- Identify your Target Market and Ideal Client
Understanding your target market enables you to gather your total number of potential clients. For example, if your target market is Female Baby Boomers – that segments your clients to be approximately 15% of the Canadian population according to StatsCan. You then can segment this further by region, income, net worth, etc. This helps determines your business’ ceiling for clients, as well as your Sales development representative’s audience for lead generation.
- Mark your Target Clients or Target Accounts
The ideal Client should hit a number of checkboxes for your business. This should be the “goldilocks” customer and should change over time. The Goldilocks Client is not too small, not too big for your company, they should be relatively “easy sell” because your business clearly adds value to their day.
- Find Internal Contacts from your List of Target Clients/ Accounts
Develop a list of internal contacts from your ideal clientel. Disseminate the organization and the internal contacts by name, phone number, email, and other relevant metrics. Reach out to those who have the power to purchase your product or service. There are two methods for developing this contact list.
- buy a contact list – this is scalable, automated, but can be impersonal and have stale data
- Build a contact List- This has more control, and accuracy, but is much slower and cheaper
- Make a Connection With your Internal contacts that were developed in step 2 & 3
Touch base by phone, email, or snail mail using your outbound sales team. A good best practice is to reach out to the same organization at least once every 90 days (3 months)
- Divide and work the Pipeline
Salespeople interact with humans, not business robots. Your Sales approach should reflect a relationship-building experience. Your pipeline should reflect this too. Dividing the pipeline into “working” or “demo” or “scheduled” is a good idea to keep a keen sense of where the relationship is, and where it is going.
As the Great Sales Manager Michael Scott once said “Make friends first, make sales second, make love third. In no particular order.” (Season 6, Episode 20)
- Move Warm Referrals down the Pipeline to the account executive (optional)
Depending on the Size of your business, you may or may not have an account executive to help close out the deal. Account executives have the experience and power to negotiate the services rendered, terms, and price.
