Not every company is a good fit for your products/services so how do you ensure you are attracting the best fit customers? Prospecting and finding the right type of people to talk to, who are both a good fit for their business and yours. Targeting the right audience is key to growing your sales pipelines and your business as a whole, every company will have a specific target market in mind that they need to attract and convert into customers, but most companies have either too broad of a market so it looks like they appeal to everyone or don’t have relevant enough content to attract the types of prospects they need.
Who’s Your Target Market?
Does your company have a specific target audience in mind when you think about your product or service? More importantly, do you believe that you are actually attracting that target market? Do you create relevant content that would resonate with them? Both of these things need to be a solid yes in order for your sales pipelines to grow and your retention statistics to remain consistent. If your audience size is too big, you will not be able to be specific and therefore your product or service will look too vague.
The more specific you can be with your target audience; the more likely for them to connect with you. We have written about ‘personas’ before in this previous blog (some people call these ‘avatars’. Basically, if you take your best fit customers and create a persona around them such as:
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Job role
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Industry
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Age range
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Location (if applicable)
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Where the go for information e.g. articles, online sources etc
This list can be as in depth as you need but the more info’ you have, the easier it will be to create relevant content for them and where to publish that content.
What is Your Prospect Matrix?
When we prospect for the types of customers we’d like to work with we use a ‘prospect matrix’ which we apply to everyone that we speak with. The prospect matrix is almost like a tick list of the types of things you need a company to possess, in order for you to be able to work with them i.e. a specific industry type, minimum revenue or company size/number of employees etc. Following this process you can almost pre-qualify if a company is a good fit to need your products/services or not. This saves your organisation time and costs. As well as the tick list, you must invest a small amount of time in research around the types of products and services they provide.
For example, Quattro mainly target manufacturers, financial and SaaS companies but we don’t want just any of these companies! We want those who want to grow, get more leads, convert more leads into customers, who know they have a good product/service and know who they need to attract. These companies are the ones who are more likely to engage with us and understand the benefits that we provide.
How Do You Build a Prospect List?
Now you have a prospect matrix, the next thing is to build a prospect list to then target. There are many methods sales teams use to build their prospect lists from an account based marketing process to client referred links to simply targeting similar companies within your local area who fit your matrix.
Tip: Local businesses on industrial estates/parks tend to be within the same or similar industry sector. This saves you time and effort and increases your list.
You can also look at who interacts with your company on social, look at maps on search engines by seeking out your target industry within a specified region and if they fit your prospect matrix, add them to your prospecting list.
These are good ways to start creating relevant content to build a rapport with these companies and after they have responded to your information, subscribed to your blogs, shared your content and/or joined your social channels you’ll be ready for that first connect conversation.
Top Tips for Prospecting
Our advice would be that if you’re new to sales or want new ways of prospecting then start from square one and think the whole process over to find a method or combinations of methods that suit you. Begin by asking yourself these three questions;
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Have you established exactly who your target market is for your product/services and do you honestly think you are appealing to them with the relevant content your company is currently publishing and where you choose to publish it?
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Do you have a prospect matrix that pre-qualifies if a company is a good fit for you and do they fit within the industry you currently target?
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Have you checked out if there are other companies within your local area that you could reach out to and add to your prospect list?
These three things combined can save you time and effort in having conversations with the right fit prospects and filtering out any bad-fits. Use a good CRM (like HubSpots free CRM here) to save you time by enabling automation of tasks, workflows, emails and scheduling etc.
For more information on how to create your prospect matrix, personas and/or prospecting lists, book a time to chat with me here:
