subject: Identify Your Target Prospect To Improve Sales Strategy [print this page] 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
