Quick—can you put your hands on a list of your agency’s top prospects?

A whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their sales funnel, according to MarketingSherpa. If your agency is one of them, Thomas Burke, a producer for BMB in Texas, can relate. As a new producer, Burke says his biggest challenge was identifying which companies should be his top prospects.

“My first eight months I was trying to not only learn the industry, but how to put together a prospect list,” Burke says. “I did everything from use a phone book to go online—and then I would try to organize spreadsheets myself. It’s not easy to find prospects that fit within the appetite of what my agency is pursuing for new business.”

After experiencing the frustration of going it alone, Burke found InsuranceXdate online and introduced the prospecting tool to five peers at BMB who were having the same challenges. They all agreed it could help them better hone their outreach—and they haven’t used another tool since.

Producers can search the InsuranceXdate database of businesses by a number of relevant sales criteria—location, size, industry—and insurance-specific criteria—workers comp policy renewal date, carrier of record, standard workers comp premium—in order to create targeted marketing lists.

Rob Gifford, co-founder of InsuranceXdate, says the service was born from his experience as a commercial producer.

“Networking and referrals are excellent channels for new opportunities, but take time to cultivate and are rarely abundant. Consistent new business production is generated through cold calling, direct mail marketing, email campaigns or a combination of the three,” Gifford says. “If an agent wants a list of 100 businesses a month, it would take hours to compile. Or they can use our database, which can provide the same information in less than a minute.”

On the workers comp side, Burke says the best part about the service is that it lets him focus on customers who are in the sweet spot of the sales cycle by aligning his outreach with a prospect’s policy expiration date. About half of qualified leads are not yet ready to buy, according to Gleanster Research, and InsuranceXdate cuts through the clutter to find the in-market prospects.

“If I call a company 200 days out, they are mid-term and they’re not necessarily going to want to get out their insurance file,” Burke says. “But if I call them 90 days out, I know they are going to start looking at it.”

Burke also appreciates the ability to organize prospects by class of business, with classes determined by each prospect’s set of exposures. “InsuranceXdate gives me the ability to type in the general contractor code, for example, and assign a geographical location and company size,” he explains. “I then get a spreadsheet with every company that falls into those parameters. I now have a call sheet with the name of the owner of the company, the address and phone number, along with other information.”

The tool has increased his efficiency so much that Burke says he’ll never go back to the manual labor involved in finding his best sales targets: “InsuranceXdate trumps all other ways of finding a validated prospect.”