Your sales and marketing strategy must come together to address the central questions:
- Who and where are the right customers?
- What do you have to sell that they need right now?
- What message will provoke your customers to buy?
Define Your Target Market
Before you begin selling, determine who your ideal target market is. Broadly, a target market is a segmented group of people or businesses.
A complete approach to defining your market is more specific to who you are targeting and why. Your market should be defined within the following in mind:
Location
What locations are you best positioned to serve? While a growth-oriented sales process accepts business from wherever it comes – it’s also built around high probability and recognizes that the probability of acquiring a customer in a targeted area is easier, cheaper, quicker, and more likely than acquiring a customer from outside your targeted geography.
Because of the added costs that are involved with trying to chase business outside of your targeted geographies – it is most effective to focus your marketing strategy, campaigns, and sales force on predefined locations.
Industry
What industries best align with your products or services? Where can you be recognized as a top provider?
When thinking through your targeted industries – ask yourself, can we help this type of company to either:
- Increase revenue
- Increase profitability
- Improve first-time quality
- Reduce cycle-time
Make sure you spend the time thinking through your competitive match-ups here. It is much better to have a strong showing in 2 or 3 industries than a weaker one in 10. Remember, a target market is where you are directing your marketing and sales focus, where you are seeking repeatable targeting and developing references and testimonials.
Size
What is the ideal size of the organization that best aligns to your business model? This comes back to identifying which type of company your organization can provide a competitive advantage for.
- Do you work better with smaller or larger sized companies?
- Do you have a stronger referral base of a certain size of company?
When identifying size, the two most common ways of measuring it are in terms of total revenue or number of employees. You are free to use either. Company databases such as LinkedIn are likely to have more information according to the number of employees.
Deliver Your Brand to the Right People
You must spend time to understand the individual in the organization you are selling to that is responsible for developing the competency that your offering improves.
Decision Makers
About 90% of marketing campaigns gloss over the most important part of their target market – the decision maker that will approve or deny the purchase decision.
Start your sales cycle with the decision maker. The trick to starting with the decision maker is first understanding who the decision maker is and isn’t. Let’s start by identifying the three major stakeholders in a sales cycle.
Discover How to Reach the Right Customers
Would you like to learn the first thing you should say to the decision maker within your target market? To learn more about our methodology, schedule a Demo today!
