The first stage of a new sales development program is to map your market. That means three things:
Find the companies fit your ICP
Identify Characteristics for Tier 1 Accounts
Find the people within those companies that you want to sell to
Find out which primary channel you should use to get in touch with these people (on an individual basis)
1. Find the companies fit your ICP
The first thing we want to do is figure out the profile of the companies that you're best positioned to sell to. The characteristics we include could be:
Industry
Employe Headcount
Location
Number of Locations
Technology Used
Funding Rounds
Recent Growth Rates
Etc
Once we understand the kinds of companies you want to target we can then look at who within those companies you might want to speak to.
2. Identify your Tier 1 Accounts
Every company should have a set of Tier One accounts as a subset of the larger account list. These accounts represent prospects that your product is a perfect fit for and will result in a high value order. You need both components. Potentially large deals that aren’t a perfect fit are a waste of time. Make sure these are companies where you absolutely know you can help them. This list shouldn’t be more than 10-15% of the total market you’re targeting.
3. Find the people within those companies that you want to sell to
The second job is to figure out a target profile for the kinds of people within these companies that you want to target. You could do that by defining a list of titles, or by defining people in a certain function at a certain level (both examples shown below):
Title Targeting:
VP Sales
CRO
Sales Director
Director of Sales Enablement
Director of Sales Operations
Function and Level targeting:
Function = Sales
Level = Director + above
Once we have the companies and the titles we can find out which channel we should use to reach them.
4. Find out which primary channel you should use to get in touch with these people (on an individual basis)
This is where Sales Science is a little unique. Instead of treating every prospect the same based on their title or seniority, we want to figure out the best way to reach them based on what channels they engage with.
Why? Because we know from our data that reps waste a ton of time calling people that don’t answer the phone, or messaging/sending connection requests to people that don’t spend time on LinkedIn.
So here’s what we do:
We call everyone in your market (5 times) to figure out who picks up the phone
We check their LinkedIn profiles to see how active they are on the platform (posted within the last 30 days is ideal)
Then we categorize your leads into four buckets:
Bucket 1: People that pick up the phone and are active on LinkedIn
Bucket 2: People that pick up the phone
Bucket 3: People that don't pick up the phone but are active on LinkedIn
Bucket 4: People that don't pick up the phone and people that aren’t active on LinkedIn
Now we’ve got your market mapped. We know which companies we’re going after, we know who we’re targeting at those companies and we know how to best get in touch with them.