2.03 (V) Preparation - Targeting
One of the mistakes sales people make when they start building a new list of prospects is that they target too widely. I certainly made this mistake when I was launching my first company. We had developed some software and I thought I could be all things to all people. This serious mistake caused me to have one message for one type of customer and then need another different message for another type of customer. What happens is that your sales message never really takes shape. You end up being very unclear or blurry about the value you provide, and this slows down your sales process. But we can solve this problem. I call the solution filtering. We need to filter our set of targets down to people who will understand the value of what we are selling. Here's an example. A friend of mine is a very successful entrepreneur. A few years ago he came to me to ask a question. He said "Craig, I've started a new company and I want to talk to you about targeting. So, I asked him "Great, who are you going to target?" And here's what he said "I've developed an App for salespeople, so I'm going to target companies with salespeople." Oh-oh! I was thinking to myself, what company doesn't have salespeople? He's targeting everyone in the whole world. Oh! No. But he didn't stop there. He said, "Craig, we are targeting companies with sales people, but because we've kept the App very, very simple, we would like to start by selling the App to companies with only 1-2 salespeople." And, because we've put a lot of effort into the look and feel, the user experience of this App, we're going to target companies who we think will uniquely appreciate our design. We think those are web design firms and perhaps architecture firms. Oh! And because I'm going to be living in New York we are going to limit our very early sales efforts to the New York region." This is filtering. See what this successful entrepreneurial salesperson did? He filtered his market down to where his message would really resonate. Smaller companies who need simple not complex solutions who appreciate great design and who are in New York. This hard work of filtering helped him be much more clear and disciplined with his sales message, and he went on to build a very successful company. His sales process move faster because he was able to be clearer about what he was selling and why it was unique to those targets. So, once you've put some filters in place and focused in just on the targets in your bulls eye, now it's time to get on a search engine and find their names and contact information. Make a list my friends and get ready to generate some leads.
