What I learned about building a list of leads using Hunter.Io and Linkedin sales navigator

Understand the prospect

I learned that the first thing to do when creating a list of leads was to first educate myself on the industry in which I was searching for leads. Since I’m working with an Esporst organization that needs a lead lists for potential sponsorship deals, the first companies I researched were companies that are endemic to the Esports industries. However, while doing research on the Esports industry, I’ve learned that many companies, both endemic and non-endemic, are willing to sponsor Esports organizations.

Educating oneself on these companies products or services can better help you determine whether or not they would be a good fit for your organization. It was also important for me to dive into our own company’s mission statement and make sure the companies we are targeting fit that statement. Its does no good to reach out to a company who doesn’t share similar goals.

Also, by educating myself on our own organization, I am able to explain how partnering with our organization could be beneficial for both our organization and their company.

Building a list of prospects

After deciding which companies would best suit our organization, it was time to build the list.

For this, I used a linkedin sales navigator. I started with a small list of about 10 companies that I would like to target. I then looked into these companies to find the relevant contacts based on role types. I was looking for anyone associated the sponsorship or marketing team.

After using the linkedin sales navigator to find the relevant contacts, I then needed to get their email address. Sometimes Likdin sales navigator doesn’t display the proper email or sometimes doesn’t display an email at all. For this next step, I used Hunter.io.

Hunter.io has a feature called email finder. What email finder allowed me to do was type in the name of the prospect that I found on LinkedIn sales navigator, as well as what company they work with. It then finds the person’s email address, as well as includes a confident score, so that you can assure that your reaching to the right person.

In the example above, you can see that this particular prospect has a confidence score of 89 percent. Which for me is enough to include this prospect onto my leads list, which leads us to our next step.

Creating the lead list

This part was probably the easiest part. After I verified all of my prospect emails and job titles, it was time to organize them onto a spreadsheet. For this, I used Google Sheets

As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve neatly organized all of the prospects by name, role, email, and the company they work with. I can now hand this over to the marketing team so that they can work on cold emailing these prospects, and hopefully generate results.