Customer Segmentation & Targeting
One of the keys to sales force success is identifying who are the best targets for your products, locating them geographically, and quantifying the opportunity associated with each of them. Sales resources are expensive and one basic reason why companies do not get the most out of them is because they are spending too much time locating potential prospects, as well as spending time with ones that are unlikely to buy. A disciplined and data-driven approach to targeting can help cut down the amount of time wasted on less promising prospects.
The process goes like this:
■ Define the value proposition for your product.
– What needs does it meet?
– How is it differentiated from the competition?
■ Define the overall market and the more attractive segments within it
– What is the universe of businesses that might use your product?
– How is your product or company differentiated from the competition?
– Within the potential market, why would some prospective customers value it more than others?
= What are the likely characteristics of those companies?
– When you look at existing customers, what are the characteristics of those with whom you have been most successful?
■ Translate the characteristics of high-potential targets into attributes that might be efficiently searchable in industry data or publicly available data
■ Identify and research potential data sources that can be used to locate targets
■ Refine target-customer profiles into criteria that can be used to segment the available data
■ Build database and develop queries to identify and score high-value prospects
■ Test the model to evaluate its success at identifying customers already known to be valuable
■ Once you have a working model, pilot it
– Does it in fact improve your success rate?
– What is the feedback from sales people?
– Which data attributes appear to be most relevant?
■ Adjust the targeting model on an ongoing basis, adding and refreshing data as it becomes available
The process goes like this:
■ Define the value proposition for your product.
– What needs does it meet?
– How is it differentiated from the competition?
■ Define the overall market and the more attractive segments within it
– What is the universe of businesses that might use your product?
– How is your product or company differentiated from the competition?
– Within the potential market, why would some prospective customers value it more than others?
= What are the likely characteristics of those companies?
– When you look at existing customers, what are the characteristics of those with whom you have been most successful?
■ Translate the characteristics of high-potential targets into attributes that might be efficiently searchable in industry data or publicly available data
■ Identify and research potential data sources that can be used to locate targets
■ Refine target-customer profiles into criteria that can be used to segment the available data
■ Build database and develop queries to identify and score high-value prospects
■ Test the model to evaluate its success at identifying customers already known to be valuable
■ Once you have a working model, pilot it
– Does it in fact improve your success rate?
– What is the feedback from sales people?
– Which data attributes appear to be most relevant?
■ Adjust the targeting model on an ongoing basis, adding and refreshing data as it becomes available
