Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 1

Hope everybody had a great weekend (or is having if you are in Canada!) and are pumped up for a great week ahead of opening up new doors of opportunities!  


This week the focus is slightly different than what I have been talking about - on best practices of cold-calling - this week the focus is how to go about preparing your target prospecting list. It’s a beneficial cold-calling technique I have learned that can enable you to do fewer dials for more meetings.  This is also a continuation of a previous blog I had written, which you can view here.

Facing a shrinking prospecting list?

What does this mean? Well - it is a phenomenon I call ‘constant refinement’, which means that as you start to go through your target list, identifying opportunities, it starts to become harder (by law of numbers) to keep finding more opportunities within the same list.  Say you start with a list of 1000 prospects to call, as you dig for the nuggets of gold and find them, the next nugget becomes harder to find as you have started to shrink your base of prospects. So you always have to be on the lookout for new accounts to target.

Let’s start - so the first part of your prospect list is to know who your target audience is.  

Identify your target market and familiarize yourself with it.

In other words - who is and who will be buying my product/service.  This is done by keeping an eye on the trends of your product/service in the marketplace.  What market does your product/service serve best with and are there up and coming new markets that might also benefit from your product/service?  

Find industries to target (low hanging fruit).

You can achieve this by finding out the easiest companies to sell your product / service to (low hanging fruit), then prioritize it to the next 'higher' hanging fruit, and so on.  This helps you as you can start to narrow the time spent learning about your product/service.  If you know have the answer, then start to study that particular industry, current events (news), customer case studies, etc.  


Its this preparation that’s very valuable as when you speak to your prospect, you can always include in your call “...would like to offer you the same as we’ve done with [XYZ customer - someone in their industry]...”.  This third party credibility is very helpful for establishing immediate trust.


Hope this is helpful to eveyone! Look forward to comments or questions.