Fine-Tune Your Messaging: How to Reach and Resonate with Your Best Sales Prospects

Think segmentation is an outdated tactic? Think again. Sales expert and OpenView Top 25 Sales Influencer Kendra Lee explains why it’s more crucial than ever to create messaging that is truly in tune with your prospects.

At a time when companies are doing everything they can to deliver more personalized, one-to-one messaging to prospects and customers, some marketers and salespeople are beginning to pay less attention to segmentation. After all, if the goal is to create messaging that is hyper relevant to each customer’s unique needs and pains, what good are broad segments based on generic (and sometimes outdated) data?

That’s true to a degree, says sales expert Kendra Lee. But Lee also points out that it isn’t segmentation that’s the problem. Instead, it’s how businesses use and view segmentation that’s the issue.

“If you’re focusing on just a few very broad segments and then blasting messaging to those segments that is only slightly personalized, then, no, you are not going to derive any benefit from segmentation,” says Lee, who was recently named one of OpenView’s Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013. “Truthfully, segmentation might be more critical to sales success than ever before. But to be successful, your segmentation efforts need to be more hyper-focused — pinpointing microsegments and delivering targeted messaging that appeals to more specific customer problems.”

The reality, Lee explains, is that your prospects are inundated with generic, poorly targeted content that very quickly gets ignored or tossed into email junk folders. For your messaging to avoid that fate, it must quickly and clearly address your prospects’ biggest priorities.

“If you haven’t researched those priorities and segmented your prospecting lists based on that information, it’s like shooting in the dark,” Lee says. “You’ll have very little chance of creating messaging that appeals to your audience. That will cause your response rates will plummet and your follow-up content to fall flat.”

How to Identify and Prioritize Your Prospect Segments

The good news, Lee says, is that prospect segmentation isn’t an overly difficult or labor intensive process.

By simply investing some time into studying your client base, you probably have all the information you need to create tightly focused prospect segments. From there you can create messaging or content for those segments.

Here are three tips for doing just that:

1) Start with Your Current Client Base and Work Backward

Where have you been successful? Why have you been successful there? Do your best customers share specific qualities or pain points? Asking those questions should reveal a handful of good segments that you can then filter down to identify your best segments. Make sure to focus on where you’ve been successful recently, however. Your successes five years ago may not be relevant to your market today.

2) Identify Your Team’s Core Expertise

Aside from the specific problems your product is designed to address, it’s also important to examine the domain or segment experience that you have in-house. Are your employees particularly knowledgeable of the medical field? Or do you have a salesperson who knows everything about education or small business? Choose segments where you’ve not just had success, but also have staff to serve future clients well.

3) Examine Your Competition

If a segment is overly saturated with competitors and your business hasn’t yet established its foothold, it may be best to wait to attack that segment. The reason? The sales process in highly competitive segments is typically much longer, and many smaller technology companies can’t afford to wait around for revenue.

After doing each of those things you have the data you need to create a list of hyper-focused microsegments that you can then prioritize based on opportunity.

“If your recent sales history suggests that you’ve been particularly successful in one segment and the competition is low in that segment, go after that one first,” Lee says. “And when you do that, be sure to take segmentation a step further by looking for smaller groups within that segment. If some exist, make sure you fine-tune your messaging for each of those microsegments.”

Tips for Progressively Testing Your Messaging

Of course, once you identify your best microsegments and begin to deliver messaging to prospects within them, that doesn’t mean your work is done.

 

In fact, that’s actually when the hard part begins.

“There are numerous different channels that can be used to deliver your content and generate leads,” Lee says. “You might use email, social media, or cold calling, but regardless of the lead generation activities you use, you have to test and monitor your messaging over short periods of time to make sure it’s actually delivering results.”

To do that, Lee says businesses must look beyond how many quality leads they generate. While that can be an indicator of a quality segment and effective messaging, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

“To truly understand if your messaging is working, you have to look at sales,” Lee explains. “Evaluating your segments and your messaging on lead gen alone isn’t enough. Because those leads may move through the sales funnel and run into roadblocks that your messaging isn’t addressing. And if that’s the case, click-throughs and early-stage conversions are meaningless. If you don’t fix the holes in your messaging in the later stages of the sales process, then even the best segment will be worthless.”