Prospecting to a niche market: 5 killer ideas
You can mail a potato greeting card to your friend on their birthday.
A potato. With a message on it.
That’s it, that’s the product. 🥔
And, loads of people order! It’s a huge success.
There are all kinds of unique and weird B2C products out there, tailored to unique markets, that make a ton of sales doing so.
But, can you do the same in a B2B sales context?
Of course you can! You just need to know how to prospect your niche market.
Let’s dive right into what you need to do below! 👇
How to identify niche markets 🧐
Your niche B2B product or service needs a niche market - the people who are going to buy from you.
In an ideal world, these people would pop up and come to you. But in reality, you need to pop up and go to them.
So, how do you identify your niche market? Through your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of course.
In B2B sales, your ICP is a categorical description of a person or company that would benefit immensely from your offering, while providing you with significant value.
It’s representative of the type of customer you want to focus on acquiring over a set period of time.
One important thing to note:
Your ICP is not your customer persona. Your personas only come after you’ve developed your ICP and focused on the end-user of your product, rather than the buyer you’re trying to target.
Having an ICP helps your salespeople to focus on high-quality B2B lead generation and meet their sales goals more consistently. It also extends your customer lifetime and assists your salespeople in getting more referrals.
First, you need to create your ICP - then you need to constantly consult it.
1 - Creating your ICP 👩🔬
Here are the steps you must follow when creating your ICP.
Describe your Ideal Customer
Analyse and compare who is currently getting the most out of your solution. Focus on the size of the company, their budget, where they’re located and operate, and what industry they’re in.
Get feedback from your most successful customers
Learn more about their buying process. These are the questions to ask:
- How did they find you?
- Why did they choose your product?
- What pain points does your product solve for them?
- How are they benefiting from it now?
Look for commonalities
Identify any shared characteristics or recurring patterns among your top customers. Use this information to inform your ICP. What are their business objectives? What are their notable attributes?
Create Your ICP framework
Input all of your findings into a template and watch your ICP come to life.
2 - Finding niche buyers 🕵️♂️
Modern-day sales is less about going door-to-door to sell your product and more about being best friends with tech.
In B2B prospecting, tech is a phenomenal way to generate high-quality leads in far less time.
Tech like Cognism Prospector will save you time and deliver quality results.
Our data allows your salespeople to target your ideal customers with access to over 400M contacts and 21M companies.
The automated sequencing will accelerate your sales and enable your salespeople to connect with confidence.
3 - Launching a niche outbound email campaign 📧
293 billion emails are sent every day. Prospects spend over six hours a day in their inbox. If your salespeople aren’t using outbound email campaigns, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your market.
But, you’ve got to ensure that your email campaign is tailored to your niche market - remember, this will be a highly-targeted outbound campaign.
Here are some tips on ensuring your email campaign will be a success! 👇
- Create subject lines using four words and less.
- Keep it short and never repeat yourself.
- Segment your email and make it easy to read.
- Write how you speak - make your emails sound as natural as possible.
- Use merge fields for personalisation, but avoid titles because not all titles are accurate.
- Use words like “you” and “your team” rather than “we”, “me”, “I”, and “they”.
- Leverage sensory language in your writing by getting prospects to picture the possibilities of your product or service.
- Don’t send one long email - separate the information you want your prospect to receive into four sections, and then turn those sections into four emails.
- Always address your prospects’ pain points (refer back to your ICP).
- If you’re writing for different countries, use Grammarly to switch between US English and UK English.
4 - Cold calling niche buyers ☎️
It takes 18 calls to just connect with a prospect in a regular B2B cold calling scenario.
Now, imagine what it takes when cold calling a niche market.
If you want to connect with prospects that will convert, you’ve got to have a laser-targeted prospecting list and focus on that narrow slice of the market.
To do this, you’ve got to refer back to your ICP framework and ensure you have high-quality business data backing your contact list.
Next, you’ve got to ensure your salespeople are having natural conversations with your prospects, i.e. DON’T USE A SCRIPT.
When your salespeople are trying to follow a script, they may panic when the conversation strays from what’s written in front of them.
They may also miss out on the prospect pain points they’ll need to address, as they’ll be listening to respond, rather than hearing your prospect out.
The key is to have a conversation where the prospect is doing the majority of the talking, picking up on what they need, and solving their problems for them with your product or solution.
5 - Using social selling for niche markets 👩💻
Using social selling is a great way to reach your niche market!
And there are plenty of ways in which this can be done.
- Join LinkedIn groups to connect with potential prospects.
- Follow LinkedIn influencers.
Or, become a LinkedIn influencer yourself. Figure out what content your niche market is likely to be interested in and start posting on your personal profile.
It’s a great way to create awareness, build up your network, and to connect with prospects you didn’t even know were looking for you!
Join the Cognism community 🚀
Speaking of LinkedIn, Cognism is busy building a collaborative and vibrant community of B2B salespeople and marketers.
Every day, we share the best B2B and SaaS content on our company page - follow us at the link below! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.