Attention Conservation Notice: This article discusses using Sales Win analysis to be able to create a profile of best customer accounts enabling you to identify matching companies that you are not currently marketing to. By narrowing the target market, lead generation programs can speak specifically to the buying audience, increasing response rates and ultimately ROI.

By laser targeting a narrow group of prospects, Marketers are able to deliver a message that resonates with their target audience and creates better leads for Sales. Spraying a large list of contacts with a generic message and praying that message will reach the right people has led to average response rates of less than 3%.

Instead of spraying and praying, consider building a database of targeted prospects based on where you are winning customers today. Identify these companies with customer wins analysis. Once you’ve identified this winning profile, start the search for other businesses that match that profile.

A good starting point is your in-house database of current customers and prospects. Find the companies that match your wining profile and start there.

Narrowing the focus allows Marketers to deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience. Instead of cleansing an out-of-date, in-house database, review your sales pipeline and customer win data and to identify your top market segments and determine key qualifying characteristics. Look at the size of the open and closed deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline to answer the following questions:

• In which market segments am I closing the most deals?
• In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?
• What are the common characteristics of companies in those market segments?
• What other market segments share those common characteristics?

Relevancy is key here. The more relevant the data used to feed Marketing Programs or Automation systems (like Eloqua, Marketo, Loopfuse, Vtrenz, Aprimo, Market2Lead, Manticore, etc.) the better and more powerful the results will be.

With Sales wins analysis, you can also build a profile of your best customer accounts to develop qualifying criteria. Do you close more deals with Fortune 1000-size enterprises or are you moving more deals with Small and Medium-size businesses? Is the number of employees of an organization a critical success factor or is a global, distributed environment more important? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product?

Now that you’ve documented your top markets and qualifying criteria, you can use this information to discover other target accounts. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.

Next, complete an enterprise buying profile to identify the roles of buyers involved in the buying process. Just as you identified the profile for targeting new companies, you need to have an understanding of the role and responsibilities of the buyer within those companies. You’ll want to understand their role both in the buying cycle and within the organization. It is vital to be aware of the responsibilities for each of your buyers and which organizational role typically corresponds with the role in the buying cycle. With this information, you will be able to refine your augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted Marketing Programs.

Creating your wins analysis can be done with a low-tech approach using a business analyst and a spreadsheet, but you may find that business analytics tools such as ReachForce Insight can save time and money and provide insight into pipeline changes in real-time. Once you see the results of wins analysis in action, you’ll want to monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities so it’s best to automate if possible.

Sales wins analysis is providing a new breed of B2B marketers with a more effective way to continue to build databases of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive role-based data used for multi-modal, segmented Marketing campaigns. By using sales wins analysis to understand best target markets and profiling their common characteristics, similar prospects can be identified in the same market segment, as well as additional market segments in which there are a higher propensity to sell more, faster.