You might be able to sell to everyone, but the more important question is: which industries benefit you the most? It’s easy these days to want to group everyone into a big bucket of potential leads and have a crack at all of them. But the quality of those leads can vary dramatically, depending not only on which industries you’re targeting, but also company size, revenue, number of employees, etc. Depending on the price point and terms of your services, you could risk aiming too high (they already have an in-house solution) or too low (they can’t afford you). And while you might certainly have a lot on your plate by playing the field, it can easily become more busy work than actual lead generation.
Bottom line: you may want to sell to everyone, but the reality is that you need to be targeted in your approach. Here’s how to do that.
Start with your buyer personas
Review past and current leads from your sales pipeline to compare their firmographics, then use that information to guide your future prospecting. Let’s imagine that your last three deals were all with manufacturers. But what specific types of manufacturing do they provide? What NAICS / SIC codes are they assigned? What’s their reported revenue or number of employees? These can all be used to better define your market.
Beyond the data that’s openly available, look at specific information your team learned about those leads, like the pain points for why they wanted your business, the reasons that drew them to your company as opposed to a competitor, and the goals they outlined for your partnership.
Taken together, you can create basic templates or buyer personas for your ideal new business contacts.
Where’d you get that data?
Another reason you really can’t sell to everyone is when you have shoddy contact data. These days, most companies get lead lists by purchasing them from a third-party data provider. In our experience, those lists might be accurate to some degree, but their email addresses typically aren’t — and they’re expensive. So if email marketing and automation are still your best tools to drive new business, how do you solve that accuracy issue?
In a word, Prospecto. As long as you have an employee’s first and last name, the name of their company, and their company’s website, Prospecto can find and verify their current email address, and reach out to them. Used on a large scale — with lists of thousands of potential leads — Prospecto gives you the means to develop a database of active contacts and continuously nurture them toward your normal sales pipeline.
A quick word on segmentation
Not everyone responds to the same kinds of emails, whether we’re talking different industries or different stages in the prospecting journey. Make sure that your marketing language is relevant to your buyer personas and their industries at large, and use Prospecto to segment your database to maintain this consistency.
“We Sell to Everyone”? Nah. You sell to the best leads who you know will need you. And if your team would like help in order to make that happen, click the link below to schedule some time for a free lead nurturing discussion.
