Chapter 1 – How to define my targets

Course content

Resources

Introduction

How to clearly define my persona and why I’m reaching out to them.

Before diving into the theory, let’s look at why segmentation is critical in outbound prospecting. Based on La Growth Machine’s data, campaigns that target well-defined personas see :

Higher response rates
Better engagement
Increased conversion rates

Mass outreach didn’t work, the data proves it,

Smaller audiences get above-average reply rates

Personas

What are they, and how do you craft yours ?

A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal prospect, built from real data and market research. It helps you personalize outreach, understand pain points, and predict objections.

When crafting a persona, consider:

Job Title & Industry: Who are they, and where do they work?
Responsibilities & Goals: What are they trying to achieve?
Challenges & Pain Points: What’s stopping them from succeeding?
Preferred Channels & Messaging Style: How do they like to communicate?

By answering these questions, you ensure that your outreach resonates rather than feeling like a cold, impersonal email.

Building personas for LGM

Now, let’s apply this to La Growth Machine using the principles above,

How did we start?

When segmenting companies, you’ll find yourself with two types of characteristics :

Prerequisites: mandatory characteristics for a company to qualify as addressable
Sorters: classifying characteristics that will allow you to regroup the company into similar company profiles

La Growth Machine’s prerequisite characteristics for companies are :

To be a B2B business – B2C cannot achieve good ROI due to the volume they need to do and the limitation of each outbound channel within LGM
Selling a solution/service to a nuclear market – if your addressable audience is a few hundred people a year, you do not want to burn through all your leads with automation.
To a digital audience – La Growth Machine is about multichannel automation. It only makes sense to consider multichannel automation if your leads are active on LinkedIn & Email.

If a company meets all of the prerequisite characteristics, we will then classify them based on :

Their business model: a SaaS business will not have the same outbound approach as a service provider or an agency.
Their industry: to adapt our social proof so we can showcase case studies and clients based on their industry. This is a great way of saying “People targeting similar audiences as you have had great successes, why not you?”.
The number of salespeople: companies will have a different organization of La Growth Machine depending on how many sales people they have.

As you can see, we’re starting to have different strategies AND target persona depending on the maturity of the company. In our case, the maturity is closely linked to the number of salespeople, but you could use other maturity classifiers such as fundraised, company size, total revenue, etc…

If you want to be thorough, you’ll have to merge your company segmentation with your persona segmentation and end up with a complex matrix of opportunities to address.

Now that you have the theoretical basis, you should be able to determine your persona.

Let’s move on to the next course : Building your database

Chapter 1 – How to define my targets

Introduction

How to clearly define my persona and why I’m reaching out to them.

Personas

What are they, and how do you craft yours ?

Building personas for LGM

Module 1 - Defining my targets

Module 2 - Building my database

Module 3 - Enriching my database

Module 4 - Automating my outreach

Module 5 - Managing replies & optimizing my performance

Module 6 - Building a lead machine