The definition of a prospect universe is a gating decision for success. Here are some “pro-tips” from someone who’s built a lot of lists:

1. Accuracy counts in B2B – The best trick I’ve learned in the past couple of years is to use a tool like Kickbox.io to verify email addresses. While it only focuses on email addresses, this is the crucial bit to get right. Most lists, whether purchased or hand crafted have far too many bad email addresses. Also realize that if you are emailing from your own domain that too many bounces could get you on spam and blacklists

2. Purpose of the list – Are you a startup going to market for the first time? Go wide and shallow, meaning more companies, fewer contacts as you are looking for heat. But if you are an account exec, building a territory list? Go deep and get lots of extra data about contacts/companies and as many contacts as possible at each company.

3. Segmentation – Find subsegments that work for you. If you are selling CRM, don’t just pull VPs of sales across 30 industries, rather go after segments you believe there is opportunity as this is the foundation of experimental sales/marketing.

4. Make Sure Sales and Marketing are working off the same lists – If you have separate campaign management tools from your CRM, stop it! Sales needs to know what’s been done and marketing can use info from sales to target.

5. Buy versus build – Either can be productive but be careful with purchased lists, they always have lots of bad data and you’ll have to scrub them yourself. Remember, this isn’t consumer marketing, you don’t have 1 million contacts to work against and you can’t afford to have 30% bad information.

The list is the axis about which your campaigns revolve, so spend the time getting them right and all your sales and marketing efforts will benefit from it.