3 Strategies to Prioritize Your Prospect List for More Revenue

Right now, every prospecting minute counts. With a potential recession looming, sales teams are under immense pressure to generate more pipeline and revenue from a pool of increasingly cautious buyers.

You can‘t afford to waste time chasing after prospects who will never close – or if they do, the deal size will hardly be worth the effort. The key to thriving in this uncertain market is to ruthlessly prioritize your prospect list and focus your energy on the opportunities most likely to turn into revenue.

Consider these statistics:

• 80% of sales require at least 5 follow-ups to convert (HubSpot)
• The average sales rep spends just 35% of their time actually selling (HubSpot)
• 63% of sales reps say that a lack of leads is their top challenge (SalesForce)

In other words, sales reps have a limited amount of time for prospecting and need to make every interaction count by pursuing the right leads. But without a clear prioritization strategy, reps often fall into the trap of treating all prospects equally or relying on gut feel to decide who to pursue.

Bad prospect prioritization is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Good prioritization, on the other hand, is like aiming at a bullseye – you‘re far more likely to hit your target.

In fact, sales teams that get prospect prioritization right have 30% more pipeline and 15% higher annual revenue growth (Xant.ai).

If you want similar results, use these three proven strategies to score your prospects and focus on the best revenue opportunities.

Strategy 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Any good prospect prioritization starts with intimately understanding what types of companies tend to get the most value from your product and ultimately convert to high-value customers. This is your Ideal Customer Profile or ICP.

Your ICP acts as a North Star to help you quickly identify good fit prospects to prioritize. It usually includes firmographic attributes like:

• Industry
• Employee headcount (company size)
• Annual revenue
• Geography
• Tech stack

For example, say you sell marketing automation software. Your historical sales data shows that your product has the highest adoption and largest deal sizes among B2B tech companies with 200-500 employees and at least $50M in annual revenue.

You would score prospects matching those attributes higher than those falling outside your ICP. A 1,000 person manufacturing company or a 50 person startup would get deprioritized or disqualified altogether.

To define your own ICP:

1. Analyze your past deals, both won and lost, to identify trends in the most profitable customers
2. Interview your best customers to understand what qualities they share
3. Get input from customer success on which types of customers find the most success with your product
4. Document your ICP attributes and socialize with all revenue teams to get buy-in

Here‘s a sample ICP template to get you started:

ICP Attribute	Definition
Industry	B2B SaaS
Employee Range	200-500
Revenue Range	$50M-$500M
Geography	North America
Tech Stack	Salesforce, Slack

Strategy 2: Score Prospects on Key Buying Signals

Even if a prospect is a good fit for your ICP, not all of them will be ready to buy at the same time. You need a way to stack rank prospects based on their current level of interest and urgency.

This is where lead and account scoring comes in handy. Lead scoring assigns point values to each prospect based on key buying signals and behaviors. The higher the score, the more likely the prospect is to convert in the near term.

Some of the most predictive lead scoring attributes include:

• Behavior on your website – Pages visited, time on site, content downloads, etc. More engagement = higher score.

• Interactions with your brand – Email opens/clicks, event attendance, social media engagement, etc. More interactions = higher score.

• Demographic info – Job title, seniority, department, etc. Decision makers or influencers = higher scores.

• Company info – ICP match, recent funding, hiring trends, technographics. Better fit and growth signals = higher score.

For example, a prospect who visited your pricing page multiple times, attended a recent webinar, and has a director-level title at a company that just raised funding would score very high.

On the other hand, a prospect with no recent engagement from a company outside your ICP with a junior title would have a very low score.

The key is to identify the scoring factors that historically correlate with sales for your business. If you have a marketing automation or lead scoring tool like HubSpot or Marketo, you can implement lead scoring directly in the platform.

If you‘re starting from scratch, follow this process to create a basic lead scoring model:

1. List out all the potential scoring attributes that may indicate buying intent. Think both fit (ICP) and activity.

2. Assign point values to each attribute based on how strongly it correlates with a sale. The stronger the correlation, the more points.

3. Set scoring thresholds to bucket prospects into priority tiers or temperatures, like this:

Prospect Tier	Point Range	Recommended Action
Tier 1 (Hot)	90-100	Call immediately
Tier 2 (Warm)	60-89	Personalized email outreach
Tier 3 (Cool)	30-59	Nurture with content
Tier 4 (Cold)	0-29	Deprioritize outreach

4. Revisit your model quarterly to adjust scores based on sales data

Strategy 3: Leverage Social Proof for Priority Prospects

Now that you know how to identify good-fit, sales-ready prospects, you need a way to get their attention and stand out from other vendors vying for the deal. One of the best ways to do this is by leveraging social proof.

Social proof is the idea that people are more likely to take an action if they see others like them doing it. In a sales context, it means that prospects trust the recommendations and actions of their peers more than your marketing claims.

Some powerful forms of social proof include:

• Customer testimonials & case studies – Written or video success stories from customers in the same industry, role, or company size as your prospect. The more similar the customer is to your prospect, the more influential their endorsement.

• Referrals & introductions – Warm introductions from mutual connections like investors, partners or friendly customers. An intro from a trusted peer is one of the best ways to get a top prospect to engage.

• Badges & trust marks – Awards, recognitions or logos from well-known industry associations, analysts or review sites. Third-party validation provides an instant credibility boost.

Here‘s how to operationalize social proof in your prospecting:

1. Create a library of customer testimonials, case studies and badges segmented by vertical, use case, and company size. Make it easily searchable.

2. For each top tier prospect, identify any commonalities with your best customers. Do you serve any of their competitors? Do you have any mutual connections on LinkedIn?

3. Personalize your outreach to feature relevant customer stories and name drops. A subject line like "How we helped [Customer] in [Prospect‘s vertical] achieve [result]" is sure to boost your open and reply rates.

4. Don‘t be afraid to proactively ask for referrals into target accounts. Try a message like "I saw you‘re connected to [Prospect] on LinkedIn. How well do you know them? I‘m trying to get in touch but haven‘t had much luck!"

Here‘s an example of how Gong.io, a revenue intelligence platform, uses social proof across marketing and sales touchpoints:

• Website displays testimonials and logos from well-known customers like LinkedIn, Slack, and Shopify
• Case studies are segmented by industry, role and company size for easy reference
• Sales reps send prospects personalized videos featuring customer stories from their vertical
• Reps leverage mutual LinkedIn connections for warm introductions into target accounts

By leading with social proof, Gong stands out in a crowded market and has quickly become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies.

Prioritization Pitfalls to Avoid

While the strategies I‘ve outlined will put you well ahead of most sales teams, implementing prospect prioritization does come with some common pitfalls to avoid:

• Prioritizing quantity over quality – It‘s tempting to go after as many prospects as possible to increase your chances of getting a deal. But if they‘re not a good fit, you‘ll just end up wasting time on bad opportunities while your competitor scoops up a top tier prospect. Narrow is the new wide in prospecting.

• Letting good prospects slip by – On the flip side, over-indexing on a small set of top prospects comes with the risk of missing out on good opportunities that may not look perfect on paper. Use the 80/20 rule as a guide – spend 80% of your time on top prospects and 20% experimenting with outliers.

• Treating prioritization as a one-time event – Prospect quality and buying intent can change rapidly, especially in uncertain markets. What was an A+ prospect last quarter may be a dud today if they‘ve had layoffs or budget cuts. Review and adjust your prospect scores at least monthly.

• Not getting the rest of the revenue team on board – If marketing is generating leads that don‘t fit your ICP or if customer success isn‘t willing to provide references, your prospecting will be an uphill battle. Get buy-in on your prioritization criteria from all customer-facing teams.

Real-World Examples

To further illustrate the power of prospect prioritization, let‘s look at a couple real-world examples of companies doing it well:

Example 1: Snowflake

Snowflake, a cloud data platform, uses technographic data to identify and prioritize prospects based on their current data stack. They know companies using legacy on-premise data warehouses tend to be the best fit for their product.

Snowflake has a very specific ICP of companies above a certain data volume threshold, which helps them quickly disqualify poor fit prospects. They also heavily score leads based on activity data like what pages they visited and what content they consumed.

This tight ICP alignment and behavioral lead scoring has helped Snowflake achieve a massive $12M average selling price and over $100M in sales in just their first year of selling (SignalFire).

Example 2: Salesforce

Salesforce, the behemoth CRM platform, is well-known for its disciplined prospecting process. They have a detailed matrix for scoring accounts on two dimensions:

1. ICP Fit – How well the account matches Salesforce‘s target profile in terms of company size, industry, geography andtech sophistication

2. Engagement – How actively the account is interacting with Salesforce‘s marketing and sales efforts, with points assigned for actions like email opens, event attendance, web visits, etc.

Accounts are then assigned a letter grade from A to D based on their combined fit and engagement score. Salesforce‘s sales team goes after A accounts with highly customized outreach while marketing is tasked with nurturing B and C accounts. D accounts are automatically disqualified.

This systematic scoring model ensures no high-value prospect falls through the cracks and has helped Salesforce achieve a commanding 19.8% market share and over $17B in annual revenue (IDC).

Key Takeaways & Next Steps

I covered a lot in this guide, so let‘s recap the key takeaways:

• Prospect prioritization is critical for sales efficiency and maximizing revenue, especially in an uncertain market
• Start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile to know what a good fit prospect looks like for your business
• Score prospects based on key buying signals like company fit, behavioral engagement and intent data
• Leverage social proof like customer stories and referrals to capture the attention of priority prospects
• Avoid pitfalls like valuing quantity over quality or treating prioritization as a one-time event
• Learn from real-world examples of companies excelling at prospecting through disciplined prioritization

If you only remember one thing, let it be this – time is your most precious resource in sales. You can‘t create more of it, so it‘s critical to spend it with the prospects who have the highest propensity to turn into actual revenue.

By ruthlessly prioritizing your prospect list and using these proven plays, you‘ll fill your pipeline with more high-quality opportunities and ultimately close more deals.

Here are a few next steps you can take to get started:

1. Document your ICP and share it with all customer facing teams for alignment
2. Audit your current sales process to identify areas to inject prospect prioritization
3. Implement a basic lead/account scoring model in your CRM
4. Build a library of customer stories, referrals and social proof to use in outreach
5. Start tracking key prospecting metrics like ICP-fit leads, opportunity-to-close rate by prospect score, etc.

Happy prioritized prospecting!