Understanding how to target your prospects
And why you care.
I had a request to do some more articles on the sales process after my rant a couple weeks ago. If you’re not interested just fast forward, but I think you should be interested because these ‘sales’ skills I’m talking about are really ‘life’ skills.
As much as you want to dismiss me as a ‘sales guy’, I am not in direct sales, but I do understand the value and power inherent in a good sales process.
When you talk about a sales process the first step is to find some prospects. ‘Prospect’ is short for ‘prospective customer’. This brings up some interesting questions that you are forced to answer in order to do this prospecting well. By ‘well’ I mean get the highest amount of viable prospective customers for the amount of money and time you are going to spend looking for them.
Much of what the general world knows about prospecting comes from their experience with the big brands and mass marketing. Those big brands have enough capital to use mass marketing techniques to attract prospects, like television, radio and print. The problem with that kind of prospecting is that it is very wasteful. They are broadcasting a generic message to everyone and hoping someone in their target demographic picks up on it and is influenced.
In real life that’s not what we do. In real life we don’t have millions of dollars for a super bowl ad if we are trying to find donations for our charity or a good company to consider our job qualifications. In real life we have to be much more targeted in our prospecting.
Trying to attract prospects that don’t have the ability to buy or even a need to buy is a waste of your time and money. We have to determine what our target market is. Narrow it down so you can focus on the highest probability to find someone to exchange value with.
I don’t care what it is that you are trying to sell, you need to get as specific as possible. What geography are your potential customers in? If you are a local landscape business with a physical presence you can draw a 20 mile circle that will include your prospects. Who are you selling to? Describe your perfect customer. Is it a female head of households, homeowner, with $100K+ in family income?
This is one of the tricks to identifying your prospects. Give them a name. In my example maybe the prospect is ‘Marge’. Marge is the head of a household, has 2 kids in the local public schools system, she owns a house within the 20 mile circle, has a dog, has a job, has a husband who also works. They have a family income of between $100-250K per year. She controls the purse strings. Marge needs her landscaping to be presentable so she doesn’t look shabby in the neighborhood.
Now you can create marketing pieces, whether ads, calling campaigns, mailings, coupons, white papers, workshops…etc that will attract Marge. When you engage with prospects, if they aren’t Marge you can qualify them out of your sales process because you are only looking for Marge’s. Most importantly you will be forced to craft a message that explains how you add value to Marge, so that you can have a value exchange (sale) with her.
Another example of why you care. Let’s say you find yourself in need of a job. What job? Who are your prospects? You are the product. What value do you bring? Let’s walk through it.
You are willing to drive 20 miles to the office or work remotely.
You are a Vice President. You like working in smaller companies in the $10-100M range, preferably startups in your space of domain expertise. Guess what? You can put those parameters into a LinkedIn search page and it will narrow the companies down to less than 100. From those you can do some deeper research and narrow it down to under 50. Then you can prioritize and begin to approach ‘Bob’ the CEO of this company (A 50-year old guy with kids in college and a vacation home) with your value proposal.
I’ll guarantee that will be a more effective approach than mailing out 1,000 resumes to HR departments.
Once you have your target prospect defined you create a value message that will resonate with that prospect. It has to be something powerful that will fill an actual need or pain. In your value exchange with that prospect you are going to be solving a problem or relieving a pain that they are going to compensate you for.
What would your message to Marge be? Maybe that she doesn’t have time to be spreading mulch and mowing grass with the husband the kids and the house. You’ll take that burden off of her hands and give her a beautifully landscaped yard that will raise her status in the neighborhood and give her more time to spend with her kids. (She owes it to those kids, they won’t be young forever and these are the formative years, after all).
Now we could create some great story telling around that message and get it in front of all the Marges.
What would our message for our transitional VP be? Maybe that Bob, you’re trying to run a growing company and you don’t have the time anymore to manage that big sales team. As a VP I’ve done it before successfully and would provide you with a predictable, repeatable process that would free you up to attack other innovative growth imperatives.
I’m making this stuff up, but you get my point. The profiling of your prospective customer defines the value message that you are going to bring to your market to get prospects into the front end of your sales process. I.e. – deals into the sales funnel.
This process of targeting is broadly applicable across any area in your life where you are looking to exchange value. Don’t waste your time and theirs trying to mass market. Focus your market and your message like a laser on the people who will gain value from your offerings.
One of the most common mistakes that people make is trying to sell to everyone. This is a critical mistake that kills companies. It is typically a misguided attempt by some old-school manager who believe that if they just call enough people they will find the prospects. They will say “it’s a numbers game.”
True enough, it is a number game, but if your start with the whole world as your target market it is a numbers game you will never win. The most successful people and companies do not wander or let themselves get pulled outside of their focus.
The hardest thing to do is to tell Jane that you don’t think she’s a good fit because she’s not a Marge, but that is also one of the key attributes of success – being able to qualify your suspects into real prospects. The only way you can do that is to have gone through the process to define your Marges and your Bobs and what the clear, concise value is that you bring to them.
If you ask successful sales people what they are most proud of, what has lead to their success they will tell you it was the deals they had the courage to walk away from.