CHAPTER 5

Selecting Targets: First for a Reason

When charged with acquiring new business, the natural and essential first questions are: “Where is the business going to come from?” and “Who should I be pursuing?” If we are putting together a prospecting and new business development sales attack, we need to know where to go and whom to target. That’s why selecting targets is the first step in the process. Quite simply, we can’t prospect if we don’t know who the prospects are.

Most salespeople spend the majority of their time in reactive mode responding to potential opportunities that come their way. The need for a defined list of target accounts does not register because, honestly, they are not targeting anyone. However, the proactive new business hunter requires a strategically selected list of appropriate target accounts in order to launch the attack.

Selecting Target Accounts Is a Rare Opportunity to Be Strategic

It’s surprising how often senior executives or even first-line sales managers take for granted that their people are working the right accounts. Choosing our target accounts, which effectively also means choosing how we should be investing our time, is one of the few truly strategic things we do in sales. Think about it. Most of what we do every day involves executing a repetitive behavior. We work the process and work the math. Salespeople excel because they figure out how to win business and then replicate their behavior over and over. Choosing the accounts on which we’ll focus our proactive energy provides a rare opportunity to step back from the daily grind and ask the important, big-picture questions.

Who are our best customers? What are their common characteristics? What do their businesses “look, smell, and feel” like? Where are they located? Are they a particular size (e.g., in terms of revenue) or in certain vertical markets or niches where we have a higher rate of success? Where can we find potential customers with similar profiles?

Does our best chance for new business lie within our current portfolio of existing customers? How should we rank those current accounts and then segment our focus across various types of customers, based on growth potential? How much of our time should be allocated to account penetration, to prospecting, to working referral sources? Are there certain competitor’s accounts that make sense to attack?

These are all highly significant and strategic questions, and I advocate the involvement of senior leadership in the decisions. The salesperson is entitled to input from management to ensure there’s strategic alignment between the business and the sales effort, and management should certainly have a keen interest in how the sales organization is investing its time.

Time is the great equalizer and our most precious asset. Everyone needs to be on the same page regarding how time is being invested—particularly in terms of which accounts are being targeted to develop new business. Even the best talent will fail if too much time is wasted attacking the wrong targets.

Your Target List Must Be Finite, Focused, Written, and Workable

Beyond having a list of strategic targets to ensure we are calling on the right accounts, these other key parameters help maximize productivity and new business effectiveness.

A Finite List

A finite target list is essential for a successful new sales attack. Salespeople who succeed in acquiring new business lock in on a finite number of strategic targets. They’re confident these prospects have been chosen for the right reasons, and they methodically work and rework that finite set of accounts. Over time, these successful hunters get noticed, get in, build relationships, and begin gaining traction. This only happens because they have committed to this defined list and are therefore able to penetrate targets with their sales weapons.

Too often I sit down with salespeople to review their target account list and am presented a pile of folders, trade publications, a local business journal Book of Lists, and printouts from various databases or industry directories. When I ask to see the actual list being used to pursue targets, they simple point to the pile and say, “This is my list.” Oh boy.

Many salespeople fail because they’re too quick to change direction. Frustrated about not getting a “kill” with the first shot, they forget about all the thought and prep work invested to create their original list. In frustration, they discard their lists and begin shooting in a completely different direction at a new set of targets. Typically, this redirection produces similar disappointing results, so they begin the cycle all over again, dooming their business development effort to failure.

A Focused List

In my own sales career and in others I’ve studied, periods of greatest success seem to result from a laser-focused sales effort. Focusing in on a vertical market or certain type of account yields many benefits. Repeated calling on the same type of company allows us to become “experts” as we learn the language, nuances, and business issues facing similar prospects. We become more comfortable and more confident. We know which questions to ask and when. We build a reputation along with an arsenal of case studies to demonstrate our credibility and worth. And it becomes easier and easier to replicate early successes.

During my time at the direct marketing company, I had a few quick victories selling our services to large advertising agencies. It didn’t take long to figure out that these agencies were typically staffed with generalists in the production departments who were not experienced with the intricacies involved with producing a direct mail campaign. This lack of internal expertise would often get the agency in trouble, and I discovered how much value my team of experts could bring to these generalist production managers. It became readily apparent that these big agencies had a business problem for which my company had a perfect solution! After quickly picking up several new agency clients and seeing how pleased they were, I made an easy strategic decision to focus all of my time and energy pursuing agencies. That decision, along with the support the company provided, produced the record-breaking sales run I described in Chapter 1.

There’s no prize for sales creativity or being known for selling into the widest variety of customer types. Find the path of least resistance and then focus like mad on that very path.

A Written List

It may sound crazy in the age of iPads, smartphones, and comprehensive CRM systems to ask salespeople to carry around or post a written target account list. Crazy, but effective. The most prolific new business developers live by their target lists. Whether handwritten and color-coded on an office whiteboard or neatly printed on an exported spreadsheet, top performers can point to their finite, focused, written list at any moment.

Scrolling through screen after screen of the CRM or thumbing through pages of an industry directory is not the same thing as pulling out a concise one-page list. I truly believe the very act of writing or printing out and posting a target list creates increased new business activity and improved results.

A Workable List

I’m regularly asked for an opinion on the right number of accounts for a salesperson to work. There are as many “right” answers to that question as there are types of businesses. It completely depends on the type of sale, sales role, and sales cycle. On one extreme, I have friends who sell enterprise-level IT solutions and are charged with selling to only a dozen or so accounts. At the far other end of the spectrum, I have worked with inside sales teams where each rep handled upwards of 400 accounts without skipping a beat.

Workable is the word I like to use. Target lists should be finite, focused, written, and workable. Too many accounts and they don’t get the deserved attention. Too few and the salesperson runs out of targets to call and ends up surfing the Internet. Depending on the sales cycle, the level of difficulty gaining access to a prospect, and other account management responsibilities charged to the salesperson, the appropriate number of targets should be determined for a defined period of time. The key is to create a target list that can be worked effectively and thoroughly over that defined period.

Segmenting Your Existing Accounts

Although there are plenty of account-management-only-type sales roles, where reps are charged with growing business exclusively from their current customers, most of us in sales roles have the dual responsibility of managing (and hopefully growing) existing customer relationships and acquiring new business from new accounts. In either case, we must keep this truth in mind: All accounts are not created equal.

Too many outside salespeople operate in autopilot mode. They become complacent and don’t invest the energy to dissect and segment their account list. Instead, they repeat the same route or rotation, working their accounts based on habit and convenience rather than opportunity. Some refer to this sloppy approach as doing “the milk run.” Call it what you want. I call it lazy, foolish, and non-strategic.

I see a similar malady hurting the performance of inside reps. Rather than stepping back to see a big-picture view of their accounts, most activity and focus is determined solely by what comes up on the CRM’s daily task list. In several companies, I’ve observed rep after rep focused exclusively on completing that day’s call and e-mail list generated by the system. Don’t get me wrong. In and of itself, completing your scheduled daily tasks is a good thing. But most reps do it in a robotic fashion with little perspective about the relative importance, or unimportance, of the specific accounts they’re calling. In my opinion, inside reps would be better motivated and connected to the overall business if there was more macro thought put into how to focus attention to achieve greater results.

There’s no law dictating how much energy and time we should commit to each customer. But since most of us in sales are judged according to the revenue growth we achieve, doesn’t it make sense to allocate our attention to accounts with the greatest potential to produce results?

I advocate a very simple methodology for segmenting our customer lists. Assuming the salesperson knows his accounts (or territory, portfolio of clients, book of business, etc.), I suggest dividing the existing customers into four categories:

1.   Largest—in terms of dollars spent (not size of the organization)

2.   Most Growable—best opportunity for incremental revenue

3.   Most At-Risk—highest probability of losing their business (some or all of it)

4.   Other—accounts that do not qualify for any of the previous three categories

Some accounts will appear in more than one category. It’s not uncommon to have a major account that’s also one of your most at-risk customers either because of a competitive threat or something going on inside the account. And sometimes we find that our largest accounts have the most growth potential. Whatever the case, make those lists. Similar to my thoughts about having a workable number of targets, there’s no right number of accounts to list in each category.

This exercise forces us to be more strategic and provides the salesperson an opportunity to make intentional decisions about the business instead of flying aimlessly on autopilot. If I’m getting paid based on sales results, you can bet I’m going to overserve and overinvest in my Most Growable, Largest, and Most At-Risk accounts. Along the same line of thinking, if a customer falls into the Other category, that account will not garner much time or mind share. Why should it?

I once worked with a brilliant consultant who talked a lot about intentional imbalance. What a great phrase that aptly communicates the point I’m emphasizing here. There are no prizes for salespeople who work really hard. The rewards accrue to those who move the dial, so it makes infinitely more sense to intentionally imbalance our focus toward the accounts where that’s possible.

Preparing for Target Selection: The Who and Why Questions

In some sales positions, the list of target prospects is supplied to the salesperson. However, in the majority of small and midsize companies, that’s not the case. Often, the challenging task of identifying and choosing potential clients is left to the salesperson. And that can be pretty daunting, particularly for a new hire.

I like to use a series of “who” and “why” questions to help identify strategic targets when creating a list:

  Who are our best customers (by industry, size, business model, location, etc.)?

  Why did they initially become customers? Why do they still buy from us?

  Who do we compete against in the marketplace?

  Why and when do they beat us? And why do prospects choose us over them?

  Who used to be our customers (said differently, who used to buy from us)?

  Why did we lose the business?

  Who almost became a customer but didn’t (deals where we came close but lost)?

  Who has referred business to us in the past?

  Who should be referring business to us?

As discussed previously, selecting target prospects is one of our few chances to be strategic. We need answers to these questions in order to create a confidence-inspiring list of smartly chosen prospects and referral sources. I’d go as far as saying that building a great list is easy once we have these answers and just about impossible without them.

First and foremost, I want to pursue prospects that look, feel, and smell like our very best clients. We know we bring value to the equation. We have instant credibility. Our story is relevant and we have happy clients to prove it. If a salesperson isn’t confident pursuing prospects that fit this profile, then he probably shouldn’t be in sales. To the seasoned new business developer, these best customer look-alikes are a softball down the middle. We should have no trouble getting in, asking the right questions, identifying opportunities, and telling a compelling story supported with case studies.

Making the Most of Referral and Indirect Selling

In certain sales roles, referral sources and decision influencers are more important targets than the actual end-user or purchaser. I’ve worked with an assortment of businesses where the greatest sales lift was achieved by a focused effort against a defined set of strategic referral sources. In this case, I’m not talking about the traditional method of seeking referrals from happy clients and people in our professional network. Rather, the actual targets are the collective group of potential referral sources.

Successful proactive loan officers continually work real estate agents to send clients their way for mortgages. Sales reps for general construction companies build intentional relationships with construction management firms that can recommend contractors to building owners. Premier bankers target personal bankers and tellers at local branches within their own banking organization, hoping they’ll refer high net worth customers to them. Flooring sales reps call on architecture firms looking to get product specified for new projects, even though the actual “sale” is transacted with the flooring contractor. In all of these cases, it’s imperative that the salesperson builds a strategic, finite, focused, written, and workable list of target referral sources.

If your personal sales success depends on indirect selling to key influencers and referral sources, it follows that you would have a specific plan of attack for this group of targets. The best reps treat this list as if their referral sources are the actual prospects. Accordingly, they monitor sales activity and results from the effort put against these influencers. One business development person at a client goes as far as segmenting his referral sources into four distinct categories. He’s committed to balancing his proactive sales attack across each category, and he tracks the number of meaningful conversations and referrals by type of referral source. Over time, his plan is to intentionally imbalance sales activity by favoring the types of sources that end up referring the best opportunities. That is a smart, strategic plan. No autopilot or milk run for that guy.

Resources for Identifying Targets

Once the strategic prep work is completed, it’s time to identify the actual targets we’ll pursue. Again, sometimes our own company is a great resource in helping to “name the names” for our lists. But often in smaller organizations, this responsibility falls to the individual salesperson. If you’re new to business development and find yourself in that situation, fear not. There are plenty of highly valuable resources available to the business-to-business salesperson.

One of my personal longtime favorite resources is the local business journal. American Cities Business Journals (ACBJ), based in Charlotte, North Carolina, publishes a weekly business paper in more than forty markets across the United States. Each year, every local business journal compiles a Book of Lists for its market area. As a fan of identifying and sorting target prospects by company size and geography, the annual Book of Lists is a tremendously helpful tool. Want to see the twenty-five largest architectural firms or advertising agencies in a particular market? Want to scan the list of the fastest-growing privately held companies? No problem. You can purchase the entire Book of Lists (in printed or electronic format) or request only specific lists from desired markets. Looking for the largest employers or top 25 banks in Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, and Atlanta? Place a single order with an ACBJ rep and have a spreadsheet with your requested data e-mailed to you within hours.

Hoover’s, a Dun & Bradstreet company, is probably the best-known and most widely used online research platform for corporate data. Sales reps or sales teams subscribe to Hoover’s and pay a yearly fee to research targets or compile customized lists based on user-defined criteria. While no online database is consistently 100 percent accurate, anecdotal evidence suggests Hoover’s maintains the most up-to-date information on companies. It has outstanding customer support and regularly offers free trials that provide a peek into the power of a subscription. There are some new players competing in the same space and offering expanded feature sets, but after playing with a few, I’m sticking with my endorsement of Hoover’s. Its ties to Dun & Bradstreet’s perpetually updated database puts Hoover’s in a unique position to provide highly accurate information.

LinkedIn is a must-have resource for every salesperson. It’s the best liked, fastest-growing, yet still most underutilized tool for sales professionals. I can’t possibly do justice to the power and versatility of LinkedIn in a brief mention here. I’ve read a few e-books and dozens of blog posts on the topic and my simple and strong admonition is that you do the same. It’s easy to get started, connect with others, and begin exploring the myriad of ways to conduct research, build community, and initiate relationships. Most analogies fall considerably short when trying to describe the breadth and usefulness of LinkedIn. Update your profile and jump in.

Perhaps trade shows and industry associations are considered old-school methods for identifying target accounts, but I want to be where the prospects are. If virtually all the major players in an industry I’m targeting are exhibiting at a trade show, then I’ll register as an attendee. It’s typically costly to exhibit at a trade show, but relatively inexpensive to attend. Even if your specific contacts aren’t physically present at the show, walking the aisles and meeting people at the booths of potential target accounts can be both an efficient and effective way to identify true prospects. Attending a trade show also provides you with opportunities to sit in a breakout session or keynote address, where you can gain a greater understanding of the hot issues faced by your target accounts.

Finally, don’t ignore dinosaur-model industry associations. Some of the most active folks in these associations are wise old owls who not only can impart wisdom, but also can connect you to major players in the industry. Modern sales philosophers will pooh-pooh the idea and suggest that you do most of your networking online. I couldn’t disagree more, and suggest that the value of the association member directory alone is worth more than the annual price of admission.

Pursuing Your Dream Targets

When creating our target lists, I like salespeople to reserve a few spots for gigantic prospects. I first heard the term “dream clients” used by Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, during a keynote speech a few years ago. My friend Anthony Iannarino (who graciously provided the foreword for this book) regularly writes about the pursuit of dream clients on his award-winning site, TheSalesBlog.com. Dream clients are those monster accounts that, if landed, make your entire year and have the potential of changing the future of your company.

There’s nothing quite like the celebration that ensues after closing a career-defining deal with a dream target. The first step in the process, sometimes years before the big celebration, is being bold enough to name the names and actually write down the handful of monster accounts that you’ll commit to pursue. I’ve had the joy of closing a couple of these accounts myself, and I’ve also partied with client salespeople who reeled in the big one they declared a year earlier in a business plan.

There are two pieces of advice I want to share regarding dream clients. The first is to limit the selection. Pick just a handful, perhaps four or five, that you’ll add to your target list. Once they’re named, sketch out a unique mini-attack plan just for those targets. The key is to set aside a small percentage of time every week or two to advance the ball downfield with each dream target account.

The second piece of advice is cautionary. Because the pursuit of dream clients is a high-risk affair with low probability of success, it’s essential that we continue to fervently work the normal targets on our list. The danger is falling in love with the notion of landing a dream client and ending up a prisoner of hope instead of working our sales process across the full list of targets. Winning a major deal with a dream client is as good as it gets, but we still need to make our numbers, even if that dream deal does not materialize.

Targeting Contacts Higher in the Customer Organization

Finally, I’d like to challenge you to think not only about which businesses you are targeting, but whom you should be targeting within those organizations. I encourage salespeople to pursue contacts higher up in the companies they target. Plenty has been written on this subject and for a good reason: It works! I’ve experienced success with this strategy in my personal selling efforts and also witnessed others significantly increase their batting averages by aiming for higher-level contacts at potential customers.

Less experienced, less successful, and less confident reps immediately feel increased anxiety when asked to consider targeting a contact who’s positioned one, two, or even three levels higher up in the organization than they are accustomed to dealing with. It’s easy to understand why the sales rep would be uneasy. It seems scarier going after higher-level management or senior executives. Some reps nervously proclaim they’re having a hard enough time getting in to see their “normal” contacts, so how in the world could they have success going after the big guys?

Here’s the counterintuitive dirty little secret: It’s not harder and more frightening targeting higher-level contacts. It’s actually easier and usually a lot more fun. The fear about moving up the ladder is artificially self-induced because of incorrect assumptions. It isn’t like you know stories of sales reps who were once very successful prospecting with admins and purchasing agents but had their heads chopped off when they attempted to sell to the executive floor. I haven’t seen reports about traumatized salespeople who were once quota-beaters but are now in therapy because of horrific experiences and the abuse dished out by gatekeepers and belligerent senior vice presidents. Have you? No, you haven’t, because those stories are figments of our imagination. Salespeople scare themselves into believing they can’t handle selling to higher levels in their target accounts, but there’s no evidence validating those feelings.

You know what you typically find in the executive suite? Nicer people. Smarter people. More professional people. Bigger-thinking people. People more interested in achieving their goals than beating up a vendor over a nickel. Yup. In general, people who end up in executive positions got there because they were good. Most executives are a lot more concerned with solving business issues and achieving better results than they are with protecting their jobs or the status quo. That is a refreshing change, indeed!

The key to gaining the interest of senior executives is to be able to connect with them about issues that are on their mind. We must speak in the language they understand. Executives tend not to get involved in piddly crap and minutiae. They’re certainly not interested in the details of your products or services. However, they are very interested in solving business problems and improving results in the areas under their control. To get an executive’s attention, that is what we must be talking about, and it’s why having a sharp, customer-focused sales story is essential.

If you’re hesitant about attempting to shoot at significantly higher level contacts, answer this: What could happen if you tried it? Seriously consider the possible outcomes. What’s the worst case? They ignore you or flat out tell you no. And how is that any different from the current status of that account? It isn’t. You didn’t have their business before you shot higher and now you still don’t. Fine. You can still move forward and take your shot at the level you customarily target. They have no clue you missed the mark in the corner office. However, the reverse is not true. If you start at the lower level and get told no, it’s infinitely harder to then take your pursuit up the ladder. That’s how salespeople make enemies within the prospect organization. We can always scale our way back down the ladder, but it’s very dangerous going over the head of people who believe they had the right and authority to tell us no.

The best thing that can happen is that you gain the interest of the higher-level contact and earn an opportunity to move forward. The next best scenario isn’t so bad, either. In fact, I’d call it a minor victory. That’s when the executive resonates with your approach and your story, but instead of inviting you to the table, she directs you to the appropriate person within her organization. In other words, she liked what she was hearing, but chose to send you to someone else better suited to evaluate what you’re offering. Personally, I love when that happens. How much easier is that call or e-mail to the person the executive referred you to? “Hi, Kelly. It’s Mike Weinberg. We haven’t spoken before, but I was visiting with Susan Montgomery [the senior executive], and she asked me to connect with you about QRS.” Or if that’s a little bold for your comfort, tone it down by saying, “Susan suggested I reach out to you and thought you might get value hearing about how we help with TUV.” Any approach that capitalizes on the internal referral is great and certainly places us in a stronger position than if we were initiating contact without it.

As a guy in my late twenties selling plastic components to manufacturers, I quickly learned it was a whole lot more fun and productive meeting with business owners and high-level management than it was to get beaten up by purchasing agents. Throughout my sales career that lesson has served me well. I challenge you to consider what type of preparation you would need to feel equipped to call on contacts higher up in your target accounts. I promise you it is worth the effort.

Selecting targets is a critical first step in creating a new business development sales attack. Once we have our target list nailed, it’s time to develop sales weapons to launch at these targets.