In this instructional video, Joshua Nelson of SendVigor Agency answers a Facebook‑group query about obtaining a prospect list for a digital‑marketing agency. He outlines three primary routes: (1) building a list organically through content, opt‑ins, and paid ads – a high‑quality but slower method; (2) borrowing a list via joint‑venture partnerships or reciprocal list swaps, which requires relationship work; and (3) buying a list, the most immediately scalable option. For buying, he details four practical avenues: joining the relevant industry association to access member directories; purchasing from InfoUSA using SIC/industry filters; hiring freelancers on Upwork to scrape targeted data from LinkedIn, Google Maps, etc.; and using automated scraping tools like Lead Kahuna or LeadScope. He concludes by encouraging viewers to share their own list‑building tactics and to comment “cold outreach” for a free mini‑training on outreach tactics.
Chapters
Well, hey. This is Joshua Nelson with the SendVigor Agency. I wanted to shoot a quick video on a question that I got in the Facebook group from Pat. And the question was, "How do I get the list, right? I've decided on my niche. I know what I'm going to do, how I'm going to serve them. But I need a list of prospects so I can go out and send them cold email and try and get them to raise their hand." And so, really when it comes to getting the list for your digital marketing agency to do your prospecting, there's really just a couple of options. The first option is to build the list. I'm a big fan of building the list. To build a list, right, you put out content, you have an opt-in, you advertise it via Facebook, and you advertise it through pay-per-click, and you advertise it through all kinds of sources, you get people to raise their hand and opt in to your database. Building a list is probably the best type of list, right, because the people have chosen to enter your world, they're kind of interested in what you have to say. And so I'm a big fan of building a list, but it's a little bit slow. It takes a little bit of time, right? You have to build that content, you have to put it out there, and then there's a little bit of a gestation period. So you should be doing it, but it's not something that you can turn on instantaneously. The other option would be to, to borrow the list. And what do I mean by borrowing the list? There are people that already have the list of prospects that you want to serve. People that already sell to them, people that already have relationships with them. And one great way to build your list is to piggyback on their existing relationship with that audience. You can do that by putting together joint ventures and aligning with people either by them getting a percentage of the revenue once they sell, once you sell them. Or you know, just say, "Look, if you introduce me to your list, I'll introduce you to my list." Great play. There's companies that have built multiple 7-figure agencies just by really getting good at borrowing access to the database. Now, that's also one of those things you can't just turn on immediately. It's, it's, you know, there's some work, there's some relationship development that has to be done before you can do that. Now, the third option and probably the most scalable option, something you can tap into right away, is to buy the list. Like really just find a source that has the names, phone numbers, emails, contact details of your ideal prospects and acquire the list. So really, for most of you, if you're just getting started, this is where you want to focus. Down here, purchase the list. So how do you do that? There's really 4 ways to get access to a list. The first, and probably my favorite, is to join the association. So find the national association of, um, people within your niche. So for us, it's plumbing and HVAC. There's an organization called the National Plumbing Association. And so when we join that, that group, usually as an industry partner or whatever they call it, we get access to the list— name, address, phone number— and we've got to do a little bit of work to reverse engineer the emails. I really like doing that because members of an association had to pay in order to be part of that association, and so the list is usually pretty active, and it's almost like a mini buyers list of prospects. The second option, which is also a good option, is InfoUSA. You can go on to infousa.com. They've got lists, you know, broken down by SIC code and by industry. Millions and millions and millions of contact records. Not the cleanest data, but a great source. Another option would be to use Upwork. There are contractors, there's, there are people that are really good at scraping data from LinkedIn and from Google Maps and from all over the internet. You can put up a custom project on LinkedIn and say— I mean, up on Upwork and say, "Hey, I need all of the plumbing contractors in South Florida that do over $1 million per year in revenue." And there are guys out there that would jump on that project, cost-effectively give you some good leads. And the other option is to scrape. There are great scrape tools out there like Lead Kahuna, like LeadScope, where you can put in a type of industry and It will kind of run in the background and extract names and contact details. So there you have 4 great ways to build your list. And with the list, you can start to reach out, you can start to develop relationships, send emails, do LinkedIn connections, connect on Facebook, and get their attention to, to really show them what you have to bring to the table. So we'd love to get your feedback. What strategies have worked best for you in terms of developing your list? And if you'd like some ideas on cold outreach, how to reach out to this list once you've got their attention to move them from never heard of you to pretty interested in raising their hand, post in comments cold outreach. I've got a great little mini training that has worked really well for us and our members. So post in comments cold outreach, I'll get that over to you. Thanks for joining me. Hopefully this was interesting and beneficial.
