- Gather Insight
Data Mining
Market Research
- Target Markets
- Internal and External
- Factor Profilesl
- Relative Targeting
- Understand Buyers
- Persona Profiles
- Buyers Journey Mapping
- Plan Campaigns
- Messaging Strategy
- Offer Strategy
- Tactics and Touch Strategy
- Information Collection Strategy
- Choose Function
- Build Reputation ("Seeding")
- Create Demand
- Enable Sales
- Accelerate Pipeline
- Nurture Leads
- Optimize Tactics
- Interactive
- Direct
- Teleservices
- Develop Creative
- Data Mining
- Market Research
- Create Content
- Thought Leadership
- Interactive Experiences
- Calculators and Sales Tools
- Leverage Data
- Affinity List Sourcing
- Data Quality Improvement
- Data Mining & Analytics
- Launch System
- SmartStart
- SmartXchange
- Manage Process
- Contact Management
- Lead Management
- Campaign Management
- Marketing Measurement
SiriusDecisions developed the concept of scoring and ranking targets against one another because of one truth it witnessed time and again. There may be an infinite number of prospects who can buy something, however, at any given time only a select group of these targets will have a higher propensity to buy.
LIFT helps you apply the insights gathered in Gather Insight, against the following best practices in target marketing to ensure you are not wasting precious resources on leads that have little chance of buying.
External & Internal Factor Profiles
First, LIFT helps marketers identify the external factors — observable attributes of a target marketplace that compel companies within that marketplace to buy a specific product, service or solution within 12 months. There are five key attributes defined by SiriusDecisions’ best practices that LIFT deploys to refine a target market. Here we explain two more specifically:
Common Targeting Mistakes
Many marketing organizations are guilty of targeting too broadly. The following are the common, but detrimental, targeting mistakes that we’ve seen many marketers make.
- Not involving sales in the development and evolution of the targeting strategy.
- Ignoring the facts: Do you have a solution for them?
- Focusing targeting parameters on company or individual attributes, rather than both.
- Lack of periodic review of targeting strategy
- Lack of customized messages by target segment.
- General focus on quantity over quality.
Aligned business issues: common goals exhibited by companies within a target that align well with the value proposition of your product, service or solution, and the presence of business processes with which your offering aligns.
Category spend: the level of current spend on offerings in your category by companies within a target including a complete examination of the demand for your offerings.
Vertical marketers require sub-vertical assessments; horizontal marketers require targeting at core break points. The more refined the original targets from Gather Insight,the more precise the external factors.
Next, LIFT helps marketers run the potential target markets (arrived at after running external factors) through a series of internal factors, two of which are outline here:
Solutions delta: the gap between how well your product delivers the solution to a problem encountered by a target market.
Sales readiness: the current ability of your sales force to internalize and communicate value propositions, business needs and capabilities against relevant audiences that it will manage within buying processes.
Relative Targeting
Equipped with accurate, detailed external and internal profile information, LIFT will score the targets and make ranking recommendations into three categories: active (the target markets worth pursuing), nurture (target markets that have potential given specific investment of time or money), and dormant (targets not worth pursuing at this time).
- organizations are able to judge target candidates soundly without the complication of subjectivity and passion;
- by identifying nurture target markets, organizations invest in supporting it down the road; and
- building a process that regularly re-ranks targets against one another allows business to stay ahead of a fundamental business truism: things change.