Target Market

The target market is the first of the four answers in the marketing strategy box, and EOS treats it as a list you could actually build rather than as a persona. A leadership team that has agreed on it can turn down a lead in one sentence, and the marketing money has somewhere obvious to go.

Most sales teams carry an implicit target market that differs from the founder's by about a third. The gap shows up as long sales cycles, discounting and customers who are unhappy from month two. Writing it down creates no demand on its own, but it stops a small company spending a year selling to people it cannot serve well.

Worked example: A managed services provider defined its market as firms of twenty to two hundred staff, within ninety minutes' drive, in regulated industries. The last part was new. Their happiest customers all had a compliance officer and their worst had all been price-driven retailers. The next quarter's prospecting came off a filtered list of four hundred companies.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Vision; eosworldwide.com/eos-tools