What's holding your prospecting back?
Most people think prospecting is about getting valid emails and direct dials.
When results don’t come out as expected, they often think they need more. More emails, more direct dials.
In an underperforming situation, is more of the same the best solution?
Doing a larger volume of the same could waste time and resources, chasing too many weak prospects. Meanwhile, strong competitors are hitting the segments where they can win. If they win doing that, you can too.
Successful prospecting requires knowing:
-
The fleet market
-
Your best customers
-
How to match prospecting data to your best slice of the fleet market.
Reason 1: Not knowing the fleet market
A good start is to get an understanding of the market you serve, because not all fleets are the same. It’s like knowing where to fish. Not all bodies of water are the same. Where you go fishing depends on what you want to catch. Let’s dive (no pun intended!) into this now.
The other day, a prospect I worked with previously sent an excited text. “Steven Young” had joined a new fleet fueltech company as their Chief Marketing Officer.
He told me, “Parth, we don’t have any limits like before. In this company we can serve fleets between 1 and 10,000!”
I asked, what industries? He says “All industries! If they use fuel, they can use our service!”
I told Steven, this reminded me of the adage “When you serve everyone, you serve no one.”
We talked about our past work together. Didn’t we see that segmentation strategies make prospecting more effective and efficient? Those strategies led to the previous employer’s “limits.” We can see those as guides to efficient, profitable growth, not limitations. So, let’s get down to really analyzing the market and see if your theory is true. He agreed and we started this engagement.
What does market actually mean?
There are two core markets that are quite different: long haul vs. local fleets. Long haul is mostly the for-hire transportation, wholesale, distribution, logistics industries with heavy-duty tractor and trailer fleets.
Local fleets on the other hand are predominantly private-use fleets with a lot of light duty, but also medium and heavy duty. There are many local fleet industries: last mile delivery, HVAC and many other trades, landscaping, retail, municipalities, police and airports.
Segment by both companies and fleet size
The ratio of companies to vehicles is quite diverse in the commercial fleet market. Did you know 63% of companies with 5 to 9 vehicles have only 17% of the vehicles in operation?
On the opposite end, fleets of 100+ vehicles make up less than 2% of the companies, and they have 45% of vehicles in operation.
Put it another way, the ratio of vehicles to companies goes from 0.26 to 25.0 – yes that’s a difference of 100X!
This is why, choosing and tailoring the fleet size segment is crucial. On the low end, you chase many smaller companies. On the high end, you are competing with many to get the attention of the few.
What happens without market strategy?
Without a clear strategy aimed at the right market, it becomes difficult to establish key metrics like conversion over time, long term value, etc. Therefore, companies tend to be conservative in the initial customer acquisition cost (CAC), and possibly attract prospects in the market where they are the least well positioned.
Without the insights, and locking down the complete market, knowing where and how much to invest becomes a guessing game.
Reason 2: Not knowing best customers
“Bart Starr Jr.” is a CMO of a company based in Green Bay, Wisconsin that manufactures industrial supplies. They serve customers in multiple verticals, with fleets being a new area of strategic focus for their CEO. Last year I was speaking with Bart, and he was already stressed from the Packers division loss to the 49ers. He said, “We have been in business since Lombardi was head coach. But we don’t know much about our customers except what they buy from us. Now we are branching to new verticals like fleet! Where do I even start understanding what we can offer them?”
Relax Bart, you’re in good hands. Align your product(s) to the customers who will find the most benefit within that market. But using only gut instinct to apply database filters and get lists is not always effective, and can take you down the wrong path.
So, continuing on the theme of fishing, now you found the body of water. You have to find the right fish!
What does “knowing the customer” mean?
We recognize all customers are not equal. Most companies are not immune from the Pareto principle, which shows that 20% of customers make up 80% of the revenue (or profit, or other metric).
It is important to capture and track this metric well. It helps answer the question, “How do I find prospects who are like my best customers?” To answer that, you need to know: How did they become your customer? What source can you attribute them to? How many times and for how long did you have to court them before they signed up?
Once you have defined your best customer, relate them to the product they signed up for.
How are you offering superior value to your best customers?
Looking from the customer’s perspective, and again using the fishing analogy, we have to analyze what was the hook that attracted the customer over your competitors. Maybe it is the personalized service, product mix/bundle, ease of deployment, or how it helps serve their own end customers better. Or the product they chose aligns well with their business model and thus makes it easily scalable.
It is also worth asking them, why did they choose you over a competitor? The answer will illuminate their decision process which you can use to close on other prospects. It can also provide a guide to their lifetime value with you. Taken together, all the information will help create additional parameters to attribute to your prospects, identify the patterns early, and allow investments in converting them.
What are the in-depth fleet characteristics of these customers and prospects?
A deeper knowledge of the fleet’s characteristics is often overlooked while prospecting. Besides total fleet size, which is an important component of the ideal customer profile (ICP), others are:
- Vehicles by duty/class
- Ownership (owned/leased)
- Locations where they have fleet
- Make/manufacturers
- Age of fleet
These can greatly influence their decision to become your customer.
Gathering this data from customers, as well as on prospects, completes the picture on knowing more about your customers and finding prospects with those fleet characteristics.
Reason 3: Not understanding prospecting data
“Yogi Burrie” is a director of finance at a telematics SaaS company, and naturally, a champ with spreadsheets. You can’t squeeze daylight through his decimals, if you know what I mean. He was confident that he knew everything about his data. One day “Joe DiMajors”, the marketing analyst, approached Yogi for a budget to buy lists and set up campaigns. Yogi was waiting, ready with his sharp pencils.
Joe started to layout out his case. He wanted data about companies with more than 20 vehicles, and fleet, safety and operations managers with email and direct dial phone.
“Wait,” said Yogi. “How can we be sure that they are in our ICP?” (He remembers the marketing lessons at DePaw College’s b-school). “What kind of vehicles? Do they own or lease? How do you plan to segment the industries? What else can you get to tell a complete story of the prospect and how they are like our best customers? And finally, how will you check accuracy or handle missing data?”
Thoroughly exhausted, Joe reached out to us and asked can you help me? And I said pull up a chair Joe, this is not our first rodeo. And we started explaining …
“In the right direction” will serve you better than seeking perfection.
What does “knowing the data well” mean?
When we speak of prospecting data we are often referring to “decision makers” such as title, and direct dial number and email – the means of reaching the prospect. We think in terms of how fresh the data is, how recently it was compiled and how many emails are valid.
In addition though, there are data points such as breadth of fleet info (class/duty, age), market segment (i.e., industry grouping) and personas within your ideal customer profile to consider.
Fleet data comes from multiple sources, and it’s subject to different standards that can result in latency and missing data. Being able to understand across these standards helps to sort through inevitable data that is not consistent, so you can use the data directionally. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is a wise saying that is very relevant here. By cross-validating, the data can be made actionable and produce great results.
Bring all relevant data together
Combining various data sources over time into one repository is a key to customizing the data and getting a long-term view. To do this, create a data warehouse or data lake to hold all pertinent information in one place. Overlaying the company, fleet and contact data on prospects with customer data can connect the dots to improve prospecting results at scale over time.
Making decisions when data is not clear
Sometimes available data may not be sufficient to provide a consistent picture. Data may be incomplete or deemed inaccurate. In those cases, it is not necessary to throw out the entire dataset. Instead make reasonable assumptions on missing data, aggregate to get the big picture or hold off on acting on some segments or campaigns until more data becomes available.
This is because the core of the information – the markets and the customers – don’t change quickly. You only have to enrich some aspects of the data for prospecting, while continuing to learn from the results and make incremental and directionally accurate decisions.
Successful prospecting also needs a long-term perspective. The key is putting all this together. Just one of these dimensions – market, customer or data – may be influential, however a combination of these can affect the ability to execute consistently.
Choosing the right data to connect the market to the right prospects is critical to execute campaigns, attract leads and win deals. But getting the market and ICP correctly is even more important, because those are less volatile. Without that, focusing on only contacts or emails is the proverbial “barking up the wrong tree.”
In conclusion: The market, the customers, and the data all influence the success of prospecting, not individually but in combinations that should be taken into account.
