uncover potential targets manually. 

– Associations & Members Lists: Industry associations like Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for healthcare technology list member companies on their websites.

– Conference Attendee Lists: Manyevents publish a list of registered attendees – review this for targeted companies in your space.

– Industry News Sites: Scan sites like FierceBiotech for software technology for lists of companies mentioned in articles.

– Trade Magazines: Publications focused on your industry vertical like HR Technologist often showcase clients using various products and services.

– SIC Code Search: Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes classify companies by industry vertical – search sites like Hoovers to find specific SIC-coded prospects.

While manual research takes longer, poring through industry-specific sources can uncover quality prospects that automated tools miss.

By leveraging these research approaches, you should build an expansive initial target account list to fuel your outbound initiatives. Now let’s look at refining and prioritizing this list.

Refine and Segment Your List

With your initial broad target account list assembled, conducting further segmentation and refinement is key to improving outreach efficiency. Take the following steps to focus your list:

By Company Size

Segment your list by company size criteria such as annual revenue or number of employees. Group accounts into size buckets like mid-market, enterprise, SMB, etc. 

Focus on company sizes that best align with your ICP framework. Having size-specific prospect lists prevents wasting time pitching smaller businesses with lower contract value potential.

By Industry

Divide your prospects by their industry vertical or sector. For example, separate manufacturing accounts from retail and financial services accounts.

This allows tailoring messaging and solutions to industry-specific pain points during outreach. Organizing prospects this way also facilitates targeted advertising.

By Tech Stack

If your solution integrates with certain technologies, segment accounts accordingly. For instance, group prospects by what marketing automation platform they use. 

You can then highlight your platform expertise in initial outreach and account mapping documents to catch their interest quickly.

By Location  

Separate prospects geographically however makes sense for your business – by country, region, city, or other geographic divisions. 

Location-based segmentation enables outreach time zone planning and localization like translating materials for international audiences.

Apply additional filters as well to narrow your list, such as social media followers, web traffic, or number of employees on LinkedIn. The goal is creating focused segments ripe for targeted outreach.

Prioritize Accounts for Outreach 

With your refined, segmented account lists, the next step is determining outreach priority and sequence. Not all accounts are created equal in terms of sales potential, so you need to assess and prioritize them.

Here are some factors to consider when prioritizing target accounts:

– Fit Score: How closely an account matches your ideal customer profile based on attributes like industry, size, tech stack, etc. Assign accounts a fit score from 1-100.

– Firmographic Data: Consider company revenue, number of employees, growth rate indicators, and technology spend when ranking accounts. Bigger is often better.

– Engagement History: Prioritize accounts that have engaged with your website, content, events, etc. Some interest is better than none. 

– Contact Intel: Having existing relationships and executive contacts at an account improves the odds of outreach success.

– Propensity Models: Solutions like 6sense, Demandbase, and Metadata.io score accounts on likelihood to buy – use these scores to guide prioritization.

By combining these factors, you can bucket accounts into groups like A, B, and C priorities for tiered outreach. Keep shaping and updating this prioritized list as new data comes in.

Enrich Account Data 

Your prospect list contains the companies to target – but you also need intelligence on the actual people to contact within those accounts. Expanding contact and account data should be an ongoing process.

Find Decision Makers

Identify the key decision makers and influencers involved in a purchase, like CMOs, VP Sales, IT Directors etc. These are the people you want to reach.

Sales tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach.io have automated contact discovery capabilities to uncover titles and roles. You can also search for executives by department on LinkedIn and company websites.

Gather Email Addresses

Obtaining accurate, direct email addresses is crucial for reaching your prospects. Leverage sales intelligence tools, email verification services like NeverBounce, and email finding Chrome extensions to get this contact data. 

Even without direct emails, you can use personalized email formatting like firstname@company.com to improve open rates. 

Identify Pain Points

Understanding challenges prospects face in their roles creates opportunities for highly relevant outreach. Use case studies, news articles, and social media to research hot button issues and topics for each priority account.

This account-based research will fuel creation of customized outreach that resonates with each prospect’s situation.

Invest time enriching data for priority accounts and contacts prior to large-scale outreach. This will pay dividends in terms of higher open rates, responses, and opportunities.

Develop Account-Based Outreach Strategies

With your enriched target account list ready, it’s time to execute personalized outreach at scale. The strategies below can drive dramatic improvements in account engagement and pipeline creation.

Personalized Messaging

Generic batch-and-blast emails are easily ignored. By personalizing messaging to each account with relevant details, response rates can skyrocket.

– Use Pain Points: Weave identified account challenges into subject lines and content e.g. “Reducing Salesforce Licensing Costs by 20%”.

– Mention Contacts: Namedrop colleagues, executives, or connections contacts have at the account. This gets attention.

– Spot Trends: If multiple prospects at an account engage with a piece of content, proactively reach out to discuss it.

– Send Physical Mail: Send personalized direct mail packages referencing online activity at their account. This multi-channel approach stands out.

Taking the time to tailor messaging for named accounts and contacts pays off tremendously inCutting and pasting generic messages simply does not work today.

Multi-Channel Outreach 

Leveraging multiple channels and touchpoints improves prospect engagement. Don’t rely solely on email outreach.

– Social Selling: Engage prospects via LinkedIn Messages and Facebook Messenger when possible.

– Direct Mail: Send custom packages and care packages aligned to accounts’ interests.

– Phone Outreach: Nothing grabs attention like a timely, relevant phone call instead of another forgettable email. 

– Retargeting Ads: Serve dynamic ads across channels to accounts after they visit your site or content.

– SMS: Obtain legal consent first, but personalized text messages have amazing response potential. 

Orchestrate customized nurturing journeys across email, phone, mail, digital ads, and more to create a surround sound effect.

Account-Based Advertising

Today’s advertising platforms enable targeting display ads and other digital content directly to your priority target accounts via IP addresses and cookies.

Platforms like Terminus even let you create LinkedIn and web ads personalized for individual accounts. Other options include:

– LinkedIn Sponsored Content: Show in-feed posts to specific companies.

– Google Display Ads: Remotely access business wifi networks to drop cookies for ad targeting.

– Geo-Fencing: Target mobile ads to devices in proximity of an office or tradeshow booth.

– Direct Mail Ads: Send custom gift boxes and packages to named executives.

Account-based advertising combines the power of marketing channels with personalized precision. Use it to increase awareness with your targeted accounts.

Measure and Optimize Outreach Efforts  

Driving maximum results from your campaigns requires continuously monitoring performance and iterating your approach. Use the metrics below to track progress and optimize over time:

Open and Response Rates

Gauge the effectiveness of your messaging, offers, and outreach cadence by measuring:

– Open Rates: Benchmark target open rates by outreach type e.g. cold email vs. warm call. 

– Response Rates: Set targets for replies and set meetings from campaigns. Assess by sender, account tier, persona etc.

– Engagement: Monitor click-through rates on links and CTAs in emails and ads.

Set goals based on past performance and industry benchmarks. Analyze results by segment and channel to identify successes and areas for improvement.

Opportunities Created

Ultimately, you want to drive new pipeline and opportunities from your outreach programs. Track key conversion KPIs:

– Meetings Booked: Number of discovery calls, demos etc directly from campaigns. 

– MQLs/SQLs Generated: Count new marketing and sales qualified leads created. 

– Pipeline Influence: Credit from outreach efforts attributable to new opp value.

– Deal Progression: Analyze stage movement and deal sizes from target accounts. 

Continuously assess opportunity metrics to optimize converting accounts into pipeline and revenue.

Marketing Qualified Accounts

To complete the loop, gauge success converting target accounts into marketing qualified accounts (MQAs) based on their engagement and buying signals. Track:

– Website Visits: Site traffic from target accounts after campaigns.

– Content Downloads: Assess asset access and engagement from accounts.

– Form Fills: Measure leads and inquiries generated from accounts. 

– Intent Data: Monitor increased buying signals like searches and techstack updates.

Analyzing MQAs provides insights into which accounts to keep pursuing with sales versus re-nurturing or removing from campaigns.

By regularly evaluating performance on these key metrics, you can refine target account selection, outreach strategies, and nurture paths to boost results. Testing and optimization is critical.

Conclusion

Creating and executing targeted outbound outreach to priority accounts is a proven tactic for efficiently driving pipeline and revenue. But without doing the upfront work to build customized, well-researched target account lists, it’s impossible to maximize your impact. 

This guide walked through start-to-finish steps for building target account lists tailored to your ICP, enriching data, developing personalized outreach, and measuring outbound campaign effectiveness.

While the process requires an investment of time and resources on the front-end, the payoff in terms of increased qualified opportunities makes it well worth the effort. Just be sure to view your target account list as a living asset to continuously refine and optimize based on data and performance indicators.

With the right targets, a compelling offer, and multi-channel nurturing, your outreach efforts will thrive. Use this comprehensive framework to create target account lists that deliver results.

Now get out there and engage your future customers! With the right preparation and execution, they’re waiting for you.