How can you identify your most valuable prospects? It's a key question for any organisation that has lengthy or complex sales cycles and relies on finding and winning a steady stream of new business in order to sustain their growth and hit their revenue targets.
In trying to understand the common characteristics of your most valuable prospects, we strongly recommend that you look beyond the traditional demographics of size, industry and location and focus your attention on understanding the dynamics that affect your prospects' external environment and their internal operations and organisation.
You'll want to get inside the heads of the people who make things happen inside these organisations, to speak their language, to understand their priorities, to identify with their goals, needs and problem and to focus on the factors that are likely to influence their buying behaviour.
Who are your most valuable prospects?
They are the people within organisations who have pressing business issues that they cannot afford not to deal with, for which you have a demonstrably superior solution that will be highly effective in solving their problems whilst being suitably profitable to you.
Value is not just about the initial revenue you can generate - it's about the potential lifetime revenue and profit that you have the potential to earn. Even better if these prospects are widely recognised as "thought leaders" in their marketplace and if the choices they make influence the other companies in their sector!
It's equally important to identify the common characteristics of your least valuable prospects - the opportunities you have little chance of winning or, if you do, are unlikely to ever prove profitable. Chasing these deals will simply divert attention away from the task of finding and winning more of your most valuable prospects. You need to qualify them out early.
Demographics and dynamics
We’ve found that some of the most effective ways of identifying your most and least valuable prospects are to systematically review recent sales wins, losses and deferred decisions, and back them up with regular voice of the customer interviews. Of course, you’ll want to identify the common demographics (such as size, industry and location) but, even more important, you’ll want to identify the external and internal dynamics that make them a good or a bad prospect - and the trigger events that caused them to start searching for a solution. You can learn more about trigger events and your prospects' most important issues here.
External predictors of prospect value include factors such as new legislation and regulation, recent changes in technology or the competitive environment, and industry consolidation. Internal predictors of prospect value include recent changes in management or organisation structure, new strategies or initiatives, and merger and acquisition activity. Don't ignore the role of systems and infrastructure, either - your prospects' existing investments in these areas can often have an important impact on their potential value and "win-ability".
Most valuable prospect profiling and data quality
Successful sales and marketing organisations have a relentless focus on data quality. Having established their most valuable prospect profiles, they measure the completeness and accuracy of their prospecting data base and set aggressive goals for improving the quality on a monthly basis. Prospect database quality is the critical foundation for effective B2B marketing – and the ROI can exceed that from any other initiative.
Most valuable prospect profiling and opportunity qualification
Most valuable prospect profiling also provides the basis for systematic, evidence-based qualification of sales leads and opportunities. It enables marketing and sales to agree what a "sales ready lead" should look like, and provides the basis for a structured approach to sales opportunity scoring that can reliably separate good deals from bad ones early on in the sales cycle.
Our Recommendations?
- Carefully profile the common characteristics of the most valuable prospects in your key target markets
- Be sure to focus on the dynamics as well as the demographics of your most valuable prospects
- Establish buyer personas for the key decision making roles in your most valuable prospects
- Focus on the factors that influence their behaviour - and on the BuyerSphere that surrounds them
- Establish clear data quality standards for your prospecting database and drive continuous improvement
- Incorporate what you have learned about your most valuable prospects into an opportunity scoring system
Could we help you to identify your most valuable prospects? We would be happy to arrange a brief exploratory conversation - see below for how to get in touch.
How does your organisation compare?
Why not download this 15-point checklist
and see for yourself how your organisation compares to some of the best
in breed? We can't guarantee that completing the checklist will give
you all the answers, but we think that it will at least help you to ask
the right questions!
Are you ready to learn more?
Please continue to browse the site and when you are ready to talk, contact us here or call +44 845 519 0295. We look forward to hearing from you!