Lesson: Sales Market Fit with Whitney Sales

Step #4 Go To Market: Techniques for winning customers

For a transactional sale, you may have a freemium product, you may have a free trial, or you may have a low cost product where they can just sign up. For each of these, you're really going to want to be focusing on mass market lead development. So you're going to be looking at low cost ways to reach your customer.

So specifically in a transactional sale, you're going to be looking at SEO. You're going to be looking at SEM. You're going to be looking at various content plays that you can do, potentially social media if that's something your market responds to and the various forms of social media that your market will respond to. Also, potentially, thought leaders within your market, developing those relationships, so they can help you push your product out to market.

Typically, with a mid-market, you're going to be looking at a market that already exists. Marketing automation is a perfect example. So there are a number of companies that are coming into the marketing-sales automation space. So it's a market that already exists and has been established. When I say marketing automation, people know what I mean.

When I talk about the mid-market, it's relatively competitive. So you're differentiating yourself from other solutions within the market. You're looking at where your customers are, so potentially conferences are a really great way to reach those customers. White papers to talk about why your solution is different.

You're going to be looking at an inbound and outbound sales strategy where, for example, when we talked about transactional sales, they're not necessarily as oriented towards a competitive sell. It's going to be much more inbound with a smaller portion of sell. With a mid-market, you're looking at much closer blend of sales doing inbound versus outbound.

Then when we look at some other pieces that can come into play, there are those white papers that I was talking about, case studies, a lot of content development within that space because you're really trying to differentiate yourself.

So the go-to-market strategy for insight sales is going to be much more oriented towards a direct customer relationship. So you're going to be doing field marketing, opportunities in which you can get in front of your customer for that one-on-one conversation. So there's the field marketing.

You also are going to want a lot of white papers within this space. Speaking events can be really important in an insight sale because it is challenging the customer to start thinking differently about the market and how it can actually impact their business.

Building out lists specifically and what your target market looks like within the insight sales space because you're going to have a smaller set of customers that you can actually reach with an insight sale than you are with a mid-market sale or a transactional sale. So when you look at those and how you're defining your target market, it's actually really important.