When people first start selling and marketing, it’s common to think, “We can sell to everyone.” While it might be true, it makes sales and marketing more challenging and less effective.
In prospect planning, the more specific you can be, the better. Narrowing your focus is critical if you want to speak directly to client needs.
We’ll start by narrowing your customer focus. How we do it depends on what you’re selling. The process usually involves some combination of natural fit, demographics, geographics, psychographics, search patterns and sales history data.
The goal is to narrow your focus to a shortlist of idealized clients. This shortlist is developed into a set of persona descriptions, purchase use cases, target keywords and often a prospect list to support direct selling and marketing efforts. Your sales and marketing program is built around these first principles.
The point is to shift your focus away from what you offer and onto how to speak directly to your target client’s needs and their decision process. Rather than pitching what you want to sell, you shift the focus to helping people see how ideally suited your offering is for addressing their needs. It’s challenging to be relevant and compelling to everyone, which is why targeting ideal clients is so vital.
Once you know who you’re looking for, the second half of prospect planning is about determining the most direct way to reach these people and make it easy for them to find you.
