Sales Targeting: 4 Steps for Creating a Successful B2B Targeting Strategy

According to?Salesforce, 57% of salespeople expect to fail to meet their quotas this year.?

Oof. That's a lot of anticipated revenue lost.

And if salespeople aren't living up to expectations, how can you ever expect your business to succeed and grow?

Most of the time when salespeople aren't making their quotas, focus is the main issue.?

Is your sales strategy focusing on the right prospects to get the ROI you need from your efforts?

Setting your salespeople up for success with a comprehensive B2B sales targeting strategy will empower them to close more deals and push your company to new heights.

What Is Sales Targeting?

Sales targeting is a strategy that companies utilize to hone in on the right prospects—in other words, those who are most likely to buy.?

When they appeal and cater to the leads that are most likely to convert, your sales team stops wasting time filling up your sales funnel with low-quality prospects. Perfecting this quality over quantity approach means that your sales team will close more deals with less time invested in each one, translating to healthier revenue and growth for your company.

Many businesses approach B2B sales targeting strategies too hastily, often leading to serious missteps that can actually be counterproductive to your sales ecosystem.?

So how do you develop a targeting strategy the right way?

You can’t craft an excellent sales targeting system without first having a comprehensive understanding of your company, product, your ideal prospect, and their pain points.

4 Steps for Creating a Successful B2B Targeting Strategy

Crafting a successful sales targeting strategy for your company doesn't need to be complicated. Below, we'll discuss how to craft your ideal B2B targeting strategy in a few simple steps.

Step 1: Set Your Goals

Setting realistic but challenging daily, weekly, and monthly goals is always important when you set out to improve your sales flow.?

But first, there are some questions that you need to answer before you can create attainable goals that still push your sales team to succeed.

• How many touchpoints does it generally take before you get to a meeting??
• On average, how much time do you invest in prospects before your salespeople have their foot in the door??

This information will help you figure out how efficient your targeting is right now, and how much it could potentially be improved.

• How many meetings until a sale??

There's a big difference between closing a deal after the first meeting with a client and after the fourth. When your salespeople are investing their time in prospects, you have zero ROI with that client until a sale actually happens.

• What is the lifetime value of your business’s typical customer?
• AKA: How much revenue do you generate per average customer throughout the entire lifetime of your relationship with them?

This can be an important indicator of how much time you should invest in each prospect to ensure robust returns on your sales efforts.

Once you answer these questions, you should be able to build goals that work for your sales team much more effectively.?

You might be surprised by what you learn in this process. You may find places where your goals could be more specific or identify ways to streamline existing processes.

Let’s say you find out that it takes an average of 10 touch points to get a meeting, and then 8 meetings to convert that prospect to a sale.?

You may want goals that focus on finding better targets.

It’s important to set attainable goals for your sales team in the short term, while your long-term goals should feel lofty and challenging at first.?

Step 2: Find Your Targets

Have you heard of the?80/20 rule?before? Essentially, 80% of a company's revenue is generated by 20% of its customers.

Identifying what traits the 20% have in common is key to finding more high-value customers. If your sales team is devoting similar amounts of time to each prospect, then it’s all too easy to underinvest in possible "unicorn" clients while spending too much time on clients who are unlikely to ever generate that kind of revenue.?

Co-selling?is one of the best ways to find targets that have a proven track record of being reliable prospects. Utilizing sales partnerships, you can pool resources to find common customers whose problems you already know you can solve.

Step 3: Make the Plan

Now that you know your ideal customer, what are their specific pain points??

Look at your product from their perspective, and figure out exactly how you can help them and connect with them.?

A great way to do this is to tap into knowledge shared through sales partnerships. Partners who have worked with a prospect can give you key insights into a prospect's operations, giving you an edge on how to appeal to them.?

The more information you have about a prospect, the easier it is to turn them into a customer.

Working with similar but complementary partners can be an especially potent source of prospect information.?

Let’s walk through an example:

It may seem simple—that’s because, with a successful sales partnership, it is.?

Step 4: Evaluate and Iterate

Just as any other time you change your approach, you should measure and evaluate the results as you implement your new strategy. Are you hitting the goals that you settled on? If not, what isn’t working??

Don't forget to highlight the things that ARE working, too. If you're adjusting your targeting strategy to perform better, you need to know how it succeeded so you can replicate that success in the future.

If you're one of the many B2B organizations that use sales partnerships to get an edge on the competition, your partnerships should be a key part of your sales targeting strategy. To ensure that they are, you’ll need to keep a close eye on the?KPIs for your partnership program.

Develop a Successful Sales Targeting Strategy With Partnered

If you're crafting a sales targeting strategy, you're already ahead of the competition.?

Your sales targeting strategy will fill your funnel with quality over quantity and have you exceeding quotas in no time.

Sales partnerships are one of the best tools to create a more robust sales targeting strategy. If you'd like to learn how Partnered can help you connect your sales team with your partner sales teams to exchange customer introductions,?join us today!

This article was originally posted at?https://partnered.com/post/creating-a-successful-b2b-targeting-strategy