It makes no sense spending time and money chasing after the wrong prospects, so don’t allow them to make their way into your sales plan.

Once you know your niche, it’s time to dig into finding out as much as possible about your target customer in order to properly sell to them.

So, just what should you look to define about your audience within your sales plan? That depends on your company and your market, but start with basics like company size (in terms of employees or turnover), geographical information, industry, job title, etc—any traits that are common across your best customers or the types of customers you’d love to have.

Also, don’t forget to think about whether they’re going to be a good ‘fit’. If this is a long-term relationship you’re developing rather than a one-night stand, you want to make sure you’re speaking the same language and share a similar culture and vision.

Use this information to build out an ideal customer profile. This can be your ideal ‘perfect customer’ or a fictitious organization that gets significant value from using your product/service and also provides significant value to your company. A customer profile helps you qualify new leads and disqualify ones before you spend months barking up the wrong tree and under-delivering on your sales plan.

Once you know the type of company you want to target, it’s time to get inside their head. Start by hanging out where they hang out:

• Are they on social media? What’s their network of choice?
• Are they members of any Facebook or LinkedIn groups?
• What podcasts do they listen to or what resources do they read?

Get in your customers’ heads and you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them.