Sales targeting isn’t a step you can skip; it’s a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting customers and increasing sales. Sales targeting methodology is pretty accurate and very effective at helping you get the most out of your sales efforts.

That’s why it’s important to develop a well-thought-out targeting strategy that takes into account who your target customers are, what their interests and needs are, and how best to reach them.

What is sales targeting? Why is sales targeting important? How to do sales targeting? What are the main sales targeting strategies?

In this post, we’ll explain the theory of sales targeting and why it should matter for your prospecting strategy. Then, we’ll jump into our very own step-by-step guide to create a great sales targeting process.

What is sales targeting?

Sales targeting is a methodology that helps you identify the targeted leads that best match your sales ICP and your personas. As you guess, this process comes after marketing targeting, which is about defining your personas and ICP.

Sales targeting is also different from sales segmentation: the first one is focused on a single segment that you’ll target, while sales segmentation is about dividing prospects into meaningful segments and ranking them in order of priority. In other words, segmentation comes a step before targeting.

Why is sales targeting important?

Sales targeting has a huge impact on your marketing ROI and sales results: when you focus on the right leads, you can drive more qualified leads to your pipeline and maximize your sales opportunities.

In fact, at LaGrowthMachine, we’ve measured that targeting is responsible for about 50% of your sales campaign success. The other 50% is attributed to the copywriting of your sales messages.

Indeed, here are the main benefits of sales targeting:

Shorten your sales cycle as you understand better what actions to take;

Increase leads conversion rate by reaching prospects who have higher chances to convert into customers;

Improve the accuracy of your predictions and get better insights about customer behavior;

Reduce marketing costs as you can focus on high-value leads instead of wasting time and budget on low-quality leads;

Increase sales impact as you can communicate the right message to the right segment of prospects.

And here are the main points of failure if you don’t /y attention to sales targeting:

Low engagement as you target irrelevant leads;

Poor lead conversion rate due to wrong copywriting;

Wasted budget on useless campaigns targeting wrong prospects;

Lack of insights because you don’t understand the best-performing channels or audiences;

Poor ROI.

How to do sales targeting?

Sales targeting should obey a very accurate methodology in order to be effective. From our perspective, there are several steps you need to follow if you want to succeed. That’s what we want to show you next.

At LaGrowthMachine, sales targeting goes through these different stages:

  • Step 1: Define your personas and ICP
  • Step 2: Do a proper segmentation
  • Step 3: Choose your sales playground

Step 1: Define your personas and ICP

This is much more of a marketing task, but you really need to ensure this is done before even thinking about sales targeting.

As a reminder, let’s define what they are:

  • Persona: a persona is an archetype representing a cluster of people sharing similar characteristics, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors.
  • ICP: Ideal Customer Profile refers to the characteristics of your perfect customers. It should contain demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information.

This means you can have several personas, but only one ICP per persona. For example:

  • Persona 1: Salespeople
  • ICP: Salespeople working in agencies scaling up their sales processes

To create your persona, you can check Hubspot’s “Make My Persona” tool, getting guided through the different steps of the process.

Step 2: Do a proper segmentation

Personas and ICPs help you identify the different segments of your market audience. Once you’ve done that job, you’ll be able to identify your main segments, which are parts of the market you want to reach.

Here’s an example of what a segment should look like Small business owners between 25 and 45 years old, working in the tech industry, have a team of up to 10 people, and a yearly revenue of up to 5 million US dollars.

When you’ve identified all your segments, your next job is to prioritize them to know which are the one or the two main ones you’ll focus on.

To do that, ask yourself these questions:

  • As a company, are we legit to focus on this segment?
  • What are our core product/service benefits compared to our competitors for this segment?
  • What is the size of this segment?
  • How much money this segment represents (=what’s the potential?)

At LaGrowthMachine, we’re using 2 formulas that can help you to estimate the potential of a segment.

First, calculate the potential customer segment value:

The details of each component are below. You can get these data from your current client lifecycle:

  • Average Purchase Value: This is the average amount of money a current customer spends on a purchase.
  • Average Purchase Frequency: This is the average number of times a customer from your identified segment makes a purchase within a given period of time.
  • Average Customer Lifetime: This is the average duration of time a customer stays with your business or remains part of the customer segment.

When you get the Potential Customer Segment Value, you can go with this second calculation:

Where:

  • Lead Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of leads from the lead segment that convert into paying customers.
  • Potential Customer Segment Value: That you got from the previous calculation.

Step 3: Choose your sales playground

By playground, we mean selecting the source you want to get your lead from as well as the channels you’ll be using to outreach to them – for the outreach part, we recommend that you go through our post about automated outreach or keep on reading this post, as we’re going to talk about it in the next sections.

If you’re working in B2B, you most likely want to focus on LinkedIn first – especially the Sales Navigator version which is very effective for sales.

Indeed, LinkedIn is not just the largest leads database in the world, it is also one of the most effective ways to reach out to your leads.

Here’s a use case you should consider:

1. You can use the Sales Navigator version to search and find leads that match the segment you want to prioritize first. To do so, you can use Linkedin Sales Navigator filters such as job titles, industry, location, etc.

2. Then, you build a list of prospects who match your segment criteria (let’s say, all sales managers working in vineyards with a +20% budget).

3. Outreach with your leads: either you do it by phone, email, or LinkedIn, you need to select the channels you’ll be using to contact them. Two benefits of using LaGrowthMachine here:

  • you can import your segments of leads directly from LinkedIn to LaGrowthMachine;
  • you can craft multichannel sequences using not only 1 but 3 channels to outreach with them;
  • you can do this all automatically, with a very high degree of personalization.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

Top 3 Sales Targeting Strategies in 2023

Now that we’ve gone through the process when it comes to sales targeting, let’s talk about the strategies you can use.

Indeed, there are three main strategies that are working for targeting B2B:

  • Geo-targeting;
  • Account-Based Marketing;
  • Intent-Based Targeting.

For each targeting strategy, we’ll explain what it is, how it works, and the main benefits of using it.

Strategy 1: Geo-Targeting

If your company offers any products or insights specific to certain locations, using geo-targeting would be the best choice.

This strategy allows you to target customers based on their geographic location, such as city, state, country, or even region.

Then, in these areas, you can segment your personas accordingly and then personalize content specific to each customer segment’s needs.

To do this, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator filters which offer very accurate location outputs.

Strategy 2: Account-Based Marketing

That’s one of our favorites at LaGrowthMachine because it works so well!

This targeting strategy is based on finding and targeting high-value companies (or accounts) instead of individual personas. Then, you’ll get to find leads inside those companies.

By using LinkedIn Sales Navigator filters, you can search for specific accounts with very high accuracy.

For example: if you’re trying to focus on marketing managers staffing their team, you could add a filter to only cluster companies that +30% employees in marketing.

This way, you’ll be able to find the right companies and get leads that are more likely to convert.

Check our LinkedIn ABM guide if you want to know how to build this process step by step!

Strategy 3: Intent-Based Targeting

Intent-based targeting involves using data and technology to identify and target leads who are actively showing intent to purchase based on their online behavior, such as search queries, website visits, and engagement with specific content.

With the help of social media analytics or Google Ads, you can identify leads who are actively searching for your products or services. Then, you can target them with personalized messages that will help increase conversions and sales.

This allows sales teams to prioritize prospects who are most likely to convert and focus their efforts accordingly.

Bonus Step: when it comes to outreach…

Even if you’ve got all your targeting ready, that’s the beginning of the process. You also need to make sure your outreach approach is appropriate and effective.

At this stage of the process, LaGrowthMachine is the tool you need: with our tool, you can automate your sales prospecting and save a lot of time, while boosting up your lead generation.

First, import your lead from LinkedIn or a CSV file. You’ll be asked to create an audience.

Then, create your sales sequence and match it with your audience (which is the lead segment you want to target in priority). As we’re providing multi-channel selling software, you can choose to build it on a single channel, or different channels such as LinkedIn + Email. In our experience, multi-channel is really the best option for sales outreach here.

Whether you’re doing it on single or multiple channels, try to combinate your great sales targeting strategy with great copywriting! If you managed to do both great, you can expect a 50% response rate even with cold outreach!

After setting up your campaign, you’re good to go! Simply launch it.

A few things for the next steps:

  • you can choose to plug your LaGrowthMachine account with your favorite CRM, to see the lead popping up automatically and being updated consistently in your CRM interface.
  • you can choose to answer on LinkedIn or by email in only one single interface, which is our sales inbox (a huge time-saver).
  • you can observe the performance of each message of your campaign, with KPIs such as bounce rate, deliverability, and response rate, … This very detailed reporting feature allows you to identify if there is a point of failure somewhere, and enable you to iterate on your campaign.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!