FOCUS — Find your buyer!

Finding your buyer can be frustrating, a little like trying to find your friend at a music festival when its past midnight, you have had a few drinks, and you are surrounded by 10,000 crazy people having the time of their lives. You know he is out there somewhere, but where do you even start looking?

Finding and understanding your buyer is crucial for any B2B company but most companies still don’t do this well, or some even at all. My own specialty is helping B2B and B2C software businesses scale so its that which I have in mind as I write this. Ill write in another post about what you do once you have found your buyer, explaining how you build a customer-centric sales process to pull that buyer towards the buying decision by helping them to buy, rather than selling to them.

The first step is to segment your market and find the segment that are most likely to buy from you (the low hanging fruit) and then within that segment you can start to define your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP’s). Geoffrey Moore writes about this in Crossing the Chasm (which if you haven’t read yet, stop reading this right now and go and read that), he says that its inevitable that there will be some sub-segment of your market that is more likely to buy from you. Your job is to figure out how to segment your market to find this sub-segment. It could be a particular vertical, a particular geography, a particular size of company, people with green hair, or some other form of characteristic. If you have customers already start with them, what characteristics do they share? If you don’t have customers yet then create some hypothesis that you can test with market research interviews.

Finding your ICP will allow you to focus targeted marketing messages which will undoubtedly appeal to them more than a broad and general message, it will allow you to focus your product development towards features that serve this segment, and it will allow your sales team to focus on the deals most likely to close. Most importantly having true focus forces you to say no to potentially lucrative opportunities that come knocking that are not within your target ICP. These will inevitably distract you and sure, saying no is not easy, but come on, lets be honest, nothing good in life is. Don’t spread yourself too thin, focus on being the 100% product for your target segment rather than being a 70% product for several segments, that’s how you will win.

This focus also allows you to then start thinking more about the buyer and to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional generalized representation of your buyer that you can use to ensure that all of your company is focused on the right thing. You give them a face, a name, a backstory, you make them real. Most importantly you make sure that everyone in your company knows who they are, what makes them tick, and how to talk to them. Using them in stories is always a powerful tool.

Once you have defined your buyer you then need to understand how that buyer makes buying decisions and then develop your marketing and sales processes to support their buying decision process. You need to create a magnet that pulls your buyers through the process naturally, and not the more common push that just feels wrong. There is a process to this and I will post about that shortly.