The 21 Marketing and Sales Challenges of ICT Businesses

Challenge #2 –  No Clear Target Market

Welcome to the second in our series of 21 Marketing and Sales Challenges of ICT Businesses and what to do about them.

If someone asks you, “Who is your target market or your ideal customer?”, could you really answer it succinctly in one or two sentences? Most businesses (including ICT businesses) can’t.

Watch the video and read the article below on how to overcome this challenge.

We can help Anyone

Usually, the answer to the target market question is that we can help everyone. That’s natural because you have range of products and services and can actually service a wide range of small to large business.

The issue of the “we can help anyone” approach is it doesn’t work in the long-term because:

• Your message is too general and
• It’s hard to identify “everyone”.

So, how do you solve it? You need to pick a target market and focus on that first. That seems pretty easy and pretty logical, doesn’t it? But what you need is a process to do that.

A simple process for choosing an Ideal Target Market

1.Collect data on your existing customers

Use MYOB, Xero or whatever accounting package you have. Then take last year’s sales and sort them from highest to lowest.

Why do you want to do that? Because these are your highest revenue customers – and most likely you need to find more “lookalikes”.

2. Spend time analysing them

Next  spend 5-10 minutes examining each one of the top 25 customers. Work out:

• What industries or segments are they in?
• Who is the decision-maker?
• Where are they located?
• What products and services do they buy?
• What outcomes do they get by using these products and services.

3. Look for patterns

Then find the common industries/markets amongst these top 25 customers. You will usually find 5-7 different key markets that are common amongst this group of customers.

You will also have documented more about what products you sell to each customer and their outcomes. You can use this information to identify cross-selling opportunities as well as for developing marketing content and sales presentations. When you have this ready you are now able to prioritise.

4. Rank the top 5 Markets

The trouble most ICT businesses have when they identify these different markets is that they don’t know which one to focus on first.

What we suggest if that you develop a list of criteria for ranking your target market options (or feel free to use ours) below:

• How do you compare to the competition?
• Do you have the resources to meet their needs?
• How large is this market?
• What is the growth potential of this market?
• What is the profitability of this market?
• How easy is it to reach this market?
• Do they need unique products/services than other markets?
• Do you really understand their needs?
• Do you have good testimonials/Case histories of similar customers in the market?

By the way you can download a  Market Priority Ranker here which has all these questions and will allow you to rank all the options.

What you will then get is the total score at the bottom for each of the priority markets.

5. Start with the Number One priority

When you have found your highest priority market you can start your lead generation targeting with that highest priority option. What you will find is that targeting people that you can best serve profitably plus create content and have great case studies for will yield much  better lead generation results.

Need some guidance?

If you need more help this challenge, we have a free Integrated Marketing Plan Roadmap you can download. You can also download the Market Priority Ranker mentioned above.

That’s the second of the marketing and sales challenges that ICT businesses face. If you would like to discuss any specific marketing needs feel free to contact us