B2B Target Data: Are You Focusing on the Right Businesses?
Databroker Summer Series - Part 4 of 8 – Building Your Best Q4 Starts Now
Over the last few weeks, I’ve talked about building momentum before September, giving your CRM a summer MOT and understanding the hidden cost of poor-quality data. This week, I want to tackle another question that doesn’t get asked often enough:
Are you actually targeting the right businesses?
It’s amazing how often companies invest time, money and effort into campaigns before properly answering that question. The emails are written, telemarketing scripts are ready, LinkedIn activity is planned and the sales team is waiting - but nobody has stopped to ask whether the businesses they’re targeting actually resemble the customers they’re most likely to win.
After nearly 15 years at Databroker, I’d say that’s one of the biggest differences between campaigns that perform and those that don’t. It’s not always the marketing that’s the problem. Quite often, it’s the targeting.
In 30 Seconds
- Better targeting usually beats bigger prospect lists.
- Your best existing customers can tell you a lot about who to target next.
- B2B target data should be built around relevance, not simply volume.
- Knowing who not to target can be just as valuable as knowing who to target.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
One of the biggest misconceptions in B2B marketing is that success comes from reaching as many businesses as possible. If you double the number of prospects, surely you double the opportunities? Unfortunately, that’s rarely how it works. If I go back a decade, spray and pray marketing used to be more common, but now we consistently see better results from targeted campaigns instead.
Imagine you’ve got two lists. One contains 25,000 businesses that broadly fit your market. The other contains 4,000 businesses that closely resemble your best customers. Which would you rather give your sales team? The answer seems obvious, yet one of the first questions we’re still regularly asked is:
“How many records can we get for £x budget?”
I’d argue there’s a much better question:
“Which businesses are most likely to buy from us - and where is our marketing budget best spent?”
What Should Your B2B Target Data Be Based On?
If I asked you to describe your ideal customer, could you do it? Not simply the industry they work in, but the wider picture. How many people do they employ? What’s their turnover? Are they single-site or multi-site? Are they SMEs, owner-managed businesses or larger corporates? Which sectors produce your best customers, and which consistently waste your sales team’s time?
Good B2B target data starts with answering questions like these.
The clearer the picture, the more accurately you can identify businesses that genuinely fit your market. Without that clarity, it’s very easy to end up with a large prospect database that looks impressive on a spreadsheet but contains thousands of businesses that were never particularly likely to buy from you.
Your Best Customers Are Trying to Tell You Something
One exercise I regularly recommend is surprisingly simple: forget about prospects for a moment and look at your best existing customers.
Which clients stay longest, spend well, refer other businesses and are generally a good commercial fit? Then look for the patterns between them. Perhaps they’re concentrated in three or four sectors, employ between 50 and 250 people, operate multiple sites or all have a particular type of internal department.
Those similarities are valuable because you’re no longer guessing who to target. You’re using what you already know about successful customers to help identify businesses that look like them. That’s a far stronger starting point than simply casting the net as wide as possible.
From the Databroker Desk
Businesses regularly come to us asking for data before they’ve completely defined who they’re looking for. That’s absolutely fine. In fact, it’s often where the most valuable part of our job begins.
Rather than immediately producing a count, we’ll talk about the client’s current customers.
- Which sectors work?
- What size companies buy?
- Where do the best opportunities come from?
- Are we focusing on high ticket opportunities or low hanging fruit?
- Who isn’t a good fit?
- What characteristics separate a great prospect from an average one?
Sometimes those conversations result in a smaller audience than the client originally expected. But it’s usually a better one. Because our job isn’t simply to help clients find more companies. It’s to help them find the right companies.
Learn more about how Databroker can help you source B2B data lists.
Asking Better Questions Creates Better B2B Target Data
The quality of a prospect database is often determined before anybody starts building it. Compare these two briefs:
“We want all manufacturing companies.”
Versus:
“We want UK manufacturers employing 100 - 500 people, operating from head office or single site locations, with turnover above £5 million. Within these companies our key personas are Senior DMs, Procurement & Operations. We’ll split the data sets by region, as we have different sales teams across the UK.”
The second brief immediately gives us something much more useful to work with. We can refine further by geography, growth, ownership, number of sites, specific SIC codes, decision-maker functions and countless other variables depending on what the client is trying to achieve.
That’s why Databroker has always taken a brief-led approach to sourcing data. The objective isn’t to find the biggest number of records that vaguely qualify. It’s to understand what a genuinely valuable prospect looks like and build the audience around that.
Don’t Be Afraid of a Smaller Audience
Businesses can understandably be nervous about narrowing their market. There’s a natural concern that fewer prospects must mean fewer opportunities. But a more relevant audience allows you to create more relevant marketing. Salespeople have better conversations, campaigns become easier to segment and you’re spending less time and budget trying to engage organisations that were never likely to become customers.
You’re not necessarily making your market smaller. You’re making your prospecting smarter. Successful B2B lead generation isn’t about building the biggest list. It’s about building the most relevant one.
Five-Minute Challenge
Open your CRM and look at your ten best customers. Look at their industries, employee numbers, turnover, geography, locations and the people who actually buy from you.
What do they have in common?
If you can spot the patterns, you’ve already started building your Ideal Customer Profile. And if you can’t, working that out might be one of the most valuable things you do before September.
Looking Ahead
So far we’ve covered building your pipeline, improving your CRM, understanding the cost of bad data and identifying the right businesses.
Next week we’ll go one level deeper, because finding the right company is only half the battle. You still need to find the right person inside it. We’ll look at decision-makers, job titles, buying committees and why speaking to the wrong contact can undermine even the best-targeted campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is B2B target data?
B2B target data is business information selected around a defined target audience or Ideal Customer Profile. It can use criteria such as sector, employee size, turnover, geography, site type and other company characteristics to identify organisations most relevant to a sales or marketing campaign.
How do I identify my ideal B2B target audience?
Start with your best existing customers and look for common characteristics. Consider industry, company size, turnover, location, business structure and the types of organisations where you consistently generate your strongest results.
Is a bigger B2B prospect list always better?
No. A smaller database containing businesses that closely match your target market can be significantly more useful than a much larger audience containing poorly matched prospects.
What criteria can be used for B2B targeting?
Depending on the available data, targeting can include SIC code, industry, employee numbers, turnover, geography, number of sites, company type, ownership, growth indicators and many other business characteristics.
Can Databroker help define a target audience?
Yes. Databroker takes a brief-led approach, helping clients understand their target market before sourcing data and using multiple data sources to identify the businesses and decision-makers that best fit the campaign.
