How Often Do You Sell to Your Top 200 Prospects?

This isn’t an article on how to call your top 200 prospects. Instead, let’s ask this question… Do you know why they are your top 200 prospects…and why you should be selling to them? And…Do you know the top 200 prospects that your company would like to gain as new customers?

Why is this Important

Begin by starting out who you believe would benefit most from your product and/or service offerings. This is better known as your ICP or ideal customer profile. These prospects would be considered the highest probability to purchase with the greatest revenue potential.

Now, this is different than a buyer personas. This focuses on the individual person within the company and the person or persons that are most likely to purchase. The ICP focuses on the organization or company and personas are the recommenders, purchasers and influencers.

Defining Your ICP

Defining the ICP is going to be more than the traditional size of organization, how many employees, and industry. We want to take that a step further with more detail.

One way to define this is to understand the patterns of what customers have answered in your top 3 questions. The top 3 questions are usually your qualifying questions in order to uncover if there is a need. Place these answers in front of you and decide on your pattern. This will help you to formulate the ICP. Here is an example (please notice the formula not the details or the accuracy of the details), of a completed ICP.

“National food processing company with over 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $250 million in annual revenue that have approximately 10 processing lines in multiple locations, no upgrades, minimal floor coating, no curbs on the feet and are spending at least $10 million per year on maintenance.”

If you notice, the first part, “National food processing company with over 1,000 employees and revenues exceeding $250 million in annual revenue…” is the traditional information that we gather. The next part is based on your patterns, “have approximately 10 processing lines in multiple locations, no upgrades, minimal floor coating, no curbs on the feet and are spending at least $1 million per year on maintenance.”

The Top 200

Now that you have an ICP in place, it’s time to take a look at your top 200. Begin to ask the tough question if all 200 meet the ICP. If it’s a yes, keep it, if not, place them to the side. Once you complete this exercise now you know how many remain and how many vacant spots you need to fill to reach your 200. Once you have this completed, now you can begin to work your list and reap your rewards.

A Living Breathing List

As names on the list will come and go, its important to maintain the 200. It’s the critical way to reach your quota, and for the company to grow. In fact, high growth companies state that by developing an accurate (or as close as possible) ICP resulted in a 68% higher win rate.

This list can be shared with the marketing department, who can help you nurture the 200. Be sure to spend time with them so you both are in sync with communication tactics, messaging and set results.

Identifying More Top 200

To complete what we talked about today is difficult. It takes time, resources and plenty of research. Then there’s the efforts to call, cultivate and bring the top 200 companies into the sales cycle. With what you have to do each day, you may not have the time to complete it.

That’s where SalesLeads can help you. Our service offering “Prospecting Services” is an industrial lead generation and appointment setting service. What we discussed can be done by you, and/or can be done by SalesLead. Our job is to do the hard work to get you in front of qualified decision makers in your ideal customers with our seasoned business growth specialists. Let us know if we can help.