Your sales team members are like teenagers — they are always hungry. They always want more leads.
So you sign up with a list vendor and start building a target list to go after. You have a great product, a sales commission management software. Your customers are primarily in the $10-100m range, so it makes sense for your team to look for more leads in the same revenue range.
You go to your list vendor, select the $10M to $100M revenue range, add the job titles you’re looking for, and your XDRs are off to the races!
Fast forward 90 days… Your sales team is still unhappy ?
You look at the conversion rates for your XDRs, and they don’t look good. They look terrible. What went wrong?
You look deeper at the “unqualified” numbers; “No fit” is the leading reason. Yikes!
Are we in the wrong market?!
Or maybe you just used the wrong criteria for your target list?
It turns out that relying on revenue range as the primary criteria for your prospecting list leads to wasted time and resources, frustration, and missed opportunities. Why is this?
So, how can you improve your prospecting and avoid wasting time on leads that aren’t a good fit? Here are a few steps you can take:
1. Look for the right firmographics
Let’s say you sell sales commission management software to mid-sized businesses with variable compensation plans. What determines the value of your solution is the number of salespeople in a company. You already know that with fewer than ten salespeople, they can manage with spreadsheets and duct tape, so you want to filter these companies out.
You also know that by the time they have 100 salespeople, they will most likely already have a commission management solution. In most cases, it would be a legacy solution that your solution could replace. So while you want to keep them on your list, you can segment them out to tailor your messaging for a replacement play.
But there is more to it. What if the company has only five salespeople but is hiring quickly? You’d surely want to include them in your list and be the first vendor to get on their radar screens, so that’s another data point you’d like to add to your criteria.
2. Add technographics
If you can find out their existing solution, that’s a great insight that you can use to tailor your pitch accordingly. But even if you cannot get that exact piece of data, a good understanding of the company’s tech stack can help you focus on the prospects that would be a good fit. If your sales commission solution relies on Salesforce data, there is no point in reaching out to companies that work with a different CRM.
3. Focus on the problem you solve or the job to be done
By now, you’ve made good progress with these more granular company and technology filters. Your sales team spends a good amount of time prospecting companies that meet all these firmographics and technographic criteria, but there is one problem they keep encountering. It is a big problem: many of these companies don’t pay sales commissions to their salespeople. ?
By gathering this information ahead of time and only targeting companies that pay variable sales commissions, you can improve your prospecting and increase conversion rates at every stage of the sales process. This is where your sales team can start striking gold.
4. Weed out the no-go’s
Hitting a significant roadblock is never fun, especially if you see it coming a mile away. For example, if your solution doesn’t support a channel sales commission process, you want to avoid wasting time and resources prospecting companies that sell exclusively through partners.
As always, you should measure and iterate. Fine-tuning your ICP criteria is ongoing, so don’t worry about perfecting it right off the gate. As you collect more data about your conversion rates, you can continue to add more variables to your criteria and better refine your list.
What kind of results can you expect?
Focusing on your ideal customer profile (ICP) criteria can make an immediate difference. A good example is the story of Demostack, which helps software companies streamline their demo presentations. They ditched their previous list filtering methods and instead worked with RevenueBase to build a database of companies that offer a demo on their website.
The results for Demostack were a game changer. Within the first month, they increased their demo booking rates by 5x. A few of their outreach sequences had close to 100% open rate, which was unheard of before. And their BDRs can now spend twice as much time prospecting since they don’t waste valuable time building and refining their target lists.
Takeaways
Can you find the data to create your target list with the proper criteria?
Yes, you can find this information with a bit of detective work. For example, you can go to Linkedin and count the number of salespeople you see. If you find a job post for an open sales position, you can find out if they pay a commission. While it takes time and effort, it will save much more time and effort that would otherwise be spent chasing the wrong prospects.
You can also check out RevenueBase, where we can do this for you at scale (and also find the right contacts and keep them all up to date…)
To find out more, Request a Demo!
