Pragmatic Sales Strategy

How to Build a Realistic Market Attack Plan

Building a successful business requires step wise iteration towards the long term promise of your company. Many platforms stumble by attempting to sell too far ahead of their current strengths and capabilities.

Target market segmentation is the process of creating realistic market attack plan of how to drive revenue today — anchoring on current capabilities and strengths.

Executed well, it will allow you to build the crucial momentum, customer proof points, and revenue to get to the next stage of growth (where you then get to repeat the process).

Lets unpack:

Outcome

When complete, your plan will contain (at a minimum):

• Target businesses you will reach out to in the coming period
• Target personas within the accounts you will target (with names + contact)
• Horizontal Buying Reason — the most important value per persona
• Segment Buying Reason — the most important impact you can have for that type of business

Starting Point — Key Buying Signals (KBS)

The best place to begin is to unpack where you are today — and classify your customer base by key buying signals (KBS’s). Whether your customer base is 5–10 private beta customers, or a few thousand customers, tag each of your customers by the following:

Vertical Niche

Identify the specific vertical segment each of your customers fall into. Hyper-niche category definition is the goal here. For example, if you have a customer in the on-demand space (i.e. instacart) — you’ll want to define it as ‘mobile first grocery delivery’. The more niche you define your categories, the easier it will be to identify peers.

Primary Horizontal Value (PHV)

Identify the single most important persona that influenced the decision to adopt your service and the reason they bought your solution. The reason should be specific to that role. For example, an early value prop of EC2 was elastic compute capacity for batch processing. This value resonated with any software engineer with that use case — regardless of industry (i.e. media, oil and gas, etc).

Primary Vertical Value (PVV)

This value statement should tie to specific business outcomes for that industry vertical. You know you’ve selected a good PVV’s when any persona (finance, marketing, or engineering) in that industry would immediately recognize the value.

Company Size

Company head count often reflects complexity of sale — which can be a key factor when assessing your organizational selling capabilities. Classify your customer base by # of employees (Using the company size ranges as shared on linkedin can be useful here).

Target Building — Prioritize and Pattern Matching

Once you have your existing customers classified by Vertical Niche, PHV, PVV, and Company Size — you can stack rank the mix of key buying signals that reflect where you’re strong today.

With this mold in place — you can now start to research new companies that closely match.

There are no short cuts here— through brute force googling , list buying, linkedin searching — you’ll need to identify target companies and target that closely match your priority target market segments.

The number of targets you ultimately settle on will be highly dependent on your stage. Once you’ve identified these targets, you can begin your go to market motions on these targets.

New Verticals — Use PHV

What happens if you want to sell into a new market where you have no presence today? You’ll want to start with your PHV — the most important value you provide to a specific persona.

The benefit of a PHV is that your messaging should appeal regardless of what industry vertical that person is in. You may not have the reference customers needed for that new vertical (or the specific vertical messaging) — but your message should land with a well targeted persona specific message.

Moving Upmarket — Punch (slightly) Above Your Weight

Leverage the same Vertical Niche, PVV, and PHV — but expand your company size target into the next layer of company you don’t have a large presence in today. For example, if your current sweet spot is companies with up to 1000 employees — layer in a target market segmentation with companies between 1000 and 2500. This will allow you to start learning what additional capabilities you will need (i.e. sales skills, product gaps etc) — while still putting your self in a position to yield some fruits from the effort.

Iterate

I’ve seen this framework work well at each stage of revenue growth. Done well, you should be picking new segments to cross into each planning cycle. This allows you to grow your core business — while still making incremental progress into the new markets you’ll need for future growth.