This isn’t an article on how to call your top 200 prospects. Calling and selling aren’t actually synonymous, though they may often be treated that way.
Instead, let’s ask this question. Do you know why your top 200 prospects… are your top 200 prospects… and why you should be selling to them?
And do you know the top 200 prospects that your company would like to gain as new customers?
Why Is This Important?
Begin by starting out who you believe would benefit most from your product and/or service offerings. This is better known as your Ideal Customer Profile, or “ICP”. These prospects would be considered the highest probability to purchase with the greatest revenue potential.
This is different than just building a buyer persona. This exercise focuses on the individual person within the company and the person or persons that are most likely to purchase. The ICP focuses on the organization or company, and personas are the recommenders, purchasers, and influencers within those businesses.
Define Your ICP
Defining the ICP is going to cover more than the traditional size of organization, how many employees, and industry. Take that a step further and add more detail.
One way to define this is to understand the patterns of what customers have answered in your Top 3 Questions (your qualifying questions that should uncover if there is a need in the prospect or company’s environment). Place these answers in front of you and decide on your pattern. This will help you to formulate the ICP. Here is an example (please notice the formula not the details or the accuracy of the details), of a completed ICP.
“National food processing companies with over 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $250 million in annual revenue; they have approximately 10 processing lines in multiple locations, no upgrades, minimal floor coating, no curbs on the feet, and are spending at least $10 million per year on maintenance.”
If you notice, the first part, “National food processing companies with over 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $250 million in annual revenue…” is the traditional information that we gather.
The next part is based on your patterns: “They have approximately 10 processing lines in multiple locations, no upgrades, minimal floor coating, no curbs on the feet, and are spending at least $1 million per year on maintenance.”
Examine Your Top 200
Now that you have an ICP in place, it’s time to take a look at your top 200. Begin to ask the tough question: do all 200 meet the ICP? If it’s a yes, keep them. If not, place them to the side. Once you complete this exercise, now you know how many actual Ideal Customer Profiles remain. How many vacant spots do you need to fill to reach your actual 200?
Once you have this calculation completed, now you can begin to work your list and reap your rewards.
Create a Living, Breathing List
As names on the list will come and go, it’s important to maintain your inventory of 200. It’s the critical way to reach your quota, and for your company to grow. In fact, high growth companies state that developing an accurate (or as close as possible) ICP results in a 68% higher win rate.
Your Top 200 list can be shared with the marketing department, who can help you nurture the 200. Be sure to spend time with your marketers so you both are in sync with communication tactics, messaging, and set results.
Identifying Another Top 200
To complete what we talked about today is difficult. It takes time, resources and plenty of research. Then there’s the efforts to call, cultivate, and bring the top 200 companies into the sales cycle. With what you have to do each day, you may not have the time to complete it.
That’s where SalesLeads can help you. Their “Prospecting Services” offering is an industrial lead generation and appointment setting service. All of the above steps can be done by you, or can be done by SalesLeads, or a team effort between your team and theirs. Their job is to do the hard work to get you in front of qualified decision-makers in your ideal customer companies, with the help of their seasoned business growth specialists. Let us know if we can help.
Author: Evan Lamolinara
Since 1959, SalesLeads, based out of Jacksonville, FL has been providing Industrial Project Reports on companies that are planning significant capital investments in their industrial facilities throughout North America. Our professional research team identifies new construction, expansion, relocation, major renovation, equipment upgrades, and plant closing project opportunities so that our clients can focus sales and marketing resources on the target accounts that have an impending need for their products, services, and indirect materials.
