How To Get A Prospect’s Info

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the importance of being able to properly define and target your ideal prospect by using readily available demographic information.

If you have that information you have the power to very efficiently selecting new groups of targeted prospects.

For example, in business-to-business marketing there may be different demographic information that can be compiled about your customers, such as size of company by annual sales, size of company by number of employees, ownership of buildings or other real estate, major purchase behavior, credit card use, type of business, magazines subscribed to.

By collecting data about your customers you might find, for example, that a significant majority of your best clients are companies with between one and three million dollars in annual sales, between a hundred and two hundred employees, own their own plants or office buildings, have bought over a dozen computers in the past year, have a corporate American Express card, are in technology manufacturing and subscribe to Forbes Magazine.

If you have that information you have the power to very efficiently select a new group of targeted prospects as we’ll discuss in later Success Marketing Strategy

How do you get this kind of information about your customers?

Ask.

One excellent method is the use of anonymous surveys. Information gathered with anonymous surveys is most likely to be accurate. On the other hand many customers won’t respond to such surveys. For that reason at another time you may need to survey your customers with identity attached by mail or phone and even offer some gift as an incentive for response.

The problem with such surveys is that people will lie. You can improve the accuracy of your data by crossing your anonymous survey results with your identified respondent survey results. Commonalities verified by both types of survey can generally be relied on as valid. You can also compile information about certain types of customers through research.

The objective of all this is to find demographic commonalities in a significant percentage of your good customers. In consulting with companies I am consistently amazed at how little marketers know about their customers or if they have knowledge they aren’t paying any attention to it.

For example, I consulted with a firm that sells investment real estate. They know that their best most active investors are engineers yet they’ve done nothing with this information. They haven’t advertised in trade publications aimed at engineers. They haven’t done any direct mail to engineers.

Not long ago a customer survey that I conducted for one of my own companies revealed that twice as many of our customers have VISA cards as have MasterCard’s. I was able to make a slight adjustment in our marketing as a result of that information and I think it’s going to be quite useful in the future.

Author Info:  Dan Kennedy is internationally recognized as the 'Millionaire Maker,' helping people in just about every category of business turn their ideas into fortunes. Dan's "No B.S." approach is refreshing amidst a world of small business marketing hype and enriches those who act on his advice.

Most Commented Posts