In this instructional video, Joshua Nelson of the 7 Figure Agency explains a repeatable process for turning a large, unfocused prospect list into a highly targeted "Dream 100" list for digital marketing agencies. He begins by emphasizing the superiority of a focused list over mass email blasting. The first concrete step is to join a relevant national association (e.g., National Plumbing Association for plumbing/HVAC contractors) to obtain a reliable baseline list of member businesses. Next, he advises enriching that list with firmographic data—revenue, employee count, owner email and SMS—by using data‑vendor services such as InfoGroup, Axiom, or Reach Marketing. With enriched data, he recommends applying revenue and size thresholds (e.g., > $1 M annual revenue and at least 5 trucks) and manually reviewing each company’s website to further cull the list down to roughly 100 ideal prospects. Because many contacts still lack direct email addresses, he suggests using tools like Hunter.io or Seamless.ai and, when necessary, making phone calls to ask owners for their preferred contact details. Finally, he outlines an omnichannel outreach strategy—direct mail, email, social messenger, SMS, and custom‑audience social ads—to become omnipresent with the Dream 100, moving prospects from unaware to client. He ends with a call for viewers to comment if they can implement the process or want specific messaging examples.
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Well, hey, this is Joshua Nelson with the 7 Figure Agency. In this video, I want to talk about how to kind of take a big list and turn it into a targeted list. I did a previous video where we talked about kind of the benefits of having a super targeted list instead of having like this massive list that you just kind of pepper with emails randomly and get no responses. So here's what we're finding works best to narrow your list. The first thing is join the National Association of Members of your niche. So we work with plumbing and HVAC contractors. We joined the National Plumbing Association and some of the groups and subgroups within that. And by joining, you get a pretty solid list to start with because members have to pay in order to be members. And they're only joining that national association because they take their business seriously and they've got some, you know, some vested interest in the game. So you can kind of feel confident when you join that association and you get that list they're gonna be real businesses, they're going to actually operate, they're gonna give you real phone numbers, and this is all kind of useful stuff. But really, you wanna go deeper than that because not every member of an association is your ideal client, right? For us, we found plumbing and HVAC companies doing over $1 million per year that have at least 5 trucks really are our best kind of client, the ones that can invest in our services and will stay with us long-term. So it's worth it for you from a prospecting perspective to kind of find out what the situation is with the companies that you're emailing, that you're direct mailing, that you're cold calling, that you're reaching out to trying to get as clients. And so here's what we found worked best: join the association and then append revenue to the list. There's lots of great companies out there, and even me over the last couple years did not realize this was an option, but there's ways to bounce data from one source against another source like InfoGroup and Axiom and hundreds of other data warehouses out there. So you could go to a company like Reach Marketing— I'll kind of share some links in the comments if you're interested— that you can upload your list. Okay, here's the list I have. Go ahead and append from your database what the revenue known numbers are for these companies, what the number of employees are for these companies. In some cases even, what's the email address that's out there for the owner? What's the SMS or text message number for that owner? And this costs money, right? You're getting— investing in a list and then you're investing in kind of cleaning up that list. But when you do that, you wind up very clear. Okay, these are the kinds of companies that meet my ideal criteria and are worth the additional effort. Now, the other step that we got from Jim Allen from Roofer Marketer is what he did, he got his list, he appended the revenue data and then he culled it down. I think it was like 2,500 potential prospects. He got it down to like 350 or 400 that were over the revenue target he was looking for. And he spent some time and manually reviewed all of their websites. So he pulled them up, he looked at their websites and he kind of said, "Okay, this looks like the kind of company I want to work with." Oh, this looks like a residential type company. That's our ideal prospect. Right? And so manually taking the time to look at each one and minimize it. Really try and get it down to 100 that you feel confident. Man, if I could get their attention, if I can get them as a client, they'd be the exact kind of client that we'd want to work with. We can get great results for and then would probably wind up staying with us long term. And so how do you get the email addresses? Right? And this is the last piece of the puzzle. You've got your, your list of association members, you've culled it down, you've looked at the websites, but you still don't have email contact details for most of these people. And the fact is there's no liable source on the internet that you can just randomly find it. Yes, you can use Hunter.io, yes, you can use Seamless.ai, there's lots of great tools that can help with this, but at the end of the day, old-fashioned, take out your phone or have an assistant call and say, hey, "Hey, just wanted to learn a little bit more about your company. How much revenue? How many trucks? I'd like to send a survey out to the owner. What email address should I use?" Or something like that. You can use any variation of those questions, but you're not trying to sell anything. You're not offering solicitation. You're just asking what the email address is, and you're not trying to get it for thousands and thousands of contacts. You're just trying to get it for 100. So that's the, that's the idea, right? Take your big list, cull it down, and then you can really go deep in marketing to that list. You can direct mail them, email them, connect with them on social messenger, connect with them via SMS, roll out a custom audience to really target them on social media. And by doing that, you can become omnipresent in that small groups world and get them to move from never heard of you to absolutely see you kind of everywhere to let's give them a shot to it, to a client, right? And we're finding this is working best for the digital marketing agencies we work with. So, would love to hear from you in comments. What are your thoughts? Can you do this? And just in comments say, "I can do this!" with an exclamation point. And if you'd like some ideas on the type of messaging to send, like what kind of email, what kind of direct mail, what kind of text message, put in there "Dream 100 Communication" in comments and I'll get some additional details to you on that front. Hope you found this awesome. I'll talk to you soon.
