How to Build Your ABM Leads List & Win in SaaS 📈

Hi there,

Hello from a boat off the coast of Madeira, Portugal. I’m working from Starlink on a family cruise this week.

In this week’s video, I show you exactly how to build a list of nearly everyone in your target market – so you can show targeted ads and send high-value emails to your audience that drive predictable and scalable SaaS revenue growth.

If you’re a B2B CEO/Founder or Head of Sales or Marketing – this email should be quite helpful… as it covers the exact process we have used to help SaasRise members generate an additional 500 qualified B2B leads per week (and it’s how we bootstrapped SaasRise from $0 to $3M ARR in 12 months).

The key is to build a comprehensive target market list (we call it an ABM Lead List) using Apollo, Instantly, ListKit – and about the 18 other lead prospecting tools I list below – then use those leads to show matched audience ads and launch outbound market education sequences. The full Loom video is here and the in-depth how-to article is below.

This process works especially well for any B2B firm where the ACV is $1000+ (mid-market and enterprise). Below that price point, there’s often not enough margin to cover the data and ad costs to execute this strategy.

We make this type of specific growth and exit prep content available to our SaasRise community. If you’re already in the SaasRise community, enjoy. If not, you can apply to join us here to join our private mastermind community of software CEOs and Founders with $1M to $100M in annual revenues. We offer a two week free trial to all qualified applicants.

This Week’s Video - How To Build Your ABM List 🎯

You can start with this week’s Loom video… “Building Your ABM Lead List” and/or read the below for step-by-step written guidance. You can also see the ABM List Building slides here. We love to give away helpful content that can help you grow your company.

If you like step-by-step helpful growth and exiting videos like this, join the SaasRise community where you can get access to all 26 of our growth and exit modules within the SaaS Growth System Course (free for our members). 

Here’s the full written out instructions that I wrote today…

How We Built Our ABM Lead List 📋

Since Sep 2023, we’ve built a list of nearly every SaaS CEO and Founder in the world. 

What we’ve discovered is that there are around 450,000 SaaS CEOs and Founders globally. We spent around $45,000 in data costs to build the list – using lead prospecting tools like Apollo, Instantly, ListKit, and many others. We then showed ads to these CEOs/Founders using matched audience ads and did outbound campaigns using Instantly. 

As you can see above, the platforms with the most data coverage within our particular ICP are Adapt, ListKit, Instantly, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Pitchbook. Try out all of them and see if you can get a good sense as to how many targets are in your ICP.

We start with ads + outbound email to the same target market, then once these leads engage with our content, offer our weekly SaaS growth newsletter.

Remember it’s all about turning strangers into evangelizers through a combination of great list building, great content, and great products!

Through good content marketing across LinkedIn, email, and ads, we’ve turned this list of 450,000 SaaS CEOs and Founders into a very active SaasRise community – so far with 371 paying members all with $1M to $100M in ARR – all helping each other grow their companies, make referrals and recommendations, solve challenges, and prepare for successful exits. (We’d love for you to join if you’re a CEO/Founder of a SaaS Firm with $1M+ in revenues).

We’re building the digital-first YPO/EO/Vistage for growth-focused SaaS companies – and our goal is to reach 1,000 members and help SaaS companies scale and successfully exit. 

How To Build Your ABM Lead List: The Tools 🛠️

Start with one or more of the below lead prospecting platforms, building a list of everyone in your target market based on job title, industry, location, employee count, keyword, etc. 

1. Apollo

2. Instantly

3. ListKit

4. Seamless

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

6. ZoomInfo

7. Uplead

8. Lusha

9. Ocean.io

10. Adapt.io

11. Cognism

12. Lead411

13. Wiza

If your target market is CEOs/Founders/Investors also check out:

1. Pitchbook

2. Crunchbase

3. Grata

If your target market is Ecommerce check out:

1. Wavo

2. StoreLeads

And if your target market is local businesses check out:

1. D7 Lead Finder

2. Lead Scrape

If you need speciality B2B lists that can’t be easily found on the above tools, you may have to do a Google Search for lists within your specific niches to find exactly what you need. Always negotiate on price with list/data brokers, as their marginal cost is quite low. 

While most platforms charge around $0.03 to $0.10 per lead, you can get that down to .01 per lead by working with contract data providers that you can find on Fiverr who already have access to these platforms with high volume licenses. You can also just message me for our data broker contacts. 

We spent about $45,000 over the course of a year to build our list of 450,000 B2B contacts. We actually got around 800,000 contacts, but many were duplicates as the upstream providers are often the same for many of these lead prospecting platforms. 

How To Use Your ABM Lead List to Drive Revenue Growth 💸

So, when you do your B2B marketing, start by building a list of everyone in your target market. Once you have the list of leads (or a partial list if funds are tight to begin with), then set up matched audience ads (aka custom audience ads) on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Adroll to show ads directly to your target audience. 

Then, set up an outbound email sequence that provides valuable education and case studies to your target market using Instantly, with the goal of educating first, and then driving trials/account sign ups/demos/sales meetings, etc. While some people go for replies, we like to alternate between going for replies and going for clicks on our PDF reports – as that way we get more people into our retargeting funnel and more people engaging with our content. 

We usually see open rates of about 30-50% on the outbound emails our B2B SaaS clients set up via Instantly and click rates ranging from 2% to 30% depending on the quality of the content and the perceived value of the content you’re offering. 

Then as you do relevant digital events or webinars or events/tradeshows in each area – you can message people who are in those areas to let them know you’re coming to town and drive additional attendance at your in-person or digital events.

I hope this is helpful! If you have any questions about implementation just let me know.

See you next week with more great SaaS scaling and exit prep content!

Until then,
Ryan Allis, CEO & Founder
SaasRise
www.saasrise.com
The #1 Community for Experienced SaaS CEOs and Founders

About SaasRise Founder Ryan Allis