I once had a project to help a sales team align their territories to focus on their most likely prospects.  The project began by asking each rep to send me their current top fifty prospects.  One key criteria for targeting was simply the size of the prospect (revenue or number of employees).  The ideal target market was $250M to $2B.  When I looked at the list for the Boston rep, 45 out of 50 of his target accounts were greater than $2B.   When I asked him why, he indicated that even closing a few would allow him to achieve his budget.  I asked him to think about what would happen if he didn’t close a few.  He was elephant hunting.

Targeting the right prospects is Sales and Marketing 101.  In my experience it’s done poorly by both marketing and sales more than 75% of the time.  There are two reasons for this.  First, if you are in marketing, there are lots of different ways to segment a market.  Size is an easy one. So is vertical industry segment.  In the case above we started with the easy segmentation then expanded to more sophisticated segmentation.  There are dozens of other ways to segment ranging from buyer persona to behavioral segmentation that are much more difficult to identify and pursue.  Communicating these to your sales team is hard, so a lot of marketers just take the easy way out… size or vertical segment.  The second reason is that the sales team has a tendency to sell to anyone who will buy from them, especially when they have no guidance from marketing.  They are rewarded on sales revenue.  Given the choice between accepting a sale from a prospect outside the targeted segment or not, they will take the sale 98% of the time.

In the last two posts, the effect of the technology lifecycle change is outlined.  Where buyers are in this lifecycle is a key segmentation issue. If you have sales people bringing you complicated or sophisticated product needs and prospects, they could be talking to the left side of Moore’s or Maister’s chart.  If they are continually asking you for lower prices they could be focused on the right side of the charts.  Or if they are asking you to demonstrate how your product is different and asking for proof points and case studies, they might be focused on the middle or early majority.  However, none of this may be true, because they may be talking with an individual prospect or customer that has evolved with time or become overly familiar with your current solution.

Marketing needs to recognize which of these situations is being encountered and Sales does as well.  Why?  Because how you market and sell is dependent on this.  A great deal of misalignment of marketing and sales is a result of the simple failure to see where you are on this curve.  While there are sales processes that teach sales people to recognize buyer personality types (i.e. Analytical, Driver, Creative or Amiable, or in other cases, The Decision Maker, The Financial Authority, The User, The Champion, and The Roadblock etc), there are very few that focus on alignment with where the buyer is in either the buying cycle or the technology cycle.  One excellent process that focuses on keeping in alignment with buying cycle needs is discussed by the Vision Group.

How can you make sure you don’t fall into the trap of selling to the wrong segment?  It may seem obvious, but the answer for both sales and marketing is simply to ask questions. It’s also prudent to be asking yourself three questions all the time: 1) Where are my prospects in their buying cycle? 2) What is their buying type?  and 3) Where are they in their technology lifecycle?