How To Research Sales Targets

As someone who is not in the office, maybe you’re struggling to fill your day. Business is slowing down and you and your team are looking for things to do from home. The best options are things that would make good use of your time that don’t rely on having to interact with other businesses. In this article, you’ll learn how to research sales targets.

Sure, it would be nice if your clients (current and prospective) are raring to go and looking to partner with you right now, but you don’t know what kind of position they might be finding themselves in at the moment, and their ability to do that is far from guaranteed.

So where does that leave you? Current partners are unsure of their ability to conduct business as usual, and potential leads may be reluctant to open new accounts. The answer to what to do then is to hunker down and get ready for when businesses can get going again. A surefire way to have a project that can expand to fill the time you have is research. Research, research, and more research will put you in a position to hit the ground running.

Come Up With Your Ideal Customer Profiles: Research Sales Targets

Maybe you aren’t doing any selling right now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be again soon. You need to be ready for whenever that might happen, so take this time to arm yourself with new information to be able to broaden your horizons and expand your client base. While you’re taking this time to evaluate your business, others likely are, too. Maybe they want a change or maybe they’re looking for a new product or service to help improve their operations. Either way, you might just be the person they’re looking for.

But who exactly are the people you’re looking for?

Now is a great time to consider what makes up your ideal customer profile. Sit down and think about what goes into your ICP. Think about the sector you’re trying to serve, and how you could focus on a certain industry. Consider the size of the businesses you’re targeting, and whether looking to work with small-, medium-, or large-sized companies is best for you. What’s the physical location of a business that you’d like to work with, and what is your target area? Add other things that could help you determine if a business could be considered a prospective client.

Use this time as an opportunity to reflect on your current clients as well. Maybe you feel like you have the ability to expand your service area a bit and can have a large geographic footprint. Maybe you’ve grown recently and could work with larger businesses because you have a larger capacity to meet their needs. Including this reflection period as you develop your ICP will help refine your vision of who you could work with and who you’re currently working with.

Once you have your ICP fleshed out and are happy with it, you can start researching and compiling a list of all the potential leads that meet your criteria. So, a good method to see research your sales targets.

Figure Out Your Target Personas

After compiling this list of leads that meet your ICP, the next step is to figure out who will be the person you get in touch with at each of these leads. While some businesses might be a perfect fit for you, that doesn’t mean that everyone who works there would be. Your next step in researching for your list is figuring out who will be the people you contact when you’re ready to connect with your lead. These are your target personas.

These personas can be developed generally. By thinking about what department you want to be in touch with, what level of the business they should be at, and what responsibilities they might have. Maybe you need someone in sales at the vice president level because you want to go to someone who has the decision-making power to fast track a contract with you. Or you might want to target the department that could best utilize your service. Even if they need to get approval from elsewhere in the business if you can get them on board. You have someone on the inside doing your pitching for you and making the connections you need to close a sale.

Research Sales Targets Generalities

But you have more time to work with them. Creating big generalities about who you want to be in touch with and can actually pinpoint. Who you want to be in touch with. The internet is your friend, and so are your own personal networks. Use LinkedIn to see if there’s anyone you already know. Or someone who could make a more personal connection for you.

That’s the ideal scenario, of course. But you won’t always know who to turn to when trying to initiate contact with a lead. But you have plenty of time to look into who your target personas are and add them to your list. Who these people are and their contact info is all traceable. If you can do a little digging on their websites and LinkedIn.

Ideal Customer Profile Persona Leads

Combining your ICPs with your target personas gives you a mouthful. While “ideal customer profile persona leads” is a lot to say. It’s now an invaluable tool for creating and contacting leads a few months down the road. If you come out of the next month. Or two simply knowing more of who you want to get in touch with. You will be ahead of the game. As a result, a great method to see research your sales targets.

Putting this on a shared spreadsheet like Google Docs will have all of the information in one place. Where you can keep track of and sort it. As well as have it be accessible by the people on your team who need to see it. Plus, everyone can be working in the same place on a shared project, and the value of the team-building piece that should not be understated when people are not in the office.