Are you burning your addressable market, your target market, your TAM?
If have a mud-on-wall, scattergun approach to sales, then you might just be.
Refine your target market
I’m in Scotland and let’s say I want to get in front of UK tech firms.
There are more than 11,000 tech companies just in Scotland alone, so this is a little too broad. Let’s narrow this down to cybersecurity firms.
According to the UK Government’s Cybersecurity Sectoral Analysis 2020, there are 1,221 firms in this space (probably more now).
Filtering down further to Scotland and north England brings this number down to 127.
127 is a little bit more manageable than 11,000 but there’s a bit of a risk here because.
If I go into these people and I lead with a typical generic message that’s all about me:
“Hi, I’m Mark. I’m from ABC Ltd, we’re the UK’s leading supplier of widgets. You wanna jump on a call and look at how great we are?”
How long before I’ve burned all 127 bridges and no one wants to talk to me anymore? A week? A couple of weeks maybe?
Refine your prospecting
With such a small target market I need to be thinking about how I’m going to approach these organisations:
What are their key priorities in 2022?
How are they adapting to recent legislative or regulatory changes?
What are the common pain points in their own target markets, sector, geography, etc.?
Which people in the organisation should I be targeting?
Have they recently been in the news, won an award, or won a big contract that I can reference?
Thinking in this manner and applying a highly personalised, customer-focused approach means I can really tailor my approach and make it relevant to every person I contact.
Bonus tip: If you can find a question or provide an insight that makes the prospect stop and think: “I hadn’t thought about it like that. I don’t have the answer to that question.”
You’re going to have a far better chance of getting your foot in the door.