How to build a short list of 100 target companies by hand

Build the list in one sitting of research and then keep it alive. Define what a good-fit company looks like in four lines, collect 150 candidate names from free sources, and cut to 100 by checking each against a reason it should care today. Put each into a tier, give it a named contact, and review the list for ten minutes at your regular sales meeting. A list of 100 that someone reads is more use than a list of 5,000 that nobody opens.

Write the profile before you collect a single name

Four lines, no more. The kind of company (what it makes or does), the size or scale you can serve, the place, and the trigger that makes it likely to need you now.

Owners often leave the trigger out. A new plant, a fresh tender win, a new product launch, a change of leadership, an expansion advertised in the trade press: each is a reason for a call to be timely. Without one, you are asking strangers to care on your schedule.

Also write who is excluded. Companies below the order size you can serve, firms already tied to a group supplier, competitors' captive customers. This saves you from researching rows that cannot convert.

Where the first 150 names come from

Use sources that already tell you the company is active in your field.

• The exhibitor and visitor lists of trade fairs in your sector
• The member pages of industry associations and chambers in your area
• The supplier and vendor pages that large buyers publish
• Tender award notices, if you sell to institutions
• Your own past enquiries, lost quotes and old customers
• Customer references: ask each current customer which two firms they envy or compete with

Stop collecting at about 150. You will lose a third of them to the checks below, which leaves a workable hundred. Our note on where to source prospects goes wider, and building a qualified B2B prospect list covers the verification step in more depth. This post is about a smaller, named set you will work as accounts.

The columns that make it a working list

Use a plain spreadsheet. Ten columns are enough:

"Why now" and "Next step" do the most work. A row without a reason and without a next step is a name, not an account.

Rank into three tiers

Not all 100 deserve the same effort. Put them in tiers by fit and by how strong the trigger is.

Tier 1, about 15 to 20 companies. Strong fit, strong trigger. These get personal research, a first message written for that firm and a plan for reaching a second contact.

Tier 2, about 30 to 40. Good fit, weaker trigger. A short, specific first message and a regular touch.

Tier 3, the rest. Plausible fit, no trigger found. They sit on watch. When a trigger appears, they move up.

Do not decide tiers on size alone. A mid-sized firm that has just announced a new line is a better first call than a large one that has not changed in years.

A ten-minute review, four questions

Put the list on the agenda of whatever sales meeting you already hold. Ask four things.

1. Which accounts got a touch, and which did not?
2. Did any trigger appear (a news item, a tender, a hire) that moves a company up a tier?
3. Which rows have no next step?
4. Which should come off, and why?

When a company comes off, write the reason in the row. When a Tier 3 gets a trigger, move it and write the next step the same day. Add new names only when you remove old ones, so the list stays near a hundred.

For example: a battery-charger maker in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar

This is an invented small maker of industrial battery chargers for forklifts and pallet trucks, selling through walk-ins, with illustrative figures. The owner had been phoning "factories" from a paid file and getting nowhere.

The owner rewrote the profile: plants with ten or more battery-operated trucks, within a day's drive, in sectors that move stock indoors, such as bottling, warehousing and component stores. The trigger was a plant adding trucks or a second warehouse. The list grew to 150 names from an exhibitor list, two association member pages and the supplier pages of large buyers. Checking each company's own site cut it to 108.

The first mistake was to record a single contact per firm, usually the owner. At many plants the owner never saw a charger request. The stores or maintenance head did. That person was the one stuck when a truck stood idle. A second-contact column fixed that, filled from company pages and by asking on calls for "the person who looks after the trucks". Messages to that person drew more replies than messages to owners, though only a few. A first message was then written for each role, each mentioning the kind of truck that plant ran.

When a hand-built list is the wrong move

If your product sells to almost any business, so that no profile could narrow it, a list of 100 will feel arbitrary and you are better served by inbound work. Account lists also suit sales that are large, repeated or slow. For a low-value item bought on impulse, 100 named accounts is too few to matter. And when you cannot name a trigger or a contact for most rows after an honest try, the profile is too wide.

A smaller version of this list is in account-based marketing for a firm with fifty target accounts.

Fill the first twenty rows today

Write the four-line profile and fill twenty rows completely, each with a trigger, a contact and a next step. If twenty will not fill, the profile is the problem, not your effort. If you are short of hours for the research, prospect research and list development is the service for it, and the sales section holds the related posts. Once the rows fill, tell us what you need.