Targeted Selling: How to Find & Target Sales Prospects

To grow your business, you must consistently add leads to your sales pipeline.

But instead of focusing on the quantity of leads, targeted selling is all about the quality of the leads.

The philosophy behind targeted selling is that most of a company’s leads are not good fits for its product or service.

So why waste time and resources on them?

Instead, spend that time acquiring higher quality leads that are more likely to buy.

Below, we’ll go over some essential tips on finding and targeting sales prospects for targeted selling. ⬇️

Define your ICP (ideal customer profile) 👨‍🦰

The first step to targeting your customers is having an idea of who they are.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) helps you understand your customers and optimize your marketing accordingly.

Here are some key things typically included in an ICP:

• Demographics: Age, location, income level, etc., of the target customer.
• Professional information: job title, industry, company size, responsibilities.
• Challenges/pain points: What challenges are they trying to solve?
• Purchasing process: Who’s involved in the buying decision, and what’s their budget?
• Preferred communication channels: How do they like to be contacted? Through email, phone, or in person?

At lemlist, we’ve created an ICP generator that generates three different buyer personas. It uses AI to do this for you in just a few clicks.

Where does your ideal customer hang out?

Now you have your ideal customer profile ready; it’s time to figure out where to find them.

A part of this work was probably done when defining your ideal customer.

If you have a B2C business, you will probably find your audience on social media platforms.

For B2B, you may need to use other channels like cold calling, cold emailing, or through paid ads.

Since you’re focusing on lead quality over quantity, you want laser focus on the exact channels where your ideal customer hangs out.

If you take a broader approach than that, you’ll no longer practice targeted selling, and your conversion rate will likely drop.

To help you find your leads:

lemlist offers a 450M+ leads database that can be filtered by various criteria like:

• ➡️ Job title
• ➡️ Industry
• ➡️ Keyword in profile
• ➡️ Department
• ➡️ Seniority
• ➡️ Company size
• ➡️ Current company size growth
• ➡️ Full name
• …and many more.

After finding the leads, you can use lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier to find and verify their contact info.

Qualify your leads

Qualifying a lead helps you decide whether the lead should go in your pipeline or not.

You should qualify your leads based on how much they match your ideal customer profile.

Assess how much your product or services corresponds to their paint points and what their decision-making authority is.

Giving your leads a score allows you to focus on the leads with the highest potential, and that’s what targeted selling is all about.

Use a multichannel outreach approach

Now that you have qualified leads, it’s time to reach out to them.

An excellent way to do so is through a multichannel outreach campaign.

A multichannel approach can boost your conversion rate significantly.

lemlist is a cold outreach tool that allows you to contact your leads through email, cold calling, and LinkedIn.

For example, you start by automatically visiting their LinkedIn profile and sending them an invitation. Next, you may want to send them an automated LinkedIn (voice) message followed by a cold call or a follow-up email.

The process described above is completely automated. Once set up, you simply add more leads to the campaign.

However, you can also add manual steps, like commenting on their social media posts, to a campaign. lemlist will notify you when a manual action is pending.

Keep your leads list fresh

As data tends to get outdated over time, keeping your leads list updated is important.

Reaching out to an outdated list of leads has nothing to do with targeted selling!

People change their professional roles frequently, and their needs and pain points change fast.

Additionally, if a lead stays dormant, more companies will contact them. In short, losing relevance is easy if you don’t keep your list fresh.

Key takeaways

• ➡️ Targeted selling can significantly boost your conversion rate without wasting time and resources on weak leads.
• ➡️ By creating your ICP and qualifying your leads, you can find the highest quality leads.
• ➡️ A multichannel outreach approach is the best way to reach and convert those leads.