Why and how to qualify a prospect file ?

Qualify a prospect file is the holy grail of sales. 🧉 Good prospecting is based on a simple concept: “Send the right message, to the right person, at the right time”.

If you’ve understood that, you’ve understood everything, but you still need to put it into practice. To send the right message at the right time, you first need to find the right person. All the people you’re going to contact who don’t correspond to your target cannot, by definition, receive the right message. 👀

So, if 10% of your target may be interested in your service/product, the success of your marketing campaign follows the following logic: 10% number of qualified prospects / total of your list.

Because yes, a prospecting list does contain a proportion of “false positives”. The aim is to reduce this proportion as much as possible. 😇

How to create a prospect file using LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, the best BtoB database in the world. Yes, but not just any old way!

LinkedIn is over a billion profiles. Can you believe it? A billion people, likely to be decision-makers in the purchase of a service or product. 🤯

And yet, although profile search is LinkedIn’s core business, the quality of the results is disastrous, let me explain. 👇🏼

A search that doesn’t respect the principles of a good LinkedIn search will yield an average of 50-70% false positives, and a perfectly executed search will retain 30% false positives. Even with Sales Navigator! 👀

By positive, I simply mean a profile that doesn’t match the target audience.

Qualify a prospect file without making mistakes

If you don’t believe me, here’s a simple exercise:

• Go to a LinkedIn search.
• Search for your target profile.

Ex: Position: “Head Of Sales”, Location: “San-Francisco”. 👇🏼

• Go to the last page of the search.

Here are the results. 👇🏼

We can see that even if the profiles are broadly in the same ecosystem/theme, their title isn’t exactly what we’re looking for. 👀

But in the majority of cases, you’ll have profiles that have nothing to do directly with your targeting.

(For example, in our case, people who used to be Head Of Sales, but are no longer, or who are “Head Of Partnership” and have been “Sales” in the past).

The same exercise works with the Sales Navigator or Recruiter. 😇

How do I get a list of qualified prospects?

1) Use Sales Navigator

The use of Sales Navigator is highly recommended for creating a good prospect file.
It enables you to obtain more qualified results and, above all, with greater granularity (basically, more filters, so more precise qualifications). 🚀

For me, company size alone is enough of a filter to buy a Sales Navigator license.

Even so, Sales Navigator will always give you false positives, so you need to re-sort your prospecting lists.

Sales Navigator, in addition to sharing more search criteria, makes it “a little easier” to exclude false positives. 😅

In fact, the “NOT” filter is directly usable. For the rest, it’s pretty much the same thing.

We’ll also use the “Job title” filter, including “Head Of Sales”. ⬇️

Then, we’ll exclude the profiles we’ve identified in our search as not matching those we’re looking for.

2) Clean up your prospect lists before importing

It’s possible to eliminate false positives even before importing your listing into Waalaxy. To do this, we’ll ask LinkedIn to remove them from the search, using LinkedIn’s “normal” search.

Okay, but how do we do that? 🤔

Well, we’re going to use the Boolean operator NOT (I promise, it’s easy). 😇

To go back to the example we had above, we noted that at the end of our search, we had “Head Of Partnership”. But we’re not interested in these profiles.

So we’re going to add a “NOT Head Of Partnership” to the prospect search behind “Head Of Sales”. 👇🏼

This technique lets you tell LinkedIn (the best b2b database) “I want the Head Of Sales, but not the Head Of Partnership”.

If we go back to the 100ᵉ page of the search, we can see that we no longer have any Head Of Partnership.

But it’s still not perfect, which is why we recommend using an automation tool to make the task easier. 😇

3) Clean up your lists after import

With a tool like Waalaxy, you can easily clean up your lists of false positives after importing them into the tool.

#1. Find the profiles you want and tag them

In this example, I’ve imported a list of “Sales” profiles.

I can immediately see that I need to qualify the data in this list again.

This stage consists of identifying all the profiles on our list that match our search criteria.

We’ll search by “Title”, for example “Head of Sales”.

#2. Create a blacklist

We’re going to create a list that serves as a “Blacklist”. 🔲

By creating contact databases, we ensure, thanks to “anti-duplication” security, that prospects identified as “false positives” are not added to another list in the future.

If you think that profiles among the false positives may be relevant in a future sales prospecting campaign , simply delete them in the next step, instead of transferring them. 👀

#3. Exclude false positives

Refresh the page to load the new filters. Then filter by “Tag” ⭢ “Exclude”.

Exclude the tag you’ve just added (in my case “Sales”).

Select all prospects and transfer them to the “Blacklist”. 🔲

And presto! Resetting the filters, we’re left with a list of prospects that match our targeted search 🪄

How do you remove inactive from your list?

Finally, I’d like to give you a little bonus to help you manage lead requalification : remove inactive from your list.

Many people have LinkedIn accounts but don’t actually use them. Contacting these people is irrelevant. 🤔
You’ll get less interesting campaign performance, and we won’t like that!

For that, there’s a filter on Waalaxy. 👀

This filter will exclude all people who don’t have a profile photo on LinkedIn. A key indicator 🔑 in an account’s activity.

For that, it’s pretty simple. Use the advanced filter “Does not have profile photo” and add them to the blacklist, as seen in the previous step. 😁

If you’d like to find out more about Waalaxy and discover all its features, click here! 👇🏼

How about a recap?

This method may seem tedious. But it’s essential for quality prospecting.

It enables you to move from a 30% to a 95% qualified customer list!

That’s a ratio of 1 to 3 on the performance of your campaigns, which translates into a ratio of 1 to 3 on the revenue generated by your prospecting. 👀

A good way to optimize the contact quotas authorized by LinkedIn 😉

Frequently asked questions

Wait, don’t go away so quickly, we still have a few resources to pass on to you. 😇

What qualifies a prospect?

To qualify a prospect, it’s important to understand several aspects that will determine their potential as a customer, for example: 👇🏼

• Interest and commitment.
• Needs and challenges.
• Budget.
• Authority.
• Urgency.

How to qualify a customer file?

If you want to qualify new customer files, here are the different steps:

• 1️⃣ Analyze demographic data.
• 2️⃣ Assess needs and interests.
• 3️⃣ Check budget.
• 4️⃣ Assess the potential decision.
• 5️⃣ Measure engagement and activity.
• 6️⃣ Use automation tools.

Now you know how to qualify a prospect file! 🌞