 Your sales team seems to be doing everything right. You know what you offer, what value you provide and how those attributes align. But you just aren’t seeing the lead velocity you want.
Are you running paid search campaigns and finding the leads are a poor fit for your business, or that your sponsored ads are showing up in the wrong locations? Are your sales teams having meetings with the right people? Maybe they bring you along to the meetings and when you get there you realize the lead will never buy your service. Do you get the feeling when you’re interacting with leads that something isn’t quite right? These breakdowns may indicate that you haven’t found the perfect product-market fit. Here are some signs you might not be targeting the right audience — and what to do about it. Your Target Audience is Anyone Who Walks in the Door. You’re passionate about your offerings. You have no doubt that they could benefit a wide variety of people. Are you harder pressed to think of who you don’t want to contact than who you do? If that’s the case, your target audience might not be targeted enough. Imagine you’re shopping for a gift for a teenager. Try and picture what you’d get that teenager. Tricky, isn’t it? Without knowing anything about the person except their age — not their gender, their location, their interests, their needs — it’s really difficult to buy an appropriate gift for them. You might be thinking, "Ok, but what about a car?" Any teenager wants a car! And since our offerings are so awesome, anyone will want them. Not so fast. Even if your products or services could benefit anyone, not everyone will really resonate with the value you’re providing or be drawn in enough to listen to your message. Consider a small electric car and a full-size pickup truck. Neither is better than the other. They are just each aligned to audiences with completely different experiences and lifestyles. So their target audiences are completely different, too: an eco-conscious single mother with a tiny car budget for her teen daughter vs. a father whose teen son will use the truck to help with their family landscaping business. Plus, if you’re casting too wide of a net, you and your team are wasting a lot of energy sorting through the flotsam and jetsam that you pull in. You may catch a fish or two, but not before discarding the tin can, the lost shoe, the spare bicycle wheel. And, if you do catch that big fish, you won’t know if it was because you were fishing in the right area or if you just got lucky. On the other hand, if you research where a particular type of fish hangs out, go there and bait specifically for that fish, you can tie your success to your intentional efforts and repeat it in the future. Raise the bar from “anyone with a bank account” to some really specific criteria that will guide you and your sales team to client gold. Examine these three criteria to identify your target audience.
You aren’t Finding Leads in the Places you Thought They’d Be. You’ve got your industry, demographics and psychographics down, and you’re hot on your target audience’s trail. You’ve talked to your sales team, and you’ve heard that the group you’re looking for lives on LinkedIn. So, you do some targeted outreach, even join some professional groups on the platform, and nothing manifests. Sure, you have some good conversations, but deals-wise, you’re still coming up empty. If your target audience isn’t showing up where you expected, it’s time to do a bit more research. Here's how.
Your Target Audience Isn’t Engaged. But, maybe you’ve done all of that. You’ve found the right people in the right places, and you’ve brought them to your door. And maybe they take a peek in, explore your website, read an email or two, and then wander away. If you’ve found your ideal clients and they’re nibbling but swimming away, what you’re offering might not be attractive enough to hook them. In this case, you may want to take a look at your messaging. Ask these three questions.
So, there you have it — 3 key ways to tell if you don’t quite have a handle on your target audience. Looking for more on finding that perfect product-market fit? Check out our video on target audience and this target audience worksheet you can discuss with your team.  “If you build it, they will come” is only true in sales if you know exactly who you want to come your way. If you assume that creating a great product or service model and “getting it out there” is enough, you may find yourself struggling to create reliable growth. By narrowing in on who you can best serve, your sales organization can avoid wasting resources on poor product-market fit. By clearly defining your target audience, your team can readily align on messaging, sales tactics and goals. Here’s how to define your ideal client. Match Your Value Proposition to Your Ideal Customer's Needs When you’re looking for a romantic partner, you focus just as much, if not more, on what you have to offer as what a potential date might bring to the table. The same is true of identifying your ideal client. To thrive, your understanding of who you’re selling to needs to be rooted in what you’re selling. What you’re selling is not your product, not your services, but the value you provide. When considering your ideal client, your value proposition must align with their needs. For example, take a look at the following value proposition. “We help companies create corporate event experiences that expand team knowledge, boost sales and increase revenue.” If you were the leader of this organization, your ideal client would be companies whose events are dedicated, not just to increasing sales, but also to learning. Companies needing an event planner for their corporate gala wouldn’t be an ideal fit. But, companies looking to establish an annual sales conference would be right up your alley. Study Your Current Clients If you’re stumped as to how to articulate your ideal client, take a look at the customers you’ve already built strong relationships with. Explore both who they are and what works about your partnership. Answer these questions.
Answering these questions about your current client base and searching for patterns will help you create a clear picture of your ideal client. Identify Your Top Industry Sectors It’s tempting to cast a broad net, especially when you’re looking to get your business off the ground. After all, the more customers the better, right? Not really. Your ideal client is one that your organization has a good grasp of. No matter how skilled your team is, their capacity to really understand the inner workings of other industries is limited. Partnering with customers from any industry that comes your way will likely lead to a shallow picture of client need, scattered team energy and stagnant sales. To create repeatable, sustained growth, you want to narrow in on and study your best-fit industries. Be Realistic There’s a big difference between your ideal client and your idealized client. Just as it’s hard to give up on romantic pipe dreams, it can be difficult to adjust your expectations about who your best client is. You may think that your services are tailor-made for Fortune 500 apparel companies and discover, with time, research, and trial and error, that your golden ticket is really mid-sized food manufacturing businesses. You want to make sure you are pursuing the audience that is the best fit for what you offer, not who you think should be the best fit. When defining your ideal customer, take a good look at what partnerships have been fruitful for you and what pursuits have cost a lot of time and effort — without solid results. Do Market Research While looking at your internal data and past experiences is an excellent way to understand what’s working and what’s not, market research can help you uncover paths you might not have thought to explore. What’s more, market research can be especially effective in telling the difference between a pipe dream and a dream client. Focus groups and external surveys can help you determine if your hypotheses about your target market bear out. You can also do research to understand how big a specific market is to better understand your ideal fit. Do this for each target audience you want to pursue to help validate or reassure a target audience strategy. Create a Persona Now that you have a strong idea of the value you create, who you’ve sold successfully to in the past and what industries you’re targeting, you’re ready to delve into the process of creating a persona. A persona is a semi-fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. It’s grounded in market research, current customer information and industry knowledge. You want to include detailed information in this representation, including:
Persona: Steve the Staffing Executive Job title: CEO or President of a staffing and recruiting company Goals: Gain more new clients, go deeper with current clients, increase recruiter productivity, improve candidate response rates, and be seen more and more as a resource to current and new clients Challenges: Standing out from the competition in a highly competitive industry, getting candidates to respond, retaining core staff and attracting top talent Demographics
Psychographics:
Sources of Industry information: Staffing Industry Analysts, StaffingHub, Inc, Forbes Story: Steve has been in staffing and recruiting for 10+ years. He manages a large team of recruiters and works hard to adapt in a constantly changing and increasingly competitive industry. He has a core fan base of loyal candidates, and while the reputation of his company gets him far, the market for talented candidates is tight. He needs to break through the noise, as a talented candidate will receive 10+ email and voicemail messages each day. He wants a reliable, unique solution for getting candidate attention that will please his recruiters and speed sales. Once you have this level of understanding of your ideal client, you can hone your marketing efforts, refine your value messaging and ensure your sales team is aligned on who you’re selling to.
Defining your ideal customer may seem like a daunting task but it’s well worth the effort. By aligning your team on who you want to provide solutions for, all of your sales team’s activity — from generating leads to closing deals — will be more targeted, efficient and fruitful.
Looking for more on defining your audience? Check out our target audience worksheet and video. To use your resources wisely and build a high-performing sales organization, you need a clear picture of your ideal client.
Check out the video above as Karl Becker from The Carruthers Group describes how to define and narrow in on your target audience.  When companies lack leads or have an empty sales funnel, it’s common for execs to start searching for the newest, hottest sales- and lead-focused solutions. But these are just Band-Aids, and they won’t help you achieve long-term success if the source of your trouble lies in the internal functioning and processes of your company. Generate more leads by looking within. Here’s a look at the three internal steps you need to take before you can make any solid movement forward. Determine Your Ideal Customer Does your team treat every lead the same? Think again. Before you can create a high-functioning sales organization, you need to know exactly who you sell to. Just as a regular gas engine doesn’t run on diesel, you can’t transform prospects into customers if you don’t sell what they need. You might have a single target audience — or you might have a couple. Take a look at everything your company offers. Then, identify the people who need exactly that. With a clear understanding of who your ideal customers are, you can move forward in a coordinated — and profitable — direction. Define What Your Company Does for Customers With your ideal audience in mind, it’s time to define your company’s value. Your value definition is like GPS. It gives your team a clear path to follow. Plus, it makes it easier for you to attract generate qualified leads and maintain their interest. Before you can increase leads, you and your team need to agree on what you do for customers. Sit down with your team, and identify the words or phrases that describe your company. It’s worth the effort to make sure your team is aligned around the value you provide. As you explore different opportunities, this infrastructure of what you do and who you do it for will help guide your path Clarify Your Brand Message Finally, once you know your value internally, you need to communicate that value externally. So, before you set out to generate more leads, make sure you’ve clarified your brand message. This means putting your value message into words that are meaningful to your prospects and customers. Value messaging looks like this: “We help _____ do _____ by providing _____.” For example: “We help manufacturers source hard to find materials through a web-based platform that uses search technologies to find and rate material providers that have immediate inventory.” Simple, yet extremely effective.
Consider your ideal audience, what you help them do and how you help them do it. Just as a map will point you in the right direction and a full gas tank will help you reach your destination, these three steps will help you fill your sales funnel with qualified leads, and then turn those qualified leads into customers. This is the foundation of a solid, high-performing sales engine.
Learn more about how we can help align your team with a Sales Engine Workshop or a Sales Engine Program. |
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