Identify Your Target Market

In this episode, I’m going to talk about creating a target market.  This is extremely important.  In one of the last two episodes, we talked about “Structuring the Value Proposition.”  We also talked in another episode about “Test Your Assumptions Before You Launch.”  Be sure you have completed these two steps before going forward.

The third step now will be to create your target market.  When I talk about creating a target market, I am talking about a very specific thing.   You need to know how many people you can sell to in your area, based on the problem you are going to solve.   Let me give you two, very specific tips to help with this.

1. First of all, let me recommend a website. Go to infoUSA.com. Click on business leads to set  certain criteria to search. You may search for certain business types or business sizes once you have selected a specific area.  Play around with this.  Don’t be afraid to call the website’s support team for additional help in building your list.  You may wish to spend a couple hundred dollars for a contact list of prospective clients.  If you don’t want to spend the money, go through the process to get a count of businesses in your target market.  This will give you an idea of how many are out there.  Okay?
2. Once you have an idea of how many people there are in your target market, you will want to set your geographic target market. If you are trying to solve a very specific problem, there may not be enough people who need your solution within 30 minutes of your office. Does that mean you are going to drive three hours to sell? Are you going to do phone soliciting?  How are you going to reach a large enough geographical area?   In this instance, I suggest that you rethink your value proposition to broaden it a bit.  Perhaps it is a little too specific, not leaving enough businesses to go after.  Your target market is geographic as well as business type and business size.

You say, “I’m going to go after pizza shops.”  Okay, are you going to go prospect Papa Johns?  Perhaps some of them are franchise owned.  Maybe you sell to franchises or are you going after smaller places?   Go to a website such as infoUSA.com and get help to build a list of specific businesses that fit your target market.   Your goal will be to prospect from this list every day, day in and day out until you contact each business you have targeted.  This is your campaign.

So, our campaign has a value proposition.  We’ve tested the value proposition.  We know the businesses we are going to prospect based on a specific list of businesses that we have researched and selected.  Don’t miss the next episode as I continue structuring sales.

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Test Your Assumptions Before You Launch

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Decide When to Stop Selling