Maybe you’re struggling to fill your day as someone, not in the office. 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 and don’t rely on interacting with other businesses. In this article, you’ll learn how to research sales targets the right prospects.
Sure, it would be nice if your clients (current and prospective) were raring to go and looking to partner with you right now, but you don’t know what kind of position they might be 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 is to hunker down and prepare for when companies can get going again. A surefire way to have a project that can expand to fill the time you have is to research. Research, research, and more 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. It would help if you were ready for whenever that might happen, so take this time to arm yourself with new information 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 perhaps they’re looking for a new product or service to help improve their operations. Either way, you might 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 particular industry. It would be nice if clients, current & prospective, are raring to go & looking to partner and learn how to research sales targets and the right prospects.
Consider the size of the businesses you’re targeting and whether looking to work with minor-, medium-, or large-sized companies is best for you. What’s the physical location of a business you’d like to work with, and what is your target area? Add other things that could help determine if a company could be considered a prospective client.
Use this time to reflect on your current clients as well. Maybe you can expand your service area and have a large geographic footprint. Perhaps 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 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. This is a good method for researching 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 everyone working 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. It would be nice if clients, current & prospective, are raring to go & looking to partner and learn how to research sales targets and the right prospects.
These personas can be developed generally. Consider 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 with 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 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 & Right Prospects
But you have more time to work with them. You can make big generalizations about who you want to contact and pinpoint who you want to contact. The internet is your friend, and so are your 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 initiating 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, it’s a great method to research your sales targets.
Putting this on a shared spreadsheet like Google Docs will have all the information in one place. Where you can keep track of and sort it. It should also be accessible to 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.
