Buying a list buys you the means to contact someone. It does not buy permission, attention or interest. Expect 30% to 50% of any purchased list to be wrong, and expect a half percent to two percent response from a cold list done properly, meaning 5 to 20 replies per 1,000 names. The list that actually makes money is permission-based and built through educational direct response and joint ventures, which is how I built a list of over 43,000 MSP CEOs. It takes years. There is no version of this that does not.
“Your list, and the relationship you have with it, is the single biggest asset in your business, period.” – Robin Robins
One of my MSP clients booked a private consultation with me to discuss creating a marketing campaign to send to a list he had just acquired. He dropped somewhere around $3,500 on a “hot list” of 1.3 million “verified” decision-makers from a data broker that promised accurate e-mails, phone numbers, mailing addresses, titles and even mobile numbers. He was going to load it into his CRM that afternoon and blast his managed services pitch to every single one before lunch, but thought he’d check in with me first to come up with the right messaging.
I asked him one question: “Have they given you permission to email them?”
Silence.
“Um, do I have to get permission?” he said.
“Only if you don’t want to tank your sender score so that ALL e-mails from your domain go to spam, get shut down by your CRM for being a spam cannon AND destroy your reputation with the prospects who are seriously pissed off that you’re spamming them.”
Boy, that put a real damper on his plans.
The good news is that I caught him before he hit “send.” Another MSP I know didn’t call me first and instead spammed out over 10,000 e-mails from some list he scraped via his PSA tool. His bounce rate was through the roof, complaints came flooding in and a chunk of those “IT decision-makers” turned out to be random employees, dead companies and a guy named Kevin who left that job in 2019. His PSA vendor throttled his e-mail broadcasting immediately, and rightfully so. He wasn’t fined. He wasn’t sued. He was just done, locked out of his own e-mail platform, watching every legitimate campaign he’d ever want to send from that domain get quietly buried in everyone’s spam folder from here on out.
All because he thought buying a list was all the permission he needed to spam the crap out of his prospects’ inboxes, expecting them to be glad he sent them his spam.
It’s not. And this is where I need you to sit up and pay attention, because I’m about to save you a very expensive lesson.
There Are Only Two Ways To Secure A List Of Prospects
Strip away all the data brokers, the lead lists, the “AI-powered lead gen platforms” promising you 500 qualified leads by Tuesday, and there are only two ways to develop a GOOD list of clean, qualified prospects for your MSP:
- You build it.
- You buy it.
That’s it. Every tactic you’ve ever heard of, trade show badge scans, ZoomInfo subscriptions, LinkedIn scraping, cold e-mail blasts, webinars, direct mail, referrals, is just a flavor of one of those two paths.
And here’s my advocated position, the one I want tattooed on the inside of your eyelids so you see it every time you blink:
Great lists are built, not bought.
That doesn’t mean buying data is forbidden. It might be the exact place you need to start.
Let’s go through both paths, because you’re going to use pieces of each one. Just don’t confuse them, and don’t ever skip the step that turns a pile of names into an actual asset of qualified prospects you want as clients.
Path One: If You BUY It
Despite the opening story, I want to be clear that I don’t think buying a list or buying data is a sin.
In fact, I highly recommend all MSPs get a subscription to a data service like ZoomInfo, Seamless, or Dun & Bradstreet when they are starting a prospecting outreach for no other reason than to use it as a verification tool for prospects they have and to build a target list of prospects for outreach. If you’re in a vertical niche, like medical practices or CPAs, there are list brokers and data sources specific to that vertical that may be preferable, like Orbital for CPAs or the AAOMS membership list for oral surgeons. Note that I’m NOT specifically endorsing these lists and data brokers, just giving you an example.
Another way to buy a list is sponsoring an event, like a trade show or conference. Some event organizers will give you the list of attendees with full or limited contact details. Another is buying a company. When you do this you get all of their client and prospect data.
BUT here’s the part everyone doesn’t seem to understand about bought lists:
You ONLY bought the means to communicate with them. You did NOT buy a relationship, their attention or their interest.
Buying someone’s name, email and cell phone does NOT mean they gave you permission to call, text and email them. You haven’t earned permission to communicate or sell yet, so you do NOT want to stuff all of those names into an e-mail broadcast and hit “send” thinking you’ll get instant leads. The only thing you’ll instantly get is searing HATE coming back along with a giant pile of bounced e-mails and a scorched sender score.
CRITICAL POINT: MSPs are in the trust business. You are asking a business owner to trust you with their network, passwords, backups, financial data, employee data, cybersecurity and ability to operate. Then your first interaction with them is essentially:
“We harvested your contact information without you asking us to, put you into our database and started spamming you with e-mails you never signed up for, hoping you’ll click, call or respond. You know, exactly the way all the phishing attacks happen.”
That is a terrible opening move for a company selling security, privacy, compliance and trust.
So what should you do instead?
You need to have a cold outreach campaign that communicates with the prospect in a way that won’t get you blacklisted as a spammer. Here are the steps:
Step 1: Clean the list first
I can promise you, without ever seeing your list, that at least 30% to 50% of it is inaccurate. The record has the wrong company, wrong title, wrong e-mail, wrong human being entirely. Privacy in America is basically dead at this point, which is actually good news for you. It means the correct name, title, phone and e-mail for almost anyone can be found if you’re willing to do the digging.
That’s what list cleaning is: taking a purchased or scraped list and verifying it, contact by contact, so that when you call, you ask for the prospect BY NAME instead of saying “I’d like to speak to whoever handles your IT,” which is a giant flashing red flag that screams cold-call.
You can use your favorite AI tool to do the first pass. However, AI can’t always verify every record’s full information, particularly e-mail addresses. Depending on the list, you might only be able to get it to verify 30% to 40% of the list.
Next, I recommend getting an intern or other part-time human being to hand verify the list. You can hire a list cleaner for $10 to $15 an hour to comb through the list record by record, checking the company’s website, LinkedIn and calling to verify the rest of the information. It is not expensive. It is just tedious, which is exactly why 90% of MSPs never do it.
What you want to produce is not a giant list of prospects, but a well-defined, SMALL and curated list of prospects that truly match your ICP (ideal client profile). Then, instead of spamming everyone, put more time, money and effort into talking DIRECTLY to those prospects with a meaningful offer, message and media.
Step 2: Craft a compelling offer and message
“We do IT support, want some?” is not a compelling offer. Most MSPs prospect like they’re begging for a favor or a date. “I would LOVE to schedule a call with you to talk about your IT needs.”
What’s in it for them? A conversation with a needy salesperson with commission breath? Do you think they have a lot of free time to talk about their “IT needs”?
Listen: if you want more prospects to meet with you, come up with a SOLUTION to a problem they have, something THEY would LOVE to solve, not what you would love to do. Prospecting is about offering something of value to the prospect. You won’t get everyone to say yes for all sorts of reasons. They don’t have a problem, they don’t have a perceived need, the timing is bad, they’re busy dealing with something more important than you and your quota.
Step 3: Run a quality prospecting campaign, not a cheap blast
I have found the best way to prospect a cold list is to use multimedia sequencing that is initiated by a memorable direct mail piece (not a postcard), followed by a series of phone calls, PERSONAL one-to-one e-mails sent out of your personal e-mail (not a broadcast) and sent AFTER you’ve sent the letter and made a call, plus a social media outreach (LinkedIn message or even Facebook), all working together over a period of about 10 to 12 days.
This is what I built multi-touch sequences for, designed specifically to warm up a cold, purchased or scraped list without torching your sender reputation. I call these “plant the farm” prospecting campaigns because you’re initiating communication and starting to build awareness and a pipeline.
Because these are cold prospects, expect somewhere between half a percent and two percent response from a cold list done right. That means if you bought 1,000 names, plan on 5 to 20 responses, not instant riches. Anyone who tells you different is selling you B.S. or, perhaps, has an extremely compelling message, offer and campaign.
Other quality prospecting campaigns include canvassing (walking into their office) and attending events they are likely to attend. Again, the key is not to try and spam the masses, but create a small, highly targeted list of prospects then double down on the time, money and effort into talking ONLY to them in a meaningful, impactful way.
Step 4: Keep the communication going
Once you’ve put a prospect through a “plant the farm” sequence like the ones mentioned above, keep up a steady outreach. You cannot email them unless they’ve given you permission by opting in, calling your office or requesting to be on the list, so this ongoing communication will have to be with offline media (direct mail, calls) or targeting them on social media with ads.
After about 3 to 6 months, run them through another “plant the farm” campaign. I call it re-seeding the farm. Be sure to keep detailed notes in your CRM about the outreach you’ve done, conversations you had and information you’ve gleaned. KEEP CLEANING THE LIST.
Over time, the list will become more responsive and valuable IF you are constantly updating it as you communicate with those prospects.
What About Using AI To Build A List?
Another way to build a list is doing the sourcing work yourself instead of paying a data broker to hand you a spreadsheet. This is scraping LinkedIn, running Google geo-searches for the type of business you want, or, increasingly, using AI tools to assemble a target list based on criteria you feed it.
I want to be very clear about something, because I know half of you are hoping I’ll tell you AI changes this rule: it doesn’t.
A list AI scrapes together for you is exactly as cold and often as full of holes and wrong information as the one you bought from ZoomInfo. Garbage in, garbage out doesn’t care whether the garbage came from a $15,000 database subscription or a slick new AI prospecting tool with a rocket ship in its logo.
You still have to clean it. You still have to verify the firmographics (industry, geography, size, employees), the decision-maker’s name, confirm the business is real and still operating, check that the e-mail address is correct and active, then get it into a CRM where you can actually manage a relationship instead of a spreadsheet.
Skip that step and you’ve just automated the exact mistake that MSP made, except now you did it faster, which honestly makes it worse.
Path Two: If You BUILD It Through Direct Response Marketing
Now here’s the path I actually want you living on, the one that built my own list of over 43,000 MSP CEOs, and the reason I keep saying great lists are built, not bought.
This is where you stop chasing prospects and get THEM to raise their hand and come to you.
It’s what I call E.D.R., educational direct response, and it works like this: you put out something genuinely useful (a report, a webinar, a guide, a JV partnership with a non-competitive business who already has the audience you want) and you make it easy and low-risk for someone to say “yes, tell me more.”
We call this “lead generation magnets” or top-of-the-funnel offers. Next, you advertise the content in social media ads, in retargeting campaigns, at trade shows and events, in sponsored e-mail and digital campaigns and via direct mail and cold prospecting.
When a prospect requests the information and gives you their name and e-mail to download something or register for something, they are giving you PERMISSION to talk to them. That permission is everything. It’s the difference between a list that opens your e-mails and a list that reports you as spam.
Even when I started my company and had nothing, no product, no logo, not even a business entity yet, much less a marketing budget and sales team, I called everyone I knew that had a list of members or customers and offered to do a free webinar on lead generation marketing. One said yes. I used that to call every other association with the same offer, and a few more said yes. That free webinar was the top-of-the-funnel I used to get leads and customers, all without a marketing budget. I bartered my time to get a website done.
That’s list building with a phone and a Rolodex, and it still works exactly the same way today.
The above is an example of a JV, or joint venture, partnership: finding a non-competitive business or association that already has the audience you want, and offering to deliver real value to their list (a webinar on cybersecurity, a Zoom tutorial, whatever solves a problem they actually have). You’re borrowing trust that took someone else years to build. It is, hands down, the highest-quality, easiest-to-close list-building method there is, and it’s exactly how I built my business on a shoestring budget.
Once someone opts in, you can continue to e-mail them, but make sure you’re delivering GREAT content on a regular basis. Otherwise, prospects opt out or, more often, stop opening and responding to your e-mails.
The permission piece is not optional and it is not a suggestion. It is what keeps your account alive. The moment you buy a list of e-mails and blast it without permission, you’re one spam complaint away from your ESP (e-mail service provider) shutting you down entirely.
Building a PERMISSION-BASED list through direct response marketing means every name on it opted in, wants to hear from you, and won’t blow up in your face. THAT is how you build a hyper-responsive prospect list and strong sales pipeline.
Put It Together: Your Step-By-Step Plan
Whichever path (or combination) you use, here’s the order of operations. Don’t skip steps because they’re boring. Boring is exactly why your competitors won’t do them.
- Pick your farm. Decide, deliberately, who you’re targeting: niche, geography, size, whatever makes sense for you. A list with no chosen target market isn’t a list, it’s a phone book.
- Source it. Buy a starter list (ZoomInfo, Seamless, D&B, a trade show scan) if you have nothing, OR build it by scraping or AI, OR, best case, start running E.D.R. campaigns and JV outreach so prospects come find you.
- Clean it, no matter which path you took. Verify names, titles, phone numbers and e-mails. Get the actual decision-maker’s name so you’re never that guy asking for “whoever handles IT.”
- Load it into a CRM or marketing automation platform. Not your PSA. A spreadsheet is not a list-management system, it’s where lists go to rot and get forgotten. Be sure to classify it correctly, meaning source and “marketable” status, as in can you broadcast e-mail to them or not.
- Create a compelling message and offer so your outreach feels generous, not a greedy favor to ask. A key to success is to promote and sell the free lead generation magnet, NOT your IT services. These are COLD prospects. Get them interested in the content to engage, then move to an appointment. This won’t put off prospects who happen to be open to switching MSPs, so you get that as an added benefit.
- Run a real multi-touch campaign on anything cold. Use a multimedia campaign, not just e-mail. Incorporate memorable direct mail, phone, e-mail, social, together, in sequence, over weeks. One e-mail is not a campaign, it’s a coin flip.
- Nurture what doesn’t convert immediately. Most of your list won’t buy on your schedule. They’ll buy on theirs, sometimes years from now. Keep them on a drip and you’ll harvest that patience later.
- Replant weekly, clean constantly. A list isn’t a project you finish. It’s a farm you tend for as long as you’re in business.
Now Go Build Something
Here’s the truth nobody wants to hear: building a quality, hyper-responsive list takes YEARS. It’s not instant oatmeal. You have to put time and attention into it. You have to stay consistent. You have to have good messages and offers. You need to make sure your marketing person or team is prioritizing the cleaning of the list and your salespeople are DILIGENT about adding notes and updating records.
Every slow month, every “where’s my next client coming from” panic attack, every time you’ve watched a competitor casually mention they added six new clients last quarter while you added zero, that’s not bad luck. That’s the bill coming due on years of neglect in building your list.
You can buy your way to a starting point. Fine. Just clean it and market it like it’s cold, because it is. You can scrape or AI your way to a starting point. Fine. Same rule applies.
But the list that actually makes you money, the one that opens your e-mails, picks up your calls, and refers their friends, that list gets built, one relationship, one JV, one piece of genuinely useful content at a time.
Great lists are built, not bought. Get building.
If you want help deciding which path fits your business, and building the campaigns that turn a cold list into a pipeline, that is the work I do in one-on-one consulting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I email a purchased list of prospects?
No, not as a broadcast. Buying a list buys you the means to communicate, not permission, attention or interest. Blasting a purchased list will tank your sender score so that all e-mail from your domain goes to spam, will likely get you throttled or shut down by your CRM or e-mail provider, and will damage your reputation with the prospects you were hoping to win. Use offline media and personal one-to-one e-mail instead until they opt in.
How much of a purchased prospect list is usually inaccurate?
At least 30% to 50%. The records will have the wrong company, wrong title, wrong e-mail or the wrong person entirely. That is true of purchased lists, scraped lists and AI-assembled lists alike. Every one of them has to be cleaned and verified contact by contact before you spend a dollar marketing to it.
How do I clean an MSP prospect list?
Run an AI pass first, though expect it to verify only about 30% to 40% of records, especially e-mail addresses. Then have a human hand-verify the rest. An intern or part-time list cleaner at $10 to $15 an hour can work through it record by record, checking the company website, LinkedIn and calling to confirm details. It is not expensive, it is just tedious, which is exactly why 90% of MSPs never do it.
What response rate should I expect from a cold prospect list?
Between half a percent and two percent, when the campaign is done properly with multimedia sequencing. On 1,000 purchased names, plan on 5 to 20 responses, not instant riches. Anyone promising you significantly more is either selling you something or has an unusually compelling message, offer and campaign.
Does using AI to build a prospect list change the rules?
No. A list AI assembles for you is exactly as cold, and often as full of holes, as one bought from a data broker. Garbage in, garbage out does not care whether the garbage came from a $15,000 database subscription or a new AI prospecting tool. You still have to verify the firmographics, confirm the decision-maker, check the business is real and active, and get it into a CRM. Skipping that just automates the mistake faster.
What is the best way to build an MSP prospect list from nothing?
Joint venture partnerships. Find a non-competitive business or association that already has the audience you want and offer to deliver real value to their list, such as a webinar on cybersecurity. You are borrowing trust that took someone else years to build. It is the highest-quality, easiest-to-close list-building method there is, and it works with nothing but a phone and a contact list.
How long does it take to build a good prospect list?
Years. It is not instant oatmeal. It requires consistency, good messages and offers, a marketing person who prioritizes list cleaning, and salespeople who diligently add notes and update records. A list is not a project you finish, it is a farm you tend for as long as you are in business.
