How to understand your market split, and identify ready-to-buy customers.
The inability to understand the market is the number one reason why all marketing strategies fail to deliver tangible results. Identifying who is ready to buy now, how they buy, why they buy and when they will, is the key to delivering successful marketing campaigns that drive revenue, growth and new business.
However, this is the step that every sales and marketing team skip over, assuming they know enough. Read on to find out how understanding your market will enable you to generate sales-ready leads and close more business.
Ready to buy?
In your market, how many people are ready to buy right now? And how many aren’t ready to make an immediate purchase but will do so in the future?
When the economy’s good, most businesses can achieve their sales targets with a short-term pipeline of new business fed by conversion-driven performance marketing for ready-to-buy customers.
However, performance marketing is often less successful during a downturn, when customers tighten their budgets to weather the trickier operating conditions or delay purchase decisions until later. ‘The projects have moved left, been pushed back.’
The effect is a reduced number of in-market buyers and an increase in out-of-market buyers. Or, more simply, fewer people buying and fewer deals closing.
Businesses and CEOs who can design sales and marketing strategies to reach both in-market and out-of-market groups will gain a huge competitive long-term advantage over their rivals during and after the trickier times. Why? Because, not only will you capture more of the in-market buyers, but you will have a focus on filling the pipeline with people who will be ready to buy later. Giving you a predictable stream of qualified leads, and the ability to focus your sales team on deals that can actually close.
Know Your Split of Out-of-Market: In-Market
To create a sustainable long-term pipeline of new business, B2B brands must employ the right messaging and channels to target long-term and short-term prospects efficiently, so understanding this fundamental market split is essential.
By understanding this market split, you can make decisions not made on instinct, but data to support your business goals, exit strategy or plans to diversify your revenue stream. Understanding the market fully will enable you to lower the risk when deploying your next sales and marketing strategy.
Sales-Led Marketing from Forge®
There will be no ‘new normal’. The socio-economical landscape is changing so rapidly that the world could have lived through more ‘new normals’ and ‘unprecedented’ events in the time it has taken to write and produce this content.
However, the basic principles of emotive long-term and rational short-term sales and marketing working in synergy to engage the whole market will hold true.
We Get Sales
While working with owner-managed and private equity-backed SMEs over the past two decades, we’ve lived with CEOs and sales teams through the challenges affecting every industry.
The Forge® team is uniquely positioned to understand how the right sales and marketing formula can help survive and thrive through the next five years, especially if you’re heading towards an exit.
Moving forward into the next five years and beyond, CEOs need support from a team that knows that the best marketing is really all about sales and is ready to campaign by your side until your marketing strategy is your business’s most significant single sales contributor.
