5 Ideas to Improve Your Prospect Targeting
If you’re not targeting the right prospect, everything else you do is pretty much academic.
Idea #1 – Find more customers like your best customers
Do you know who your best customers are? They’re the ones who represent higher purchase volumes, higher relationship efficiencies, lower service costs, an inexpensive referral base, and greater profitability. As a marketer, you should have a list of these customers pinned to your wall. The profile that defines these best customers can be very helpful to you in finding more like them, which is most often the path of least resistance (and greatest effectiveness) when targeting new prospects.
Idea #2 – Build a Best Customer Profile (BCP)
Talk to and survey your best customers. Because they’re your best customers, they’ll be happy to help you succeed. It’s in their best interests. In building your Best Customer Profile (BCP), add all the usual suspects like demographics and firmographics (industry, company size, locations, etc.). Then layer on less obvious stuff like what sorts of offers your best customers have responded to in the past and why (e.g. white papers, speaker series, webinars, referrals, demos, benchmark data, samples, ROI calculators, other incentives), and what sources of information they regularly refer to in their business (e.g. trade publications, websites, business press, general media, word of mouth, email, newsletters). You might want to profile them under two scenarios: when they’re in learning mode, and when they’re in deciding mode. What attracts them will likely be different in these two situations.
Idea #3 – Test your value proposition with your best customers
While you’ve got their attention, make sure that your best customers validate the promise you are making to your market, and that you are truly addressing a monetizable pain from their point of view. The answers you get may not be the final word on your value proposition, but they will help you to sharpen your communications as you set out to find your “best prospects”.
Idea #4 – Find your best prospects
Armed with the information given to you by your best customers, you will be in a much stronger position to find your best prospects. If you are using in-house lists, purchased lists, or list brokers, your BCP will help you make more informed decisions. If you are using a media buyer, your BCP will permit them to achieve much greater precision and efficiency. Because “birds of a feather” almost always applies, your best customers can also likely help you find 4 or 5 other companies just like them, via a well-crafted referral program.
Idea #5 – Involve your sales team
It always makes sense to involve your sales team in the marketing prep-work you do. First, by allowing them to “fingerprint” your work, you’ll find that you’ll get better field support for your programs when those programs launch. Second, sales knows the customer better than anyone in your organization (or should). Their insights will make your efforts more relevant and effective.
When you are targeting your best prospects, you might want to consider starting by working with your sales team to identify target accounts, grouping them by priority and geography, and then overlaying your BCP to identify the highest potential prospects. This will always work better if the sales team was involved in developing the BCP with you.
About Drew Williams
My name is Drew Williams. I’m an author and marketing entrepreneur. “A what?”, you say. I call someone who’s passionate about building businesses a marketing entrepreneur. So that’s me. Full Profile | Google+
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