Identify Your Target Prospect To Improve Sales Strategy

One important step in developing sales strategy that often does not get enough attention

is to clearly identify what the target prospect that you are pursuing looks like. This involves stopping to clearly identify what attributes and characteristics a prospect will have when then stand to fit well with using and purchasing your products and services.

Optimize Your Time

This is a critical step for a couple of reasons. First, if you don't know exactly what the prospects you should be spending your valuable time with look like, you can end up spending time with prospects that are not a good fit and do not have a decent probability for moving forward. When this happens, you can increase the potential that you end up spending time with prospects that never purchase anything and that will have a negative impact on your sales performance.

By simply knowing how to identify what good prospects look like, you can improve your decision making around what target prospect to spend your time with and how to best manage your time. This step alone can have an immediate and positive impact on sales performance.

Feeds Other Sales Strategy Areas

Another reason that identifying what the target prospect looks like is important is that it feeds into many other components of your sales strategy:

Qualifying

Building off of the concept of optimizing your time is the sales tactic of qualifying prospects. The formal process of figuring out which prospects fit well and which ones don't is called qualifying. This is where we ask questions and look for certain attributes to identify the probability that the prospect is going to purchase from us.

If we don't know what the target prospect looks like, we will not be able to effectively qualify. A clear picture of the attributes for the ideal prospect will help you to develop the best qualifying questions to ask.

Finding Pain

Finding pain that the prospect is experiencing will be key to both qualifying prospects and creating leads. The ideal prospect attributes can help you know what pain to look for and what questions you should ask to try to uncover the pain.

Building Interest

Building interest on the prospect's side will be an important part of your sales strategy. Having clarity of what the ideal prospect is having challenges with in terms of pain will help you to have a better idea of what points to hit on to effectively build interest.

How to Identify Your Target Prospects

When working to identify your target prospects, there are clear characteristics and attributes that you can look at to see which prospects you do and don't want to spend your valuable time with.

Geography: area where we want to focus

Size: either in terms of revenue or employee count

Industry: either industries you want to focus or industries you want to exclude

Department: functional areas that we want to sell to

Title: level inside the organization

Current systems: systems that are being used

Current vendors: vendors they are currently working with

Current processes: details around the current processes

by: Michael Halper

POST COMMENT

How To Build Interest On Telephone Sales Calls Great Instructions To Help You Maximize Sales 000-n03: For The Ibm Commerce Solution Sales Representative Bug Tracking Tools - Maintain Sales Activities How Long Do Tucson Short Sales Take? Unit Dose Packaging Can Increase Your Pharmacy Sales Top Reasons Why Your Sales Recession Benchmarks Of Sales Team Excellence Aim For Greater Career With Professional Sales Training A Driven Market Is Heating Up Within Car Sales Australia Have Your Next Sales Meeting At An Oakland Airport Hotel 5 Mistakes To Avoid When Building An Inside Sales Team Tips That Guarantee A Speedy Property Sales