Sales Strategy: Hit Sales Targets by Targeting Your Sales and Marketing

Danita Bye

In an age of seemingly dwindling opportunities and seemingly endless competition, picking up every sale you can get is seemingly imperative. It’s either that, or go hungry, right?

Wrong – everything is not as it seems, and if you get caught up in the idea that your business has to be everything to everyone and take every opportunity that comes its way, you stand a good chance of starving in the streets.

You need a Great Sales Strategy -

Not Every Market Is a Good Market for Your Business

I’ll make this as clear as I can: specialization does not limit profit potential. In fact, specialization can improve sales performance and profits so much and so fast that your only regret will be that you didn’t do it sooner. Just ask the doctor who chose podiatry over general practice. Ask Apple Computer, which sticks to serving a design-conscious, well-heeled customer base and does quite well, thank you, with only about 10% of the market (Apple used to do fine with less, too). Or ask me – I’ve seen the power of targeting niche markets in action.

Targetting markets yields higher sales results.

Back in the 90s, I invested in a hearing aid manufacturing company, figuring the rising average age of citizens in this country could only work to my advantage. That part was true. I also figured that more was merrier when it came to marketing our products. That turned out to be less true.

Operating on the principle that our market was any clinic which sold hearing aids, we “targeted” hospitals, ENT offices, VA contracts, private practice audiologists, and dispensers no matter where they could be found. Our prospect list was 14,000 strong, and our eight salespeople worked that list hard, contributing to a 50% per year growth.

I’m not making much of a case for specialization and target marketing, am I? Just wait. All it took to bring down this house of cards was a special report on ABC’s Nightline, a report that painted a very negative picture of the retail side of our industry and which soon got the FDA’s attention.

Leave Money on the Table. Leave the Competition Behind.

After the Nightline story aired, our sales dropped 20% in one month. Our competitors cut prices, creating a playing field so steep that we just couldn’t win. It soon got so bad that we were faced with some hard choices, including letting half of our sales force go and possibly selling the company in a buyer’s market.

Before it came to that, though, we got a flash of insight: what if we focused our marketing and sales efforts on a select group of prospects who were a perfect fit for our unique strengths? What if we customized our marketing message, services, and offerings to appeal to a niche group of high ROI customers? What if we said, when looking at the money on the table, “We’ll take some of that, but we’ll leave the rest”?

To those who subscribed to the “more markets mean more money” philosophy, this cure was worse than the disease. For us, it is not on made our hearing aid manufacturing company more successful than ever, it laid the groundwork for many of the principles and techniques I use every day to increase sales and margins for the businesses I consult with.

Why did a plan that said to some potential customers, “No, we don’t want your business,” work? More importantly, how can your business implement the same strategies and realize the sales success that we did? I cover those topics in detail, along with the myths that lead managers and CEOs to waste limited resources on unfocused, unprofitable markets, in my free book, Target Sales Focus. In this short space, though, I can tell you from personal experience and the experiences of my clients that a precisely targeted sales and marketing approach cuts costs while it boosts ROI, allows you to price like a specialist, cranks up the revs on your referral engine, and offers a wealth of other benefits you’d never expect.

As the old saying goes, “less is more,” and it’s never truer than when it’s applied to a marketing and sales plan that brings your core strengths to bear on well-defined markets just waiting for a business like yours to claim them and make them your own.

To learn more about the power of a targeted sales focus and for a step-by-step plan to zero in on your own perfect-fit market, get your free copy of Target Sales Focus today.

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye built her reputation on building and inspiring process-oriented, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100-turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their businesses to the next level. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales leadership to increase sales, creating predictable revenue streams.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving to become an equity partner and national sales manager for a Minneapolis-based medical device company. In this capacity, she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to a run rate of $20 million in just ten years.

Danita has authored numerous articles on sales management and leadership. In addition, she was a featured as a sales development expert on the TV show, “The Ruthless Entrepreneur,” which is currently airing on the Oxygen Network. Leadership Shift, Management Acceleration and a library of eBooks on critical sales management issues are available on the Sales Growth Specialists’ website.

Danita can be reached at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com, 612-267-3320 or 800-256-2799.

For more insights on Sales Strategy and Sales Process, visit www.SalesGrowthSpecialists.com.