So, you’ve had a great business idea, you’ve developed a strong brand and you’ve got an outline business plan in place. What’s next? Sales. Before you start planning your sales strategy, you need to know who you’re selling to.
Your product or service may well be something that can be sold to a diverse audience. However, it is vital you identify, analyse and prioritise your target markets to maximise return on investment.
A good place to start is by clearly articulating the problem or issue your product or service addresses, or the opportunity it holds for people. You then need to pinpoint what makes your product or service special in this area. This is often known as your unique selling point.
Once you understand your unique selling point you can start to better consider who your ideal customer group, or groups, will be.
If you’ve already made some sales, review your existing customer base and see if there are any trends. If you have been selling to professional services companies, for example, this could give you a valuable insight into a key customer group that you can then target.If you haven’t yet made any sales, think about who would benefit more from your product or service.
The next step is to create customer profiles. Think about the person’s age, gender, job title and company. Who do they work for and what are they looking for from your product or service? You can even give these ‘customers’ a fake name and build up a persona that will help you establish how to market to them effectively.
This isn’t an activity you should only carry out just once. It is something you should repeat on a regular basis, checking back on your original predictions to see if your customer base matched your initial expectations. That way you can build up a rich understanding of your customers and better meet their needs.
You can find out more about sales and marketing here, or watch the full video below.
