Long before you make the first dial, you must do extensive research to identify which verticals you should target. By “vertical”, we mean the specific target market that is most likely to purchase your product or service.
Highly specific target markets are typically smaller than a broad-sweep approach, but these verticals are generally more accessible, as you can craft your message more precisely.
For B2B sellers, we suggest an approach called account-based selling (ABS), which means targeting specific companies by finding the right stakeholders within those organizations.
One mistake companies often make is targeting industries that they want to sell to but that they have little to no track record working in. Your targeting should always be based on hard data and customer research.
Unless you have strong data indicating that you should go after a new industry, we recommend staying away from idealistic industries, as they can distract you from your short-term sales goals.
You might have high hopes of closing a large software license deal with a Fortune 500. But more often than not, your sales development team will only be distracted chasing enterprise leads. So don’t waste time trying to get past strict gatekeepers and spam filters when your smaller and more accessible leads are being neglected (and won by your competitors).
Larger organizations often have multiple departments overseeing similar functions, which might make it more difficult to find the right person to speak to.
Another concern with big companies that make big purchases is that the evaluation period is often much longer, which means longer sales cycles. Your SDR team will have to spend more time and make more touches in order to convert them to SQLs.
Don’t have time to read the full guide right now? Download the Ultimate Guide to B2B Appointment Setting to read at your convenience.
The lower the average sale price (ASP) of your product, the more appointments you will need to set on a monthly basis and the more active your pipeline needs to be. Keep this in mind as you think about the typical deal size you expect from your appointment setting outreach.
When targeting enterprise-level companies, the deal sizes will typically be much higher. But with this target market comes more hierarchy and bureaucracy that your appointment setting team will have to navigate.
With these factors in mind, it’s important to establish a floor and ceiling for your ICP aspirations. If your selling price is too low, then you may not be able to justify the cost of an appointment setting effort.
One way of handling a low ASP is to supplement SDR efforts with a marketing initiative, such as email automation, to reduce the number of touches your appointment setting team needs to make and speed up your sales cycle.
Integrating marketing campaigns with an SDR outreach can be a very effective way to quickly touch a large database.
Identify patterns in your data to make conclusions about what types of companies dominate your database, as well as which category your best customers fall into.
If you don’t have enough existing customer data to pull from, you can use the following tactics to supplement your ICP research:
Don’t have time to read the full guide right now? Download the Ultimate Guide to B2B Appointment Setting to read at your convenience.
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