Most salespeople take the path of least resistance when creating a list of cold call leads. They compile their lists from the usual suspects—sources like industry conferences, association member directories, and purchasable contact databases.
Over time, these common sources will obviously become saturated, and none of them will want to answer your calls, read your emails, or hear your sales pitches.
Thus, if you truly want your outreach to capture the attention and interest of your prospects, you’ll eventually need to start tapping into more creative, less-utilized sources for leads. Plus, if you’re lucky, your peers may not be searching through them yet, so you may even get a leg up on the competition.
Take a look at the following (perhaps unexpected) places to find leads:
1. Discord
Everyone likes to think of LinkedIn when turning to social media for uncovering B2B leads, but savvy folks know that Discord is a hidden gem for finding quality prospects. While it was originally a chat platform for gamers, Discord has exploded into a widely adopted communication channel for all types of communities, including businesses.
The best part? Many Discord users publicly display their phone numbers and email addresses right in their profiles, making them ideal candidates for cold calling and outreach.
If you’re new to Discord, the platform itself may be a bit tough to navigate at first. Still, with a little bit of research, you’ll find many “servers” related to your industry and target buyer demographics. For example, Internet Pipes is a research cohort community filled with ambitious B2B entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, there are also servers created for financial advisors, healthcare administrators, and other B2B professionals that you can add to your cold email lists.
Once you join some of these relevant Discord communities and explore their public member profiles, you can look for titles and positions that fit your ideal customer. With any luck, there will be enough profiles with open phone and email information for you to begin some legitimate outreach.
Keep in mind that there may not be many salespeople mining Discord for leads, so tread carefully. If you play your cards right, you may be able to find a group of like-minded prospects with whom you can start engaging first.
2. Freelancer Marketplaces
It may seem counterintuitive to go prospecting for clients and customers on a job board, but freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr can give you access to engaged, professional audiences who are actively looking to collaborate on business projects. Whether someone has posted a job listing or created a detailed profile highlighting their service needs, having this context can actually help you make your cold calls more personal and relevant.
When navigating these marketplaces, it’s a good idea to start by browsing profiles in categories that are relevant to your offering and scour for candidates that fit your ideal customer persona. You may also want to focus on users who have a more immediate need for your type of solution based on their job listings.
To make things easier for recruiters, many freelancer marketplaces include user phone numbers, emails, and other contact info in their public profile listings—which is everything you need to add them to your cold call list. Similarly, to make things easier for you, the service seekers on these marketplaces have already raised their hands with a business need that you can directly address in your outreach to capture their attention—which is not even the case with generic lead lists that you typically have to pay for.
3. In-Person Industry Networking Events
While online networking continues to grow and dominate the market, you should never underestimate the power of old-fashioned, face-to-face interactions. Simply put, you can still uncover new sales prospects with relative ease at industry conferences, trade shows, association meetings, and other live venues that attract highly targeted, engaged audiences.
However, what many salespeople fail to accomplish at these events is to make the most out of the one-on-one, in-person opportunities they have with potential leads. Once again, as online networking continues to grow, so does online anonymity—meaning people may not be as confident in person. Thus, if you can overcome the fear of rejection like you would with cold calls, you may be able to put together a very worthwhile list of in-person leads.
With that in mind, it’s also worth mentioning that the conversions you have at these events don’t always have to be transactional. For example, chatting with someone who may not be a good lead could turn into a conversation about the people they know who might be.
Conversations aside, you should also look to collect business cards that have titles or companies matching your ideal customer profile as you network your way around the venue. By collecting these business cards, you can build highly targeted and qualified cold-calling lists from virtually any in-person industry event. Plus, if you ever end up researching and calling someone else at one of those companies, you can reference your connection at the live event to add authenticity to your outreach.
4. Buying Targeted Lead Lists
The first thing you should remember about purchasing leads is that not all providers follow best practices for compiling their lists. This means that you will almost always run the risk of being sent outdated information, unethical scraping methods, and ‘junk’ or ‘filler’ leads mixed with quality ones.
To avoid this, you should turn to reputable lead list providers with verified, legitimate business data to build your call sheet. Here are the lead list providers we recommend:
Cognism
This sales intelligence platform gives you access to precise lead list-building and prospecting capabilities. With Cognism, you can create an ideal customer profile based on various firmographic criteria like company size, industry, revenue, technologies used, and more. Then, you can instantly match those prospects missing from your pipeline with Cognism’s accurate, up-to-date database. You can even filter contacts by specific job titles and functions to pinpoint key decision-makers.
One of the biggest benefits of Cognism is its phone-verified database of mobile numbers, which are ideal for connecting directly with prospects during your cold calling campaigns. Plus, with advanced filtering powered by AI, you can quickly build targeted call sheets to boost the productivity of your sales development efforts.
Demandbase
This AI-powered sales intelligence solution takes the guesswork out of your lead list building. It uses predictive analytics to identify the accounts and contacts that are most likely to buy from you.
Demandbase can also help you build custom ideal customer profiles based on attributes like company size, industry, technologies used, and more. Then, it will instantly match you to relevant prospects missing from your pipeline. You can even filter contacts by specific job title, seniority level, department, and function.
The result? A hyper-targeted cold call sheet of qualified leads ready to engage.
ZoomInfo
This sales prospecting software contains over 70 million direct-dial phone numbers and 174 million verified email addresses, making it ideal for building targeted cold call lists. It helps you create an ideal customer profile based on attributes like company size, industry, and technographics—which it then matches against a vast database to find prospects that might be missing from your pipeline.
ZoomInfo also provides key intel on companies to help you personalize your outreach and conversations. Additionally, with its advanced filtering and AI-powered customizations, you can build a list of highly qualified prospects in just a few clicks.
Keep This in Mind When Buying Lead Lists
Although buying contact lists can save you valuable time and spare you a lot of tedious manual labor, you need to ensure you’re using trustworthy sources.
That’s why it’s advisable to use vetted providers like Cognism, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo—because they gather B2B data legally so that you end up with accurate, targeted prospects.
You should also keep in mind that these companies don’t have any pre-made lists for you to buy. Instead, they help you build customized lists based on who and what you’re looking for. In other words, there are no shortcuts when it comes to quality list-building.
