Guide : how to build your prospection list step by step
I outline here a method to build a list
4/15/20264 min read
Guide: How to Build a B2B Prospecting List, Step by Step
From my experience, the vast majority of B2B sales teams don't know how to build effective prospecting lists.
Quite often, they have a list containing nothing but company switchboard numbers, or simply a list of companies that may not even be complete.
Yet building a good prospecting list is the number one and most important step in B2B prospecting.
If you don't have the contact details of the right people, you can't reach the right decision-makers. And if you can't reach them, you won't book meetings with them. Simple.
There are two main steps: first, identify the right people to target and build a list of their profiles. Then, enrich that list using software to find their phone numbers and email addresses.
I've put together an overview of the best data enrichment tools.
1. Using LinkedIn Premium to Build a Prospecting List
When it comes to building a list, you don't necessarily need a billion different tools.
Previously, with the free version of LinkedIn, you could search for professionals with job titles matching your target audience and filter them by industry and/or location.
For example, let's say you're looking for Marketing Directors and E-commerce Directors working in the IT industry and based in Paris. Here's what that search used to look like:
Unfortunately, you now need a LinkedIn Premium subscription to see more than the first three results.
At that point, you might as well use Apollo for data enrichment directly. It costs roughly the same, but comes with plenty of email credits and additional filters.
See here how to use Apollo.io to estimate and score your Total Addressable Market (TAM).
If you decide to use LinkedIn Premium, you can then extract profiles from your basic LinkedIn search into a CSV file using Waalaxy, for free.
Waalaxy is a paid SaaS platform, but exporting prospect lists into CSV files is completely free.
Here's what it looks like:
Waalaxy allows you to export a maximum of 1,000 contacts per export.
Not all of them will necessarily match your target audience perfectly. You can then filter the CSV file to remove companies that are too small or too large, for example, if you're not targeting very small businesses or large corporations.
Also, don't forget to remove companies you're already working with or are already in discussions with.
You can restart the export from a specific LinkedIn search page to extract the remaining profiles. Alternatively, you can segment your search by French city: export 1,000 contacts from Paris, another 1,000 from Marseille, another 1,000 from Lyon, and so on.
This is the low-cost way to build your first prospecting list.
However, if you want to run a multichannel B2B prospecting campaign targeting these prospects, you'll then need to retrieve their phone numbers and email addresses.
2. Data Enrichment
In 2026, calling company switchboards to try to reach prospects is really not a good idea anymore.
99% of the time, you won't get transferred to the right person.
It's one of the great hypocrisies of B2B prospects: they don't want you calling their mobile phones, but at the same time, they make themselves virtually impossible to reach through other channels.
If you want to do effective B2B cold calling and generate between 1 and 6 meetings per day, you'll have to call mobile numbers.
Once you've cleaned your CSV file and kept only the contacts you actually want to reach, you can upload it to a tool such as Get Eficia to retrieve their phone numbers.
This will cost you around €140 for 500 phone numbers.
One thing to keep in mind: some of these numbers won't actually belong to the right person. However, at least 80% should be accurate.
See here how to succeed at B2B cold calling.
For B2B email addresses, I recommend using Apollo.io.
For around €50, you get 2,500 email credits per month.
And if you're already paying for this subscription, you might as well use Apollo directly instead of LinkedIn.
That way, you won't need to spend time exporting lists of 1,000 contacts through Waalaxy. You'll also benefit from advanced filters to identify the right companies and decision-makers.
However, Apollo can become relatively complex to use at scale, because you'll need to build workflows within the platform if you want to identify and extract more than 1,000 companies at once.
Conclusion: You Don't Need a Billion Different Tools to Build a Prospecting List
Building a prospecting list takes time, but it doesn't necessarily cost money in itself.
Data enrichment is where things get expensive.
Some providers are significantly more effective and cheaper than others. That's particularly true of Get Eficia for phone numbers and Apollo for email addresses.
And if you don't want to deal with all of this yourself and are considering outsourcing your sales prospecting to an experienced professional, feel free to book a meeting with me below.
