How To Build Your Dream 100 List

Hey, this is Josh with the Seven Figure Agency. And in this video, I want to talk about how to take a big list and turn it into a targeted list. In a previous video, we talked about the benefits of having a super targeted list instead of having this massive list that you just pepper with emails randomly and get no responses. So here's what we're finding works best to narrow your list.

The first thing is join the National Association of members of your niche. So we work with plumbing and HVAC contractors, we joined the National Plumbing Association and some of the groups and subgroups within that. And by joining, you get a pretty solid list to start with, because members have to pay in order to be members. And they're only joining that national association because they take their business seriously. And they've got some vested interest in the game. So you can kind of feel confident when you join that association, and you get that list, that they're going to be real businesses, they're going to actually operate, and they're going to give you real phone numbers. And this is all useful stuff.

But really, you want to go deeper than that, because not every member of an association is your ideal client, right? For us, we found that in plumbing and HVAC, companies doing over a million dollars per year, and that have at least five trucks really are our best kind of client. They are the ones that can invest in our services, and will stay with us long term. So it's worth it for you, from a prospecting perspective, to kind of find out what the situation is with the companies that you're emailing, that your direct mailing, that you're cold calling, and that you're reaching out to trying to get as clients.

And so here's what we found work best, join the association, and then append revenue to the list. There's lots of great companies out there. And even I, over the last couple years, did not realize this was an option. But there are ways to bounce data from one source against another source, like Info Group and Acxiom and hundreds of other data warehouses out there. So you could go to a company, like Reach Marketing, (I'll share some links in the comments if you're interested), that you can upload your list, okay, here's the list I have, go ahead and append from your database, what the revenue known numbers are for these companies, what the number of employees are for these companies. Some cases, even what's the email address that's out there for the owner, what's the SMS or text message number for that owner. And this cost money, right, investing in a list, and then you're investing in cleaning up that list. But when you do that, you wind up very clear, okay, these are the kinds of companies that meet my ideal criteria, and are worth the additional effort.

Now, the other step that we got from Jim Ahlin, from Roofer Marketer. What he did, he got his list, he attended the revenue data. And then he culled it down. I think it was like 2500 potential prospects, and he got it down to like 350, or 400 that were over the revenue target he was looking for. And he spent some time and manually reviewed all of their websites. He pulled them up, he looked at their websites, and he said, Okay, this looks like the kind of company I want to work with. Or this looks like a residential type company and that's our ideal prospect, right? And so manually taking the time to look at each one and minimise the list, really try and get it down to 100 that you feel confident, man, if I could get their attention, if I can get them as a client, they'd be the exact kind of client that we'd want to work with, we can get great results for and then will probably wind up staying with us long term.

And so how do you get the email addresses? Right, and this is the last piece of the puzzle. You get your list of association members, you've culled it down, you've looked at the websites, but you still don't have email contact details for most of these people. And the fact is, there's no reliable source on the internet that you can just randomly find it. Yes, you can use Hunter.io. Yes, you can use Seamless.ai. There's lots of great tools that can help with this. But at the end of the day, old fashioned, take out your phone, or have an assistant call and say, “Hey, just wanted to learn a little bit more about your company. How much revenue? How many trucks? I'd like to send a survey out to the owner, what email address should I use?” or something like that. You can use any variation of those questions. But you're not trying to sell anything, you're not offering solicitation, you're just asking what the email address is. And you're not trying to get it for thousands and thousands of contacts, you're just trying to get it for 100.

So that's that's the idea, right? Take your big list, cull it down. And then you can really go deep in marketing to that list. You can direct mail them, email them, connect with them on social messenger, connect with them via SMS, roll out a custom audience to really target them on social media. And by doing that you can become omnipresent in that small group's world and get them to move from ‘never heard of you' to ‘absolutely see you everywhere' to ‘let's give them a shot' to ‘a client', right. And we're finding this is working best for the digital marketing agencies we work with.

So we'd love to hear from you in comments. What are your thoughts? Can you do this? And in comments say, “I can do this!” And if you'd like some ideas on the type of messaging to send, like what kind of email, what kind of direct mail, what kind of text message, put in there “Dream 100 Communication” in comments and I'll get some additional details to you on that front. I hope you found this awesome. I'll talk to you soon.