Are you targeting your ideal customer?

Many businesses fall down on sales because they aren’t specific enough about their ideal customers.

Explaining who your ideal customer is sounds easy enough – but do you really know what their pain points are, what they value, whether they buy on price, speed or other variables…

Once you start digging into and developing customer avatars, you soon realise there’s a lot to think about. It can be hard to find the time to fully develop customer profiles or to have the skills, and once you’ve developed customer profiles, what’s the best way to go about targeting them and making new sales?

If you employ sales people in-house, can you be sure they’re spending their time as effectively as possible?

We developed a methodology we call ‘Most Wanted’ – where we work with SMEs as bounty hunters, finding clients for you.

For over 20 years I’ve specialised in working in sales and account management roles and I’ve seen for myself the time and money that can be wasted.

We’ve developed five key steps to developing a successful sales campaign:

1. Identify target customers or accounts, or segments within a vertical market
2. Develop a vision and mission statement.
3. Identify and document buyer personas/avatars
4. Review relevant history within current sales database
5. Research and gather specific intelligence relevant to the campaign – profiles on your prospect businesses, key stakeholders within those companies.

What about GDPR?

The introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) has made companies more aware of their obligations around privacy and forced some who were on the boundary of being ethical to shift their stance.

In our view, the scattergun approach – buying in data and emailing or calling indiscriminately – was never a good use of time and resources. We’ve always advocated sales campaigns using more prospect-friendly and sophisticated methods, which are proven to gain better results.

Why bring in outside resources to help on sales?

If you find you’re not sure where time is going in your sales department, results are slipping or not as good as you’d hoped, or you feel you can’t justify a full-time sales role or team, then it’s time to think about a new approach.

Ocean Laundry, a Bristol-based industrial laundry service, had been up and running for 18 months and were keen to really drive sales to the next level, and to look at developing the client base beyond Bristol. After discussing business goals and developing specifics around customers, we put together a project-based approach to give founder Stephen Phillips a fixed cost, precise number of leads we’d generate and number of face-to-face appointments we’d arrange.

About

Penny Cox, Director of Intelligent Business Decisions  (www.ibizd.co.uk), with over 20 years of experience formulating and managing successful sales campaigns for companies large and small. Contact Penny on penny.cox@ibizd.co.uk or LinkedIn.