Article
Taking the Guesswork Out of Sales & Marketing
Best Practices: GTM Targeting
It’s always that time of year – in sales and marketing we’re always starting a new quarter, ending a new quarter, trying to create demand for the following year or just planning. We always want to start strong and grow better. Let’s assume you start strong. But how do you grow better? How do you outsmart the competition? How do you create sales and marketing systems that help identify the leads that matter? We need to create a system to identify these closeable leads so that sales teams can understand which deals that they can count on for revenue going forward.
I hosted a webinar where we explored how to up the odds of your marketing and sales campaigns’ success. Closeable revenue is all about the math. Whether that revenue is from demand generation, new opportunities, leads, etc. These days it’s easy (or should be easy) to use systems to determine those opportunities and leads that will convert into closeable business.
We dove into the 6 steps to increase the odds of building closeable demand and closeable business. It boils down to creating the right profile so you can target the right audience and then building models to understand and categorize which are the right accounts/people to go after. Figuring out which are the best models to identify and categorize leads. Building campaigns using AI to optimize and go after the right kinds of companies and people. Testing the models to identify and evaluate the right results. And finally, do this across both sales and marketing to ensure both teams are fully aligned. So what are the right questions to ask as you go through these steps?
Step #1: Build Better Buyer Profiles – How do you build Buyer Profiles? Do you have a customer data project? Customer Data Platform? How often is it updated? Is it shared across GTM? What’s the breadth of data sources?
Step #2: Target Your Ideal Buyer & TAM – Targeting is easy once you have models. Have you created a model, or is it at least in your head? What are the buying signals that matter? How many lookalikes in the world? Which territory is your next best place?
Step #3: Create Your Buyer Model – Better campaigns are all about “lift” – propensity, persona and intent. How does industry, persona, tech install, engagement or company specialty fit in?
Step #4: Optimize Your Campaigns – Campaign to Buyers and Buying Team combinations by propensity, persona and intent. Do you understand which regions convert with which products or personas?
Step #5: Put Your Buyer Model to the Test – Increase lead flow by removing friction. Are you using A/B testing to formulate GTM campaigns and how much engagement is needed? Are you doing territory and ABM investment tiering based on GTM science?
Step #6: Align Marketing & Sales with Your Buyer Data Platform – Are both sales and marketing aligned together on the same customers and prospects to deliver the outcomes? Are both teams together leveraging the profiles and funnel optimization techniques to deliver better growth? Is there an aligned measurement system to track what you manage?
These are the six steps that I use in building scalable and closeable demand. Explore what we found really works and what is delivering today with results for sales and marketing professionals worldwide with respect to each of these 6 steps by watching last month’s webinar, Taking the Guesswork out of Sales & Marketing.
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If you want outbound TAM development to produce pipeline, you need a TAM built for operations, not optics.
