Focus Your Marketing Efforts on These Customers
Focus Your Marketing Efforts on These Customers
It’s not how hard you sell; it’s who you sell to.
For the first 90 days of this year, I’m each week posting the “single most important thing you need to know” about 13 essential aspects of sales and marketing, because “1 percent of activity creates 99 percent of success.”
Here are my columns so far:
- The Single Most Essential Rule About Pricing
- The Best Sales and Networking Trick, Bar None
- The 10-Minute Website Tweak That Increases Sales
- How to Win Customer Loyalty in 10 Seconds
- The Essence of Market Targeting in 10 Short Words
- This Trick Triples Cold Email Response Rates
- The 1 Thing You Need to Know About Closing a Sale
- The 1 Question To Ask Every Marketing Job Candidate
I’ll now turn to a more general question: where should you focus your sales and marketing efforts?
First, some quick background. Over the past decade or so, I’ve had dozens of companies ask how to hone their marketing and sales plans. Surprisingly, the advice is almost always: re-target your sales and marketing towards the customers most likely to buy.
Sounds obvious, right? Well, yes, but a fair number of quite intelligent businesspeople have no idea of how to prioritize sales leads or lead generation efforts. Much of the time, they focus on acquiring brand new customers, which is expensive and difficult.
I could cite numerous examples of research on why people buy and when (perhaps a future column?) but in this column I’ll just cut to the chase and list out your potential customers from “most likely to buy” to “least likely to buy.”
1. Customer evangelists
They consider your brand or product as an essential element of their personal identity. Common examples would be Apple (about a decade ago) and Tesla (today, at least for now.) They will buy from you because failing to buy from you would be a denial of who they’ve defined themselves to be.
