Your Sales Success

A target market is a group of customers identified as most likely to purchase a business’s products and/or services. Once a target market of customers is defined, marketing and selling strategies are developed to attract this audience’s attention and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

The key idea for you as a sales professional is defining the group of customers – your target market – to which you will be making your appointment setting calls.

How do you define your target market?

Target markets of companies or consumers have distinguishing characteristics in common that allow relatively easy segmentation, such as:

• Location – where people live or do business such as all the delicatessens in Brooklyn or suburban commuters using DART in San Francisco to travel to and from work.
• Demographics – using measurable easily-available statistics such as industry, gender, age, income, family life stage (empty nesters, newlyweds, teens, Generation X and Y and so on).
• Psychographics – reflect strong attitudes, values, lifestyles such as achievers, urban dwellers, pet lovers, fun seekers, creative types.
• Behavior – based upon lifestyles, disposable income and spending habits such as only buying American-made goods, consistently adopting new technologies first.
• Product related –such as Starbucks customers, name brand product loyalty, use and consumption rates such as drivers of pickup trucks compared to hybrid cars or motorcycles.

If you sell business to business (b2b), you might use a combination of location and industry demographics such as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and North American Industry Classification Systems (NAICS) codes to begin narrowing your target market.

In addition, check out www.manta.com, which bills itself as the “world’s largest online community for promoting and connecting small business.” Currently, Manta is ranked as the third largest business news and research Website by comScore and has an audience of 26 million people in the United States and around the globe. Companies list themselves for free and have opportunities to improve their free listings with advertising. What it provides you as a salesperson is a nicely segmented list of businesses to approach with your product or service.

Another great resource is www.salesgenie.com, which helps you identify quality business and consumer sales leads with easy-to-tailor search tools. You can get a free three-day trial at their site to see if their process works for you. Hoovers, www.hoovers.com, is part of the Dun & Bradstreet family and generate qualified lead lists for your target market of companies or consumers along with several other business services. They also have a free trial and demo offer at their site that might be worthwhile to consider.

If you’re selling business to consumer (b2c), demographics, psychographics and behavior might be the most helpful segments you can use to identify a narrower target market. Don’t overlook the fact-packed value of the latest government census site (www.census.gov) in helping you further narrow your target market. You’ll find many cuts of the data online at their site and you can search their database if the frequently requested searches don’t match your requirements. In addition, the Census Bureau offers periodic free seminars to teach people how to create queries for their database to extract the information they need.

Other helpful resources for tracking down target businesses as well as individuals include the local Chamber of Commerce, public records at town halls and indexes and reference books maintained at libraries.

Also, consider the organizations and professional associations in which your target market may participate not to mention social media connections such as Linked In and Facebook. LinkedIn has a search tool so you can look for a particular company (when you drill down that far in your target market) and find the person with the job title you need to call.

Virtually every profession and job title has a professional association and you can search these databases to find members and their contact information. For example, the American Medical Association (www.ama-assn.org) has a DoctorFinder search separated by specialty, city and state. If you’re not sure of the name of a professional organization or association, do a quick search on Google and see what you find. In fact, you might also want to refer to The Directory of U.S. Associations, www.marketingsource.com/directories/associations/us to find the name of 60,000 business, professional and trade associations as well as 501c non-profit organizations, charity institutions and community institutions operating in the United States. The site claims more than 98,000 association executive contacts in their database.

Next look closely at your company’s customer files to analyze the following:

• Which customers are purchasing regularly and how large are their orders?
• How much each customer is purchasing and how often?
• Which customers have purchased from you only once?

This information is important because you want to spend your time with the top 20 percent of your existing customers and find the prospects (those not currently doing business with your company) with the most potential for revenue. The 80-20 rule holds here: roughly 20 percent of your customers generate approximately 80 percent of your revenue. Analyze the top 20 percent of customers in your territory to understand their purchasing history and characteristics, then find other prospects in your territory whose characteristics parallel those of your top 20 percent customers. These should be your top new business prospects.