How To Identify Your Target Market With Three Simple Data Points

Posted on August 2, 2021August 2, 2021 by Kaitlin Dunlap

Part 2

As B2B marketers, business developers, and salespeople, it’s our responsibility to keep the sales pipeline full of prospects. This is no easy feat and takes a lot of hard work. When the flow of word-of-mouth leads and referrals runs dry, where do you go? How do you define your target market and find businesses that can become your future prospects?

Last week, we discussed the two ways to approach this question – the method that will be the best fit for your company depends on your starting point.

Starting Point #1: You have a list of current and/or past customers AND you want to continue selling to customers who are similar.
Starting Point #2: You are starting from scratch. This means, you do not have a list of current and/or past customers OR you have a list, but you do not want to reach this group, instead, you want to target a new segment.

If Starting Point #1 sounds like a fit for you, go back and read this post.

Maybe you’re just starting out. Or maybe your goal is to grow by breaking into a new segment. If so, Option 2 is for you. Arguably, this route can feel very intimidating. But, if you apply the same three data points we reviewed last week, geography, industry, and size, you can easily conquer identifying your target market.

Here’s how to use geography, industry, and size when you’re starting from scratch.

Geography – can be defined by state, city, county, zip code, or even neighborhood
- When you’re starting with a clean slate, it is easy to think “everyone is my prospect”. And while that might be the case, it is not an attainable lead generation tactic. You need to have a starting point, or an “A List”. If you put your blinders on and start thinking realistically, geographically, where will your first buyers come from? Often, they come from your own backyard – or neighborhood, county, city, state, etc.
Industry
- Start by filtering out industries you know you do not want to work inside of – examples include competitors and non-fits. For example, if you’re a business banker, you would want to filter out other banks.
- Next, brainstorm the industries that are good-fits. This is where you’ll start finding your target industries. For example, if you sell industrial kitchen equipment, you will want to include industries such as restaurants, hotels, senior living facilities, hospitals, etc.
Size – can be defined by employee count, revenue ranges, or physical square-footage
- This is where you begin zeroing in and really start identifying your target market. There are multiple ways to define the size of a company – depending on your product or service, we suggest using either employee count, annualized revenue, or square-footage – sometimes, a combination of the three. For example, if you sell on-site fueling services, there’s probably a minimum number of gallons you want to fill on each site – you can use employee count to gauge the number of cars on site, which will give you an approximate number of gallons. Or, if you’re a commercial roofer, you would look at square-footage to determine buildings that have roofs that are in the size-range you want to do business with.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or have hundreds of existing customers, you can identify your target market. By using geography, industry, and size, you will be well on your way to your next selling opportunity!

How To Implement A Simple Plan To Sell More Business In The New Year – Utilizing Telemarketing

Posted on December 8, 2017January 23, 2018 by Kaitlin Dunlap

Originally posted on December 30, 2015 as Start The New Year Smart – Sell More Business.

How do you eat an elephant? What a silly question! Adult elephants range from 6,000 – 12,000 pounds – eating all of that would be a very large (no pun intended) and daunting task. But, hypothetically speaking, if you were to eat an elephant, how would you accomplish that?

One bite at a time, of course.

By the way, how does eating an elephant have anything to do with creating a plan to sell more business?

How To Implement A Simple Plan To Sell More Business In The New Year

Generating 70+ new leads in a year might seem like an unrealistic goal, similar to eating an elephant. However, if you break it down into “one bite” increments, you will see how generating 70+ new leads is, in fact, a very obtainable goal.

To start, keep in mind the mentality behind “one bite at a time” is to keep the task at hand, in this case, generating 70+ qualified leads in 12 months, simple and manageable. With this mind set, you will be able to see the impact this method can have on your lead generation, appointment setting efforts, and ultimately, the ability to sell more business.

Here is how you do it:

January:
200	Start with 200 target prospect records (Don’t know how to build a prospect database? We can help with that – “Identifying Your Database for a Telemarketing Campaign”)
3	Make 3 call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week to make 3 calls into 200 records (32 hours per month) – this is equivalent to 1.6 calling hours each business day, or 20% of your day
6	Lead opportunities identified in January (generally speaking)

February:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records (300 cumulative prospect records for the year)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of January’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total February prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in February
12	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

March:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records (400 cumulative prospect records)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of February’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total March prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in March
18	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

Do you get the gist? …We thought so. If you continue this discipline for April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and November, your December will look like this:

December:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records added (1,300 cumulative prospect records)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of November’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total December prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in December
72	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

In conclulsion

There you have it, the results of a disciplined approach to the new year– 72 leads in 12 months and now you are a sales pro! As with any lead generation project, some of these will not work out, but the game of numbers tells us a good amount will convert into proposals, then become new customers for you. Additionally, you will have developed a great database (pipeline) of future opportunities.

Lead generation and appointment setting isn’t as bad as you might have thought. By the way, how did that elephant taste?

Kaitlin Dunlap Cuevas – kaitlind@dunlapmarketing.com – 281.496.9870 x180

Start The New Year Smart – Sell More Business

Posted on December 30, 2015January 23, 2018 by Kaitlin Dunlap

HOW TO IMPLEMENT A SIMPLE PLAN TO SELL MORE BUSINESS – APPOINTMENT SETTING AND LEAD GENERATION

How do you eat an elephant? What a silly question! Adult elephants range from 6,000 – 12,000 pounds – eating all of that would be a very large and daunting task (no pun intended). But, hypothetically speaking, if you were to eat an elephant, how would you accomplish that?

One bite at a time, of course.

By the way, how does eating an elephant have anything to do with telemarketing?

Generating 70+ new leads in 2016 might seem like an unrealistic goal, similar to eating an elephant. However, if you break it down into “one bite” increments, you will see how generating 70+ new leads is, in fact, a very obtainable goal.

To start, keep in mind that the mentality behind “one bite at a time” is to keep the task at hand, in this case, generating 70+ qualified leads in 12 months, simple and manageable. With this mind frame, you will be able to see the simplistic impact this method can have on your lead generation and appointment setting efforts. Here is how you do it:

January 2016:
200	Start with 200 target prospect records (Don’t know how to build a prospect database? We can help with that – “Identifying Your Database for a Telemarketing Campaign”)
3	Make 3 call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week to make 3 calls into 200 records (32 hours per month) – this is equivalent to 1.6 calling hours each business day, or 20% of your day
6	Lead opportunities identified in January (generally speaking)

February 2016:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records (300 cumulative prospect records for the year)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of January’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total February prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in February
12	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

March 2016:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records (400 cumulative prospect records)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of February’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total March prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in March
18	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

Do you get the gist? …We thought so. If you continue this discipline for April, May, June, July, August, September, October, and November, your December will look like this:

December 2016:
100	Add 100 fresh, new prospect records added (1,300 cumulative prospect records)
+ 100	Existing/prioritized prospect records that justify continued calling (assuming that 50% of November’s 200 do not warrant additional calls this month)
= 200	Total December prospect records
3	Call attempts into each record on average
8	Calling hours required each week (1.6 hours per day)
6	Lead opportunities identified in December
72	Cumulative lead opportunities identified YTD

There you have it, the results of a disciplined approach to 2016 – 72 leads in 12 months and now you are a sales pro! Obviously, some of these will not ultimately work out, but certainty, a good amount of them will convert into proposals, then become new customers for you. Additionally, you will have developed a great database (pipeline) of future opportunities.