Back in grade school my aunt emailed my Mom the pre-social media equivalent of an infographic. It included pictures of cows and their political views. There was a socialist cow with accompanying text that said, “You have 2 cows and give one to your neighbor.” There was a communist cow with text that said, “You have 2 cows. The government takes both and gives you the milk.” In total there were probably 12 of these cows. The point was to illustrate how different political structures are with some satire.
When I think about how various stakeholders in a company view their ideal customer profile, I think back to these cows. Everyone has a different opinion. But unlike political views, there is one cow that is right for your sales team. This varies based on the stage of your company and sales experience.[Tweet “Read why salespeople should always be fishing in a small pond!”]
Fishing in a small pond – or picking the low hanging fruit – in the early stages of a company’s sales effort is important for one reason: you’re not likely going to be very good. Your email templates will be too long and yield low response rates. You won’t have an understanding of your buyer persona, and you’ll reach out to the wrong people at companies. You’ll struggle to build prospect lists efficiently and only be able to email a small amount of leads per day. In the early beginning, you’ll need all the help you can get.
Here’s my advice to sales professionals looking to find their pond:
1 – Gather data on what has worked
The first step in identifying your ideal customer profile is understanding what has worked in the past. If you’re lucky, you will already have hundreds of customers who have signed up or expressed interested in your product or service. And the data on these customers will help you know what your next thousand customers look like.
Once you pull a report, analyze the data to see what is common amongst your customers. Are there specific industries, company sizes or locations that make up the majority of your customer base? What qualitative data can you gather about your customers? Maybe they all use Marketo or Mailchimp.
2 – Find your data source
Once you’ve analyzed the data on your customers, you should seek a source of prospects with similar attributes. For example, if you know that all of your customers use Shopify for their eCommerce, then you can use a tool like Datanyze to find thousands of Shopify users. Or if you know that your customers all have an Alexa rank of less than 1M, you can prospect companies with similar rankings.
Crunchbase, AngelList, Yelp, and LinkedIn are all free databases that have a tremendous amount of information to guide your prospecting efforts. In these databases, you can find information like location, company size, industry, and much more. Then, using tools like Kimono Labs you can transfer the information into an excel file.
3 – Focus on the right metrics
One of the most important actions you can take while starting a sales development program is to test, test, and then test some more. Finding an ideal customer profile and testing compliment one another. That’s because an ideal customer profile is ever changing and data is what informs a business of what the profile should look like at any given point.
A lot of salespeople have testing all wrong though. Many teams evaluate vanity metrics like response rate, open rates and click through rates. While influential to the funnel, they aren’t worth optimizing early on. In fact, these metrics distract from the three most important metrics a sales team should be tracking: demos, pipeline, and revenue. Take an example campaign where 20 prospects in group A open your emails, while only 5 prospects in group B open. The 4x difference is misleading if those 5 prospects convert to a higher number of demos.
Take another example where campaign A results in 20 responses and campaign B results in 5 responses. Again, the 4x difference seems to suggest that campaign A was a winner. But if the 5 responses from campaign B result in $100k in revenue and the 20 responses from campaign A result in $10k, the metric will misinform future strategy.
With data and the right tools, you can be radically successful as a sales development team. But in order to be successful in the long run you need to be disciplined enough to test what works and optimize around the most important metrics of your business. By doing so you will be able to find a pond that feeds your team in the early days of sales while you learn to prospect like pros.
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Michael Thomas
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- Why Sales Teams Should Fish in a Small Pond - August 17, 2016