Understand your services

It sounds simple, but it’s vital that you understand your service or product inside out.

Before you can sell your offering, you need to know that what you provide helps solve your customers’ problems and adds value to their business. By knowing exactly where you fit in offering a solution for customers, you will be able to start to understand what type of people and businesses will suffer from these problems – and thus, who to target.

Talk to your existing clients

Your existing clients are an invaluable resource. You already have a relationship with them and as a result, you can help each other. They can help you provide a better service by answering some simple questions and that is something that will benefit them in return.

Do you know what their big problems are? Do you know what motivates them? If you can’t state this with 100% certainty – ask them. Once you know, you can tailor products and services to meet this need – which will drive sales to your business.

Research the competition

Considering your competitors and their positioning is an important stage of the market research process, and as such in identifying whom your perfect customers are. Key points to look into include considering your competitor’s price point, their means of communications and any weaknesses.

Depending on how well your competitor is doing, you may not want to go after the same exact market. On the other hand, if their customers are extremely unsatisfied with current offerings, you may want to jump in.

Survey target groups

A simple survey on your social media account, website or distributed via email can be invaluable in delivering information that can shape your offering. There are countless online tools available to aid in the creation of surveys and they don’t have to cost the earth (if anything at all).

Also, consider what job titles are looking at your company? Why are they visiting your website or social media page?

Gather this information and add it to your arsenal.

Create a persona and tailor your marketing and sales to them

Using all the information you gathered from the previous steps, build a persona of your perfect customer.

What field do they work in? What publications do they read? Are they active online? If so, where?

What are their problems? How can you offer solutions? What sets you apart from your competitors?

Then, use this persona to start a dialog with them. It doesn’t need to be a sales call, but use it to shape the content you are sharing online and with them directly. Instead of talking about your company and your services, show understanding of your customers’ issues and give expert knowledge in a field that can help them.

If you can combine all the steps above and harness it properly, sales will follow.