You Ask, I Answer: How to Target Larger Clients?

In today's episode, John asks, targeting larger clients can be extremely competitive. Any advice on developing a strategy to grab their attention? Well, it depends. It depends on how your your clients or prospective clients do their purchasing, right? So what is their customer journey look like?

And a lot of the time, uh, companies that are in the same industry have similar purchasing processes. So the first and probably most important question is what is that process? How does it work? How do people make choices in your industry? Is it something as simple as, you know, uh an intern pulling together a short list?

Is there an RFP process? Uh what are all the different things that go into purchasing? Once you know that, once you know how somebody does business in your industry, then you can start figuring out what are the specific tactics that map to that. For example, if you are dealing with a situation where you just have sort of a junior staff are pulling together a short list, then a lot of things that um are in the public relations realm uh actually apply really well. So awards.

Uh as much as awards are pay-to-play, um, a lot of the time they matter because your more junior person's just gonna Google, you know, award-winning whatever. And of course, if you've done a good job with uh your organic search optimization stuff, you will probably be in that list of results. Um if you're in industry publications, you're building mind share. That's for a more casual purchasing process, that's the way to go. If you have presence of mind, it then getting in front of people is a little bit easier, right?

Then if no one's ever heard of your company before. Picking up the phone and smiling and dialing is not super effective because nobody likes being called by people they don't know. Well, very few people like that. If you have something more like an RFP process, then making sure that you're doing you know simple stuff like being in SAP Ariba in the Ariba marketplace and maintaining your profile so that as companies go to issue RFPs, you make that list. Um making sure that you are uh targeting and focusing on procurement staffers uh within organizations, uh, because again, those are the folks who are you know logging into Ariba and typing uh the searches that are needed to bring up um a list of vendors that they can then go do their due diligence on.

That's you know the more formal process for RFPs. One of the challenges with RFPs is that uh as my colleague John Wallace called like second place contests, um, typically a company has a vendor in mind, but for many different reasons, some of which are regulatory, they have to put it out for bid, and then they're gonna pick who they chose anyway. So you're still there's still value in cultivating those relationships, cultivating mind share within your industry. One of the more valuable things you can do, especially for larger clients and also for uh organizations where there isn't a clear uh professional community, is to build your own community. Uh for example, we have the Analytics for Marketers Slack group.

If you go to trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers, you can see this. It's a slap a Slack group. Having regular frequent access to your audience to communicate with them, a two-way communication is incredibly valuable because when somebody starts thinking about well, how can you know who do I know that does this thing? If you're on their mind a lot, then when it comes time to issue those requests for information or requests for proposal, whatever, you at least get at a chance at bat. And ideally, you know, the sort of the dream for every uh salesperson is your company's reputation is so good that they skip the RFP process entirely.

They say there's no other company that can do this other than this vendor, so we're just going to go ahead with this vendor. Again, there may be regulatory requirements, you know, particularly if you're working with uh governments. For example, um, in the place where I live, uh, a certain percentage of government contracts must go to uh women-owned businesses and minority-owned businesses by law. It's written in. So though that's another area entirely where if you are dealing with larger organizations that have regulatory requirements, how can you conform your business to those requirements so that again, you make the list?

Think of it like search optimization for procurement systems, right? When somebody goes into Google, there's a massive, complex, very sophisticated machine learning engine making recommendations. When you go into some of these more legacy purchasing systems, they're all basic keyword search systems, right? They are they don't have a lot of vendors don't invest a ton of money in machine learning algorithms and recommendation engines. So they're still pretty primitive, which means that you want to optimize your profile in those systems to have the best chance of being uh shown for the categories you want to be shown for, to the types of companies you want to be uh showing with.

Again, this requires market research and not just Googling for stuff, but actually picking up the phone and talking to your existing customers. Say you have you know 20 customers, but three of them are really in the target that you're seeking. Like, you know, they're they're the bigger companies, they're they're good customers, things like that. You get on the phone with your point of contact and maybe their boss and say, hey, I'm doing some research. I'm trying to figure out where we can find more great clients like you.

When you were making the decision to hire us, how did you find us? Um, what was your internal purchasing process like? Hey, can I you know spend 45 minutes and buy you a coffee or a lunch or something and have you walk through how you and maybe any competitors that you know or non-competitive companies, how they do their procurement. That level of market research can only come from in-depth questioning. So you want to make sure that you are uh well positioned and to do that, you need to get inside the heads of your your buyers, right?

And that all comes from just talking to people and trying to figure out how companies work inside. So your strategy has to map to the customers. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy, particularly for larger companies. There is no one-size uh fits-all strategy for uh an industry. Uh, and you're gonna have different kinds of uh companies.

One other thing to think about is if there are certain companies in your industry that have a reputation of being difficult to work with, you may want to see you know how those companies do their procurement and then avoid them. Um, I recognize obviously uh you may not be in a position to turn down business, but a bad customer is a bad customer. So anything you can do to to not only target those larger clients you do want, but not target those clients you don't want is going to uh pay dividends down the road. So really good question. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.