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Determining Your Target Market: 6 Ways You’ve Probably Not Considered–Part 6

August 24, 2012 by Lizabeth Phelps

This is the final installment in this series and is most relevant for those who sell business-to-business.

#6: The size of the company will determine your market.

You will always need to get in front of decision makers, and the size of the company, business or organization whom you approach determines who that is and thus who your market is. It’s well worth your time to think this through.

If you want to target a large company, your market is HR or perhaps a top executive–and most likely, they will not be your final audience.  This awareness, then, tells you–as any target market will–how to craft your marketing communications. They will not be directed to the C-levels, managers or other employees with whom you will be directly interacting–everything will be constructed around “what’s in it for” the decision maker.

In determining your market, if you simply have no handles to hold onto yet, look at your ability to provide a service that will survive the tight scrutiny and tough standards of a large company. Can you compete with others in your category? Can you deliver what the company most wants? Or are you only able to deliver the softer skills applicable to a segment of their employee base?

Furthermore, there may be a lot of bureaucracy in a large company that you’d like to sidestep in favor of edgier, early-adopter-types. There may be a few of them in a big corporation, but getting to them–and ensuring they are the decision-makers–could be a very challenging road. In such a case, you will know that you need to go for a smaller organization.

I was working with a client today on this and I can assure that your mission, your sense of why you are here, is instrumental in deciding on your market. He wants to work the young Einstein’s of the world–the inventors–yet, he’d also been talking about targeting the CEOs of 5-million-dollar-plus companies. We had to pull those wires apart (and are still pulling them), because the CEO will most likely *not* be the inventor himself. It might be worth my client’s efforts to seek out the IT inventor still working out of his basement–if aiding the CEO does not give him the same level of satisfaction that creating a rising star would. You can see how he needs to know this in order to begin developing his suite of services.

So, be sure you have established your mission–what you feel you are here to do in the world; it will be your guiding star in determining the size of the company you should target. If it turns out you feel destined to help middle-management in large organizations, just remember, they are not the ones whom you will persuade. You will need to be ready to serve both them and the needs of the company as a whole.

And, of course, if you want to work directly with the owner of the business/company, that opens up a series of questions–topping the list: do you have something remarkable enough to get his/her attention? The larger the company, the more remarkable it has to be.

If you’re B to B…who is your target market?