Prospecting
Is your sales target audience still up to date?
Your sales target audience is up to date if the companies’ current circumstances, readiness to buy and the roles of the people you want to reach match what you offer today. An old customer profile or a working email address is not enough on its own: you also need to check company fit and your reason for reaching out.
In brief: Review your target audience one company at a time before choosing contacts. Separate company fit, the timing of the need, the person’s responsibilities and the usability of their contact details. This helps you work out whether poor results stem from targeting the wrong companies or failing to reach the right person.
Want to try it now? Describe your target audience in your own words and see how many matching companies and decision-maker contacts you can find. You only need an account when you want to download the data.
How do you know when your target audience needs a review?
Your target audience can become outdated even when company names and contact details stay the same. Your service may evolve, customers may change how they work, or a previously useful set of criteria may turn out to be too broad. Updating your data therefore means more than removing incorrect addresses.
Warning signs include:
- Salespeople repeatedly have to explain why the solution might suit the company.
- Conversations end because the issue is not the contact’s responsibility.
- The same list contains both well-matched companies and clearly unsuitable ones.
- You book meetings, only to discover afterwards that the company lacks the necessary conditions to buy.
- Your CRM contains companies whose last review date is unknown.
One unanswered message does not mean your target audience is wrong. Look for recurring reasons why conversations stall. If several companies say they handle the issue in a way your solution does not support, review your company selection criteria before rewriting your message.
How do you select companies based on a genuine need?
Start with the problem you solve and the operating environment in which it arises. Industry helps you find companies, but needs can vary considerably within the same industry.
Throughout this article, we’ll use the example of a company selling maintenance planning software to Finnish manufacturers. For this business, simply targeting “industry in Finland” is too broad. More relevant questions are whether a company has its own production, responsibility for maintenance planning and a need to coordinate maintenance work.
How do you turn a customer profile into criteria you can check?
- Write down the essential criteria. For our example business, these include companies with their own production in Finland and operations where equipment maintenance affects day-to-day work.
- Define exclusion criteria. A company that only acts as an intermediary does not belong in the same group, even if its industry classification looks suitable.
- Choose supporting information. Employee count or the number of sites can help you assess the scale of operations, but neither proves a need on its own.
- Record what still needs to be established. The current planning process and whether a change is timely may need to be confirmed in conversation.
The prospect list guide walks you through the selection process.
How do you identify the right person without guessing?
Once a company fits your target audience, find out who understands the problem you solve. Senior management, the user and the person preparing the purchase may be different people. A job title is a useful search criterion, but it does not by itself establish someone’s authority or responsibility for this particular purchase.
For maintenance software, the person responsible for production may recognise the need, the maintenance lead may assess practical suitability, and management may take part in the investment decision. In a small company, these responsibilities may sit with the same person. You can find more advice on choosing roles in the decision-maker guide.
Your first message should also help confirm the person’s role:
“Are you responsible for improving maintenance planning at your company, or would someone else be the right person to discuss this with?”
What does contact data quality actually tell you?
Contact data quality and target audience quality are different things. Assess them separately:
| What to check | Practical question | How it affects your work |
|---|---|---|
| Company fit | Does the company meet your agreed targeting criteria? | Determines whether the company belongs in the group you are working on. |
| Timing of the need | Is there a reason to discuss a change now? | Helps you time your outreach. |
| The person’s role | Does the issue fall within their responsibilities? | Guides your message and choice of recipient. |
| Contact details | Do you have a work email address, a phone number or both? | Determines which contact channels you can use. |
| Data origin | Where did the information come from, and when was it checked? | Makes it easier to investigate errors and update the data. |
Learn more about data quality.
How do contact requirements affect the size of your search results?
This example segment covers contacts classified as top management at companies in Finland, with no industry or employee-count restrictions. The figures describe the NordicContacts database on 19 October 2026, not the entire Finnish market.
| Contact requirement for top-management contacts in Finland | Contact rows in the database | Distinct companies represented by these rows |
|---|---|---|
| Work email or phone; contacts with both are also included | 87,493 | 45,089 |
| Work email required | 72,509 | 35,802 |
| Both work email and phone required | 61,323 | 32,109 |
Every delivered contact has a work email address, a phone number or both. You can require email, phone, either or both, depending on how you plan to reach out.
Work out your needs company by company: here’s how to calculate the number of contacts you need.
How do you keep your target audience up to date in everyday work?
Make reviews part of working through your sales queue, rather than a separate clean-up project. Assign someone responsibility for defining the target audience and agree on how salespeople’s findings will feed back into your shared data.
- Check company fit before reaching out. Pay particular attention to the information your message relies on.
- Confirm the person’s responsibilities in conversation. Update the information if the issue belongs to someone else.
- Record the reason for the change and the review date. Simply saving a new value does not explain why the criteria changed.
- Update your shared customer profile based on what you learn. Distinguish isolated exceptions from recurring patterns.
Also consider the basis for processing personal data, whether the data is necessary and any objections to contact. The availability of contact details does not, on its own, determine how you may use them.
You can also monitor changes at your most important target companies automatically: weekly target-account monitoring.
Review your own target audience
- Describe your target audience in your own words.
- Review the AI-generated filters and the number of companies and contacts for free, without an account.
- Use the free trial’s one-time download of up to 50 contacts to compare them with your current list. You only need an account to download the data.
Describe your target audience and see how many matching companies and decision-makers you can find.