Lesson: Sales Market Fit with Whitney Sales

Step #6 Target Market: Targeting customers for sales

So how you determine your target market. This is actually a really important piece. Within marketing and sales, a lot of the time people think of target market as strictly a marketing term. It's actually not a sales term. It really is. It's very important from a sales perspective to think about what your target market looks like.

Typically, marketing people are trying to develop as many leads as possible for the company and reach as many customers as possible, so it's a little more loosely defined within the marketing department than it is within the sales department.

As a sales person, when you're actually going and speaking with the customer, you need to have a very clear definition of if this person is even worth my time, if this company is worth my time. Person, specifically, in the stance of is it the right title? Do they have the right responsibilities? Are they the person who can drive action within the organization? Are they someone people are going to listen to? Do they actually know what's going on within the organization?

And then the organization themselves, you're looking at do they fit my initial lean startup methodology definition of they have the right titles within the organization and they also are in the right industry, potentially customer size or work with one of my channel partners.

But there are also elements around how big their specific departments are, what their tech stack looks like, how sophisticated they are--all of these pieces actually play a really important piece in defining what your target market is going to look like and how you actually approach that market.

If we look at the definition of target market and how we're approaching it, there's an element in defining your target market that it can be a broad definition if you're in a transactional sale and how specific you get becomes more and more important on how high touch that sales process is going to be.

So for example, for an enterprise-level sale, because you're looking at a one-to-one relationship and a one-to-one sale, it's a much more complex sale and it's going to take a lot more time. So if you're spending a lot of time on an opportunity, you want to make sure from the very beginning that you understand that this is actually going to be a good fit; where if you're looking at a transactional sell, you can have a bit looser defined definition of what your target market is going to look like because you're trying to reach a much broader market because you're at a lower price point and a lower time period to sell.

I find a lot of people early on in their sales career--assuming a founder hasn't sold before--when they’re giving a demo or even when you're giving pitches to VCs, we're looking at the pitch to be the sales process and it's actually not. The pitch is confirmation of the conversation you've already had. You understanding, specifically in the qualification process, when you're sitting down with your customer, the key pain points. Three key pain points is great. You don't need to have 50.

If you understand three key pain points of that customer and making sure that you show how you solve and you've already talked about, in the qualification process, told them the story and giving them customer examples of how those pain points have been solved, and then going through and validating everything you said around those pain points being solved. And then a lot of the demo ends up actually having conversation around how it's going to be implemented.

So it's very interesting to actually look at and confirming that the value you're presenting is actually equivalent to the cost that you're going to be charging that customer and navigating those pieces and creating more value in that.