Handicapping Your Target Market

Who wouldn’t love to have the Super Trifecta when four long shots finish in the money at the racetrack? Luck is a good thing, we all need it, but I wouldn’t want to wager business results on the concept.

Avid horse racing fans spend hours handicapping their bets. They subscribe to publications like The Daily Racing Form, belong to online forums like TVG.com and study what the celebrated handicappers pick. They look at bloodlines, work times and previous finish times. Occasionally they go with name or jockey or trainer, but not unless all the other things line up.

Creating personas for a target market is a lot like handicapping race horses. You want to know everything you can about them. Especially anything that will help you win. Some handicappers love a bloodline. They’ll bet anything with a Bold heredity or a River bloodline, for example. This is closer to what you’re trying to accomplish with a persona.

A persona pulls the traits of a group of people together so you can make certain assumptions about them and determine the best way to engage them—and this is very important—before they get to choice, where they’ve selected their vendor for the product or service you sell. The best way to get close enough to your target is to know enough about them that your messaging is so relevant that they don’t think twice about putting your organization on their list of vendors under consideration.

Building layers of knowledge about your prospects will come as time goes by and you have the opportunity to learn more and more. As you do, flesh out your persona with more details and give your company the opportunity to continuously up the odds of creating actionable relationships.

As an example, I’m borrowing Adele Revella’s example of Chris: (You can see her blog post here. The comments are interesting as well.)

Chris is 29 years old and recently married. He and Karen want children some day, but she’s also got a good job, and with the pressures of a big mortgage, they think they’ll wait a few years to start their family. For now their baby is Logan, a two-year-old springer spaniel that they rescued from a shelter.

Chris has been in the tech industry for five years. He was a product manager until the most recent reorganization created a separate product marketing group. He willingly made the move to the new department, but that was more than a year ago and he is still trying to understand just how his job fits with those in product management, marketing communications, and sales. Chris is responsible for the go-to-market planning for several products, but he spends most of his time; attending meetings, answering emails, writing content for sales collaterals, helping sales people with customer accounts, and driving to and from work – the new house has resulted in a longer commute and the traffic is horrible.

These pressures plus a tight travel budget have limited Chris's customer interactions to times when he helps sales people with demos or prospect presentations – definitely not what he had in mind when he took this job. He knows he’s not spending enough time listening to the market or working on strategic activities, but he doesn’t have time to get focused amid the daily frenzy of requests and emails. He keeps thinking that there is a more effective way to do his real job, but can’t figure out how to get there from here.

Given Adele’s example above, what conclusions can you draw? What messaging focuses are likely to engage Chris? What’s interesting is the mix of personal and work environment information. People asked Adele a lot of questions to extend their insights to his personal life, but that’s a lot more to do with enjoying the story than approaching him as a prospect for work purchases in a B2B environment.

There’s the point at which you must guard against getting too involved in individual personal characteristics when developing personas. You need to remain conscious of the fact that a persona is representative of a group of people. Not just one.

A persona should give you an idea about selling to a select target market. With that in mind, here are some things to think about if you have prospects and customers in Chris’ situation.

• Chris needs to maximize his time.
• Better collaboration might help him work better with the departments he interfaces with and may even cut back on all that email.
• Podcasts with market insights and strategic thinking ideas he can listen to during his commute might help him get some of his focus back. Someone like Chris doesn’t have any time to read more, so if you can help him leverage audio during his drive, that may help you get closer to him.

Given the information you know about Chris, what else would you like to know to draw closer connections to how to interest him in your products? Would knowing if he bought an immaculate house in well repair or a fixer upper tell you if he’s willing to take on the project of adding one-off tools to his marketing arsenal or if he’d be a candidate for a one-stop solution that the vendor maintains for him?

Handicapping your targets is an ongoing process. This article is only scratching the surface of what’s possible. You’ll have to stretch your thinking to see what other details you can use to draw conclusions that give you that extra relevancy which could mark the difference between getting your foot in the door or being left at the gate.

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B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.