Selling Today
Target Markets and Buyer Personas: Fishing in the Right Pond BY TODD M. ZIELINSKI AND LISA BENSON
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anding a new account is a lot like landing the perfect fish. Before you can fish successfully, you need to decide what type of fish you are after, where they can be found, and what type of bait and fishing method works best to hook them. Similarly, a key to successfully generating high-quality leads is by pinpointing your target market and the types of buyers within markets. When creating a target list, you typically start with target market profiling and then build out prospects’ names and contact information. Going after the right type of contact with the right messaging will improve efficiency and lead to greater success. You can take steps to ensure that you are catching the right fish (targets) and not wasting valuable time fishing in the wrong pond. In the May/June 2018 issue of BoxScore, our article, “Best Practice Approach to Accurate Target Market Profiling,” discussed the importance of looking beyond industries and SIC codes when developing your target market profile. In the article, we provided criteria to consider when developing your target market profile. We won’t cover it in detail, but an overview of the criteria included: • Defining your markets – These are industries or segments in which you have seen success. • Evaluating current customers – Look at emulating your best customers. • Defining your financial objectives – Evaluate how many companies and how much spend is necessary to meet your financial objectives.
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BOXSCORE May/June 2021
• Defining contact titles – Define the decision-makers and influencers for each market. You won’t fish in a brook if you are trying to catch tuna. Look at your current customer accounts the same way you determine where you fish and whether there are similar places to fish. Evaluate your customer accounts individually, and determine whether you would like more that are exactly like each one. Sometimes a high-spending customer creates challenges that you don’t want to duplicate. That is OK; take them off the list. Look at the companies that are remaining, and determine why they are a good fit (spend, type of purchase, location, industry, etc.).
You are trying to develop a representation of the type of company—or companies— that you would like more of. From here, you can locate competitors that meet the same criteria to build out your target market profile. Diving Deeper Now we need to evaluate the fish. Which fish are biting? When do they bite? What fishing method works best? What type of bait do they prefer? Of course, people making buying decisions are a bit more complicated than fish taking the bait. A tool commonly used for diving deeper to strategically pinpoint who is making purchasing decisions and why is called a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a
