Workbook 4: Building the Market Map

The journey so far 

Let’s have a recap on the ground we’ve covered so far. By now you should have sat down with your team to reconfirm your value proposition internally and created a visual pain statement that captures the core challenges faced by your customers. Hopefully now you’ll be as obsessed by personal business pain as we are, and this will be reflected in your visualisation.  

You’ll also have tested this message on your target audience and these interviews with relevant buying personas should have given you confidence and evidence that you’re solving a real business problem. Finally, you’ll have got uncomfortably narrow around what your ideal customer looks like, and you will have debated long and hard about who you’re for.  

How many sales do we need to hit target? 

The next step is to look at the sales targets for the next 12 months and do a simple mathematical calculation.  

Let’s say that you’ve set yourself the target of adding £1,000,000 of annual recurring revenue over the next 12 months and that your average order value is £25,000. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that over the next year you need to make 40 sales, but to make the calculation even easier let’s aim for 48 or basically one per week. This of course factors in four weeks of holiday which you will understandably need to recharge the batteries. At your next company meeting don’t forget to tell everybody across the organisation that in order to hit our target we need to close at least a sale a week. Nail your colours to the mast and get everybody focused on the challenge ahead. 

You now need to take an honest and dispassionate look at your sales conversion rate. Let’s for the sake of argument agree that historically you have converted one in five Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). In this example therefore we need to have 240 individual opportunities hit the top of the pipe in order to ensure, on a one in five conversion rate, that we close the 48 deals we need.  

Historically we’ve found that because of your revised value proposition and laser focused messaging that plays directly into the pain of your buying persona, these conversion rates will improve. This is because we’ve taken the time to properly evidence that our solution is mission critical to the businesses in our chosen, narrow market segment. We know all the companies we want to market to have this problem, so the only reasons they may say no moving forwards, is either because of other internal conflicting projects or because of poor sales execution. We will dive deeper into these latter points in a later chapter. 

Hopefully this simple mathematical exercise will have brought real clarity not just to yourself but also to your sales director and the team they manage. I’d write the number 240 on a big poster on the sales team wall, so that everybody in the business has absolute visibility of what’s required.  

But these calculations may also fill you with fear. It’s time to open the CRM and see how many opportunities are currently in the pipeline and to ask yourself the question ‘am I scared’?  

Can we change our scale of thinking? 

If 48 closed deals in the next 12 months, one a week, fills you with dread, here’s some food for thought. Now you know you solve validated business pain, is there any way we could make our average order value £50,000 meaning we’d only need to close 24 deals this year? Accepted you’d need to change your scale of thinking and find more customer value, but it’s worth considering as you would only need 120 opportunities to ensure your target is hit. 

When it comes to pricing your solution, we’ve found many business software leaders find the prospect of significantly increasing their prices quite daunting. Please don’t feel alone with this because we’ve felt the same pain ourselves in the past. Because of this, we’ve dedicated a whole chapter to how to price your solution later in this book and how to establish value and return on investment. Getting your pricing right is a tricky business but too often we find SaaS businesses significantly under valuing their software, especially in the early stages.  

But for now, let’s proceed on the basis that your average contract value will be £25,000 per year or around £2000 per month. We now know that in order to hit your annual target we need to light up 240 opportunities within your chosen market sector.  

We now need to build a list and here’s where the creation of a Market Map face book might help. 

The importance of target visualisation 

Leading sports psychologists will train the athletes they work with about the importance of visualisation, and we must learn these lessons too. They will get their clients to visualise what it feels like to stand atop an Olympic podium and to imagine how that might feel. You can see the manifestation of this in the eyes of a Formula One driver in the minutes before a race, or in the eyes of a sprinter at the end of their lane as they await the starter’s gun.  

They are literally picturing what will happen over the next 10 seconds, 90 minutes or however long the race ahead will take. There are others far more qualified than us to advise you on the importance of visualisation but research this subject extensively as there’s little doubt it will stack the odds in your favour. We’ve already discussed the power of the pain statement visualisation where you and your prospects can graphically see the challenges in front of them. It’s now time to adopt a similar technique when it comes to building our Market Map. So, how does this relate to the sales team in a software company? 

Sales directors will often refer to their team members as hunters or farmers. Hunters, by definition, are those that go out and make the kills and bring in the new sales to the organisation. Farmers in contrast are more focused on account management, tilling the land and maintaining crops.  

The next exercise is for the hunters, those whom we need to go out and slay the woolly mammoths for the benefit of the rest of the tribe. If you were a hunter in real life and those around you were utterly dependent on bringing home the steak for supper, how likely are you to succeed if you don’t actually know what your target looks like? If this was the case, a target could walk right in front of you, and you wouldn’t recognise its value. This is why visualisation is so important to the hunters in your business who in our opinion should be coached and trained just as highly as top level athletes.  

Without exaggeration, top sales people are the difference between a successful 12 months and perhaps a bigger investment raise and disaster. We need to give them every help and encouragement we can, and we found the creation of a Market Map face book is a huge step forward in them achieving their targets. 

Assess the size of your target market

The work we did earlier on getting uncomfortably narrow about the verticals we want to target, allied to the confirmation we now have about the identity of our buying persona should now start paying real dividends.  

Let’s say that you have determined with your team that you’re buying personas are Financial Directors of technology firms with between 50 and 500 employees in the United Kingdom. The first and most obvious step would be to find out how many of them there are and there are dozens of software solutions out there that will help you achieve this.  

Once you’ve counted this total service obtainable market, in other words the companies you can easily serve today, you need to think  again. Has the research come up with a thousand names and numbers? Our gut feel is this could be too many and you might want to take this opportunity to narrow down even further into more specific verticals. After all we only need to convert 240 into sales qualified leads to hit our target, based on our earlier maths. Might five hundred businesses be a more achievable number to research? Should we refine our list a bit further and initially just focus on Fintech for example?  

It needs some thought as you’re going to want to become intimate with these people and you can’t cover too much ground. Whilst it is important there are enough prospects out there to cover the 240 opportunities you need to light up, having too many target customers can be distracting.  

The whole point of becoming uncomfortably narrow across your business is to sharpen the focus on those middle of the dartboard customers that we know have the process pains we’ve evidenced. We don’t need to ‘spray and pray’ into 2000 businesses, hoping something hits. We need to laser into the most relevant 240 organisations that we believe need our solution.  

When Richard was a Sales Director, he used to put the logos of the companies he most wanted to speak to up in posters around the office so that everybody, whether they were in sales or not, would know he was looking to make a connection with these organisations. He didn’t know why, but somehow this increased the odds of meeting these people. Perhaps it was so subliminal or perhaps Noel Edmonds was right when he raves about projecting your needs out into the universe!   

Creating your Market Map face book 

Today we found a much easier way of doing that which is to create a face book of the personas we need to speak to. You know the companies you want to target, and you know the job titles of the Buying Personas. Hopefully, you may even have considered trying to scale up to C-Suite level, such is the value of your solution. 

You also know that 99% of our target audience have a LinkedIn profile or something else online that contains a photograph. Let’s take advantage of this. If you want your hunters to visualise and focus on the people they most need to meet, then producing something like the image below can be useful. 

We created this Market Map face book with one of our customers based in Northern Ireland and selling into the Public Sector space. Through excellent background research, they established exactly who the key buying personas were by region and department. And, in this instance, they created a bingo card where points were scored by the team for making connections at different levels. You got the most points the closer to the Buying Persona you could connect. Not every persona has a photograph, but many do and this image sits on the desktop of everyone in the business.  

As an aside, we’ve used a lot of analogies here about targets, hunting and shooting but please don’t be offended by the analogy. There’s nothing sinister here other than the context in which it’s meant, and we certainly aren’t proposing anything dangerous! But the people on this chart are incredibly important to your business and quite simply are the difference between success and failure. If we can find a way to meet these personas, empathise with the frustrating challenges they’re having at work and prove that we understand how to help them, they will ensure your business is a raging success. They will become advocates of everything you do, and their support and references will stand you in excellent stead. These people are mission critical to your future and you need to get to know them. 

The recommendation therefore is that you and your team come together again and create something very similar. Use the clever software out there to build a list of all the companies you want to target and then get on LinkedIn, company websites or anywhere else you can learn more about these people and start building your face book. It’s a great exercise to do as a team and satisfies the urgent need for target visualisation.  

Now research the heck out of them 

So how do we now get to meet them? Here’s where you need to be creative.  

In our worked example above, we recognise that the prospect of performing background research on 240 people might sound daunting. So, it might be time to divide and conquer and split the research amongst the team. Their job is to find out as much as you can about where these people meet, where they might be speaking next, any blog posts they’ve written and any other information you can glean. You will be simply staggered by how much information people have on the Internet about their background and interests and all of this data is invaluable. 

One of our Sales Directors used to expound the virtues of finding a “hook”, something about the persona that you can latch onto down the line. Maybe their LinkedIn profile or biography on the company website explains they are passionate about Manchester United or cycling or chess. Maybe they’ve written a blog about the environment or spoken recently at an event advocating the importance of reducing waste. All of this information is incredibly valuable, publicly available and there are even cleverer software packages that will help you do this.  

When you finally meet these people, and you will, you need to have something to break the ice – some kind of connection that can help build rapport. Merely knowing that they’d written a blog and that you’d liked it and commented on it will give you an advantage. We need to see the world through their eyes and understand the working life they are living. We need to know much more about them then sales people do today, and this lack of research is one of the reasons targets are missed. 

At the end of this exercise, you should now have a clear picture of the 240 people to whom you and your organisation need to become famous. We need to get on their radar and establish some kind of brand recognition, so that when you ultimately meet them, they understand who you are, what you do and how you can help them.  

Workbook Actions 

• Do the maths so that you, the sales team and indeed the whole company understands how many sales you need to achieve to hit target in the next 12 months 

• Use your conversion rates to establish how many personas you need to ‘light up’ to hit your number 

• Understand the importance of visualisation. If you don’t know what your target looks like, how will you recognise them when you see them? This provides cross-company focus. 

• Create a Market Map face book of your most valued targets and research everything you can about them. Find the hook for when you meet. 

Whilst sales focus on building the Market Map, the Marketing team should be learning from the feedback you received from target customers during the thesis testing. There’s no doubt your core message set will need to be updated and it’s vital to get consistency across any market facing collaterals.  

So let’s turn our attention there.