Sovereign #26 - The Power & Importance of “Lists”.

Welcome to Issue #26 of The Sovereign Seller. In today’s business climate “sales” is no longer the differentiator. The “edge” today is in “prospecting.” It’s the art and science of getting the attention of, and appointments with, your most ideal clients.

March 1st, 2026

Lauderdale By The Sea, FL

Sunday

7:11 AM

Most sellers don’t have a list.

Or if they do, it’s a mess.

A graveyard of LinkedIn exports, old CRM contacts, and business cards from conferences nobody remembers attending.

Before I realized the importance of building and maintaining a list, mine was a pile of scribbled notes.

Your manager, who probably hasn’t had to sell anything in years, is also unlikely to grasp the importance of a list.

Most sales organizations place almost no emphasis on list quality.

They hand you a territory, tell you to go find business, and measure you on activity - rarely on whether you’re talking to the right people.

But your “prospect list” is the 2nd most important list.

The importance is second only to your existing customers.

It’s something YOU must build, and maintain.

Your prospect list contains your “future customers”.

It’s your map.

Your pipeline, your job security, your bonus.

Existing clients eventually churn. Often out of your control.

The number 1 cause of client churn? Corporate consolidation.

Your client gets bought, new decision makers come in, budgets are allocated differently.

You lose a client.

But if you have a solid list, your pipeline of future business will be more certain.

Simple as that.

The Wrong List Costs You More Than You Think

Everything starts with identifying who your ideal client is.

It usually boils down to figuring out who spends the most money on the product or service you sell.

Or … who spends money on something that qualifies you to help them in some way. Whether that is to save money, or get more return on that spend etc.

This is easier to find in some industries.

I have spent my career selling marketing products and services.

When I was selling radio and TV advertising, we could subscribe to list of the top spending advertisers from a third-party service.

When I sold corporate sponsorships for Ball State Athletics (in Muncie, IN.) - there were no third party services covering a market that small. I had to figure it out on my own.

My employer encouraged me to call on university vendors … like construction companies that built campus buildings. Or alumni business owners and decision makers.

Both were a waste of time.

The vendors didn’t advertise. They won business through procurement processes - not advertising.

The alumni weren’t fans - because we weren’t good in the football or basketball - the sports that reliably moved the needle for fans.

Most alums hadn’t been back to campus since graduation.

They weren’t watching our games. They weren’t buying advertising in Muncie.

I was spending my most valuable resource - time - calling on people who had zero reason to buy what I was selling. And I had a quota to hit.

I needed a better list. So I built one.

The Tool Nobody Talks About (But Should)

Here’s where I’m going to tell you about something most sellers have never heard of - even though it’s been around for decades, it’s free, and it’s sitting inside your local public library right now.

It’s called Data Axle. You might know it by its previous name: Reference USA.

Reference USA launched in 1997, built by Infogroup – a company that had spent decades compiling business and consumer data across North America. The premise was to give researchers, students, and small business owners access to the same business intelligence that large corporations paid thousands for.

They made it available free through public library systems, funded through library licensing agreements. The name changed to Data Axle in 2021, but the library access didn’t.

If you have a library card, you can access it today for free online.

The database covers more than 28 million U.S. businesses. What makes it useful for sellers isn’t just the size - it’s what you can sort and filter by.

Geography. Industry. Revenue. Employee count.

And … by business expenditures … including advertising and marketing spend.

That is not something you’ll find in ZoomInfo at the base tier.

It’s not in Apollo.

Most sellers are paying $500 a month for tools a library card gives you for free.

Now for the downside.

The contact data can be stale. Data Axle verifies records annually, but people change jobs faster than that. You’ll pull a name and find out that person retired two years ago.

It’s always the salesperson job to verify and keep the contact information updated.

A LinkedIn search or a quick call to the front desk gets you to the right person in three minutes.

Email addresses are also sparse.

The database was never designed to be an email blasting tool.

But for a seller who knows how to hunt, that’s an easy solve. Just takes a bit of digging.

What it gives you that no shiny software gives you: a free, credible, filterable database of real businesses, built on verified data, sortable by demonstrated spending behavior.

How I Built Two Lists – For Two Completely Different Businesses

At Ball State, I needed a better more defined list of prospects.

I targeted the metro market of Muncie, IN. Then filtered for businesses with $1M or more in annual revenue.

Then I layered on the filter that mattered: $20,000 or more in annual advertising and marketing expenditures.

This gave me a list of about 200 qualified businesses. It became the backbone of my Ball State prospecting system.

Over time, through my own personal research, I narrowed this list down to about 125 ideal prospects who could benefit from, and afford to invest in sponsorships.

I consider the time spent curating and verifying this list the reason I was successful in such a challenging market, selling a program with very few fans.

Now let's switch gears to a non-advertising type of example - my client Bearstone LLC.

They sell telecom expense management – a service that finds hidden billing errors in corporate telecom contracts and recovers the overcharges.

Our geographic range is the entire United States.

Then we use two other filtering layers to find our ideal prospect.

First we pull executive titles - Chief Information Officers (CIO), and Chief Technology Officers (CTO's). They deal with telecom.

You can pull any other title, including owner, president, CEO etc.

Then we selected business expenditures, and filtered out any company that spent less than $250,000 per month in telecom expense.

You’d be surprised how many businesses spend that much on telecom.

Then Bearstone’s sales team verified every name on that list, every address - so we can send them direct mail.

Then found their emails, connected with them on LinkedIn, invited them to follow our company page so they can be exposed for free to our content.

Two completely different businesses. Two completely different target profiles.

Same free tool.

The Point

ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay – these are helpful tools. Not here to criticize any type of software.

But most sellers jump to the software before they’ve answered the more important question:

WHO, exactly, am I trying to reach, and what tells me they’re actually a buyer?

Data Axle forces you to think in filters. Geography. Revenue. Expenditure categories.

That thinking process alone is worth more than any contact enrichment feature.

Get your library card. Pull a list this week. Build it around one filter that reflects a demonstrated buying behavior - not just a job title or an industry guess.

That’s your real prospecting list. You’re roadmap.

To your success,

Shane