Lists and targeting

An ideal customer profile describes the company most likely to buy from you: its industry, its size, the role that signs and the signals that show it is ready to buy. We build yours from your own sales history, starting with one question. Who bought from you in the last twelve months, what did they pay, and who signed it off? The answers are usually less glamorous than the market in the pitch deck, and they are the only evidence in the room that is not a theory. Everything else in how we work is built on them.

Look at who signed your past deals, then find that same person in other companies. In IT and software work the signer is often a head of IT, a director of IT or a VP of IT strategy, sometimes a CTO, and those titles are not interchangeable across company sizes. Most targeting goes wrong when somebody opens a lead tool and types in whatever sounds senior. Smirnov Consulting Group maps the real signers first and only then searches for them, usually starting with LinkedIn outreach.

The people who can sign a contract without asking anyone else: founders, owners, CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, VPs of Sales, heads of department and directors, depending on the offer. What gets cut matters as much. Scraped lists are full of assistants, associates and "managers" who manage a calendar, and none of them buy. In our B2B appointment setting work, a boolean search, meaning a title filter built with AND and OR, does most of the sorting, for example ("VP" OR "Head" OR "Director") plus the buyer's function.

All three, plus the buyer's role, and each one gets its own decision. A list that runs from 1 employee to 10,000 is really three businesses with three buying processes glued together, so every campaign we set up has a headcount range. "Europe" is not a target either; specific countries are. Geography can also change the message, because a prospect in your own city reads an implied chance to meet in person. Language and time zone belong in the same decision, since a message sent at 3 a.m. local time starts at a disadvantage.

In a fixed order, with the message last. The buyer profile gets agreed first. Then companies and decision-makers are pulled from B2B data tools, and the raw export gets cleaned against that profile before anyone writes a word. Only then does anyone write a word of copy, and our case studies show what a list built in this order produces.

We work across 16+ B2B data tools, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, ZoomInfo and Clay, and past client lists have also used UpLead. Several sources are needed because no single database covers a market well, and Sales Navigator alone is not enough. Research and enrichment, such as adding company size, titles and contact details, run through the same stack. The software is the easy part to buy. The filters and the judgment about who belongs are where the work in our cold email campaigns goes.

Yes, it is where our LinkedIn targeting starts, although it is never the only source. Its filters set company size, geography, industry and seniority, and title search narrows each role to the people who actually buy. One filter worth using is people who posted in the last 30 days, a rough sign that a human actually checks the account, because a connection request to a dormant profile goes nowhere. Set it before a LinkedIn outreach campaign starts, not after the first quiet week.

The list is on us. In our done-for-you engagements, list building is part of the job: we research, build, clean and verify the list, then run the campaign on top of it, so you do not need to hand over a spreadsheet. For companies that already run their own sending and only need the data, Smirnov Consulting Group also builds Custom Lead Lists as a separate service. The main offer stays the full appointment setting system, where our team also runs the sending.

Think in contacts, and more of them than most people expect: the first list we build for a client usually starts at 20,000 contacts or more. The math explains why. One LinkedIn account over 30 days contacted 1,200 people and produced 289 replies, 16 booked calls and 3 signed deals. The same sequence on 300 handpicked names lands at less than one deal, which in practice means zero, and a founder concluding that outbound does not work in their niche. A smaller goal means a smaller list, and our cold email campaigns size it backwards from the number of clients you want.

Large enough that a year of sending does not run out of decision-makers. Take the booked calls you want next year, convert them into the number of people you must contact, and count whether your market really holds that many. A niche of 900 companies with one plausible buyer in each cannot feed a year of calls, because a campaign works through it in a quarter. Almost nobody runs this check, and Smirnov Consulting Group runs it before planning any sales call campaign.

It can, when the deal size carries the arithmetic. If an average project is worth around $200,000, which is normal in the IT services and consulting work we see, one extra contract a month adds up to $2.4 million a year, assuming you can deliver twelve more projects. At the other end, a $2,000 average deal with no renewals rarely justifies a campaign, however tight the niche. We run those numbers with you before recommending outbound for a narrow market.

By copying the pattern of the companies already paying you, then scoring the matches. We search for businesses that resemble your current and past clients in size, structure and the problem they are trying to fix. AI scoring then ranks the contacts most likely to respond, so the strongest fits are reached first and the weaker ones wait. Your closed deals hold targeting data no competitor can copy, which is why each appointment setting engagement we run starts from them.

Somebody opens the file and reads it before launch. Read every unique job title and count how many belong to real buyers. Under half means the list is not ready. Sort by country and company size and cut what you do not serve. Then pull 20 random rows and look each person up by hand. If we cannot say why that specific person would care, the row is noise, and it stays out of the cold email campaign.

Buying signals are useful for deciding who to contact first, but they should not shrink the list. Every ICP we define includes the signals that show a company is ready to buy. On paid third-party intent feeds, our position is that we use them when they fit: they work best when the addressable market is large, and on a small market, such as 2,000 target companies with usable signals on only a handful of them, intent data gets skipped in favor of an offer that resonates with the whole list. Intent data is a tool, not the name of the game.

Along the lines where the buyer's problem changes: industry, company size, role and country. If two segments would get the same email, they are one segment. Each track also needs its own proof, because three case studies in one narrow lane read as a track record, while ten across ten industries read as experiments. A UK social media marketing agency we worked with ran three niches in parallel, each with its own message and its own proof.

Mostly defined markets, meaning companies selected by industry, size, country and buyer role. A named-account list earns its place when the market is small and every deal is large. The pattern we argue against sits in between: a team contacting 50 to 100 "perfect-fit" leads a month and wondering why nothing moves. For most appointment setting clients, a defined market is what keeps new conversations arriving every month.

There is no fixed number; the size of your market decides it. In a broad market, the one role that signs at each company is usually enough to start with. In a small market, a multithreaded plan reaches several decision-makers at the same company, for example the CTO and the head of IT at one software development company. Multithreading only works when each message fits the person's role and the contacts are planned together, so the company never sees an uncoordinated pile-up.

Every company on the list gets one owner. Smirnov Consulting Group splits territories account by account, so two LinkedIn profiles or two mailboxes never reach the same decision-maker, and duplicates are removed across data tools before anything is sent. If two of your reps can reach the same buyer in the same month, the prospect sees a company that does not talk to itself. The more LinkedIn and email accounts we run for you, the more this split matters.

Both stay out, and you decide what else goes on the exclusion list: current clients, open deals, partners, past customers you would rather approach yourself, and competitors you do not want alerted. We remove every company and domain on it before anything is uploaded, and re-check it at every list refresh, so a name only needs adding once. One cheap check before launch: ask your two best reps to name the last 10 companies they contacted. Any name that also sits on the new list goes on the exclusions before a done-for-you campaign starts.

List hygiene means keeping the file you send to clean: the right titles, only the company sizes and countries you serve, no duplicates and nothing unverified. It matters because a dirty list produces silence that looks like a copy problem. So teams spend three months testing subject lines while the wrong titles sit untouched in the spreadsheet. Bad records also turn into bounces, which cost sender reputation for the next cold email campaign too.

By checking the people as well as the addresses. Decision-makers change jobs and get promoted, so a record that was right last year can point at the wrong person today. Titles get re-read against the buyer profile, because no sentence will make a junior marketing coordinator at an eight-person company buy a EUR 200,000 implementation project. Ask when your data was last checked and by what; if the answer is "the freelancer said it was clean", it is not clean. Our own lists get both checks, people and addresses, as part of the way our team works.

From the B2B data tools we build lists with, such as Apollo, ZoomInfo and Clay, matched to a decision-maker we have already chosen. The person comes first and the address second, so nobody gets targeted just because their email was easy to find. On direct phone numbers, our policy is that we do not use them for cold outreach; the email is what the campaign needs. Every address found still goes through verification before our cold email team sends to it.

Continuously, because sending capacity eats a list fast. One LinkedIn outreach account contacts up to about 2,800 people a month, so five accounts running together work through 14,000 in the same period. New batches get built while the campaign runs, each checked against the ICP again, which keeps any single file from going stale. How often a batch is needed depends on market size and the number of accounts, and that pace is built into the sending plan from the start.

You widen, go deeper, or both, and the order matters. Widening usually means a second geography where your proof travels: one UK client targeted the UK and the United States together, and two months produced 59 booked calls and 8 deals averaging $70,000. Going deeper means several decision-makers per company, longer sequences and more patience. Stretching the ICP into buyers you have never sold to comes last, because a vaguer target makes the message vaguer. If your market looks small at the planning stage, the same options apply, just earlier.

Our list-building policy relies on legitimate interest as the lawful basis for EU and UK business contacts, with an opt-out in every message and removal on request. Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic require prior consent even for business email, so campaigns into those three markets lead with LinkedIn instead of cold email. A named business contact in the EU or the UK is personal data under GDPR and UK GDPR, so a B2B list needs a lawful basis, and people must be able to object to further contact. Smirnov Consulting Group is registered in Prague, so EU data protection law applies to us directly. This is how we work, not legal advice.