We all have some idea of who our target customers are and how we want to engage them. The question is, are these ideas detailed enough, and do we have processes in place that allow us to capitalize on this knowledge?

These are the kinds of questions sales targeting answers, and for businesses looking to streamline their sales operations, it can make a huge difference. 

Every prospect is different, so how can you treat them in a unique way that offers the best service, while maximizing the resources you have available to you? Let’s see how sales persona targeting can help. 

What Is Sales Targeting?

No two prospects are the same. Some might stumble into your sales funnel, whereas others are there because they have a need for your service. 

This means that prospects have different values. 

Sales targeting is about identifying the most promising prospects and creating strategies to attract them into your sales funnel and progress them through the buyer journey

This is a complete process that will involve:

  • Understanding your target audience in greater detail
  • Identifying the most promising leads
  • Streamlining strategies to attract these leads into your sales funnel
  • Focusing your efforts on closing the biggest deals
  • Measuring and analyzing your efforts to further improve results

Perfecting your sales targeting is something that might take time, but when you get it right, it allows you to make much more efficient use of your resources. Rather than allocating equal resources to promising and dead-end leads, it allows you to focus your time and effort on the prospects that can make the biggest difference to your business. 

Why Is Sales Targeting Important?

In the past, sales were focused on volume. You’d get out and meet as many people as possible, knowing that within that group there would be some good prospects and some poor ones. The more people you engaged, the more likely you were to land high-value and low-value customers. 

In 2012, I could send 100 cold emails, only personalize the name, and get 10 replies back.

Today’s sales environment is very different. 

True to the Pareto Principle that 80% of output generally comes from 20% of actionable input, it’s about focusing on the most promising leads. Modern technology allows us to be extremely targeted with our outreach so we can focus on that most promising 20%. 

With sales prospecting tools and countless ways to reach your audience at your disposal, you’ve got to be using sales targeting. A small percentage of the population will become your lead, a small number of leads will become customers, and a small number of customers will bring in the majority of your revenue—you’ve got to find the ones you can take all the way through the journey. 

If you’re not reaching these people, then others will be and this is why it’s important to have a strong focus on sales targeting. The 20% are out there hiding in plain sight, you’ve just got to figure out how to reach them. 

A shotgun approach of firing lots of little bullets in all directions just isn’t efficient. You have the tools to clearly identify your target and use something as simple and efficient as a blow dart to bring them down. This is what sales targeting is all about, identifying the right targets so you can use more efficient methods to make the sale. 

Sales Targeting Strategy and Process

Sales targeting isn’t complicated but it does need clearly defined strategies and processes. Once you have these in place, then you can begin to optimize your sales targeting and make sure you’re focusing your resources in the right areas. 

1. Define Your Targets

You might be generating lots and lots of leads, but most of them will fall at the first hurdle. What defines those prospects who make it all the way through your funnel to become customers? You can use your inbound leads to inform who you should be outbounding.

Even more importantly, what do your most valuable customers look like? Until you have an answer to this question it’s impossible to use sales targeting effectively. 

Look at every detail:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Income 
  • Education
  • Family Status

Then, dig deeper. If your ideal target is male, aged 40-60 in an office job, then what pain point is it that makes them an ideal customer?

Once you’ve built an image of what your top targets look like, then you can start to ask the important questions:

  • What questions do they need to answer?
  • What pain points do they need solving?

If you’ve got the answers to these questions, then you’ve got what you need to make a sale, but first, you’ve got to start at the beginning. 

Look through your data and find out what your biggest customers look like. See what kind of demographics your competitors are trying to appeal to. Put all your data together to define your ideal target.

2. Segment Your Targets

Every customer is unique, but they all have things in common. One of the most important things about building prospect lists is the ability to personalize and to do this, you need to start segmenting your targets. 

If you’re already collecting leads through your website, then this can give you some good insights into different segments you can use. Look at the pages people are signing up from and use them to put people into buckets. For example, if someone signed up for your AI marketing tool from a page about content marketing, they’re likely to go in a different segment to someone who signed up from a page about PPC. 

There are lots of different ways you might choose to do this. It could be by interest, stage in the buyer journey, size of the business, potential growth opportunities, and many more. 

The better you segment your targets, the easier it is to develop a specific sales cadence to progress that prospect through your sales funnel. It will help you identify the most promising targets and offer the deep level of personalization that’s required in modern sales. 

3. Develop Strategies 

The whole point of defining and segmenting your targets is so you can develop sales targeting strategies. You’re leveraging the data to optimize your approach to each target, giving you the best chance of converting them. 

You can do this for both prospects and existing customers by adding variables to individuals. 

For each segment, come up with specific variables that you believe will impact (both positively and negatively) the buyer’s ability and willingness to take action. For instance, factors might include, “purchasing power,” “readiness,” and “multiple stakeholders.”

Rank these factors from 1-10 based on their likely impact on a prospect becoming a customer. In this example, a company that has a very limited budget might get a 1 for purchasing power. 

If you find a prospect you believe has high revenue potential and scores well in your variables, then it’s ripe for sales targeting. Likewise, if you’ve got an existing customer with lots of room for growth and good scores on your variables, then they’re worth investing more resources in. 

Again, your variables should be based on data. Speak to your salespeople and find out common objections that cause people to drop out of your sales funnel. If you can identify the most important variables, then it will help you spot the most promising targets. 

With a clear understanding of the objections each prospect might have, you can also develop tailored strategies to help solve their pain points and overcome their objections. 

4. Lead Flow

Now it’s time to start collecting leads, but you don’t want just any old lead – you want targeted prospects. 

One of the reasons sales targeting is so much more useful now is because we can be incredibly targeted with who we reach. There are endless different ways to reach your audience and you can go into minute detail with your targeting. 

Once you’ve got a clear picture of what your target audience looks like, the segments they fit into, and the variables that affect their purchasing decisions, you can start to create the content that attracts them into your sales funnel. 

Not only can you be extremely targeted with the types of content you create, but you can also pick and choose where you place it. 

For example, social media platforms each have wildly different demographics. If you were trying to reach over-50s then TikTok might not be your best option, but if you were marketing to teens, then it might be your first port of call. 

It’s all about optimizing every aspect of the process to reach the right people at the right time, where they hang out. You have many ways of doing this:

  • On-site content
  • Social media 
  • Email outreach
  • Pay per click advertising
  • Traditional advertising

Rather than casting your net as wide as possible, sales targeting is about pinpointing the exact place your target spends time and attracting them in with the content they’re looking for. 

Tip:

Creating a sales prospect list is a great way to start. Once you build your initial, more general sales prospecting list, you can focus on the “most likely to convert” prospects, or the 20%. Lusha has a great blog post which can help you learn how to create your first sales prospecting list. (And, if you need help finding a turnkey system to find thousands of prospects at scale, Lusha has a sales prospecting tool, which is free to sign up for, and gives you 5 free leads a month.)

5. Go All-In

One of the reasons for prioritizing your resources is so you can go all-in when the circumstances require it. Going back to the 80/20 rule, 80% of your revenue is likely to come from 20% of your customers. 

There are some big fish out there who can make a massive difference to your business. You shouldn’t allocate the same amount of resources to them as the smaller accounts. 

That’s not to say you don’t offer the same top-quality service to every customer, but when it comes to acquisition, you’ve got to go above and beyond to land the biggest accounts. 

The deeper prospects get into your funnel the more information you will have available to you to make an informed decision about this. It should quickly become clear to you that you’ve got a potentially big account on your hands. 

Since your processes are now much more streamlined and you’re not wasting energy on dead leads, you should have more resources available to you to help get these deals over the line. 

6. Measure and Adapt 

Sales targeting isn’t something you set up once and forget about. It’s a constant process of measuring and adapting what you’re doing to make your sales prospecting methods more efficient. 

This is where it’s important to be able to see all your data and run A/B tests to get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. 

Without the data, you’re just relying on intuition. You may think your audience behaves in a certain way, but you can’t know for sure unless you have the data to back it up. The right software should give you lots of insights in this area, taking data and turning it into valuable insights. 

The more data you have, the more you can continue to tweak your sales prospecting, making it better as you go. 

Key Takeaways

Sales targeting is an essential business process. It’s something that’s happening all the time, even if you’re not consciously aware of it. However, if it’s not something you actively pursue, then your sales team is most likely not reaching its full potential. 

Every business has a limited amount of resources. Not every prospect is as valuable as the next, so you need to be focusing your resources on the most promising leads that can make the biggest difference to your business. This is what sales prospecting allows you to do, and it can make a big difference to the efficiency of your sales department. 

If you can create a clearly defined strategy that helps you identify your most promising targets and prioritize your resources, then you’ll find your sales team will work much more efficiently. 

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    This information should not be mistaken for legal advice. Please ensure that you are prospecting and selling in compliance with all applicable laws.

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