Having worked with hundreds of customers and spoken with tens of thousands of prospects, we at Growth Orbit have seen just about every sales and marketing mistake that can be made.

In this blog, we want to share some of the most common and costly mistakes we encounter routinely and how you can avoid making these mistakes.

To start, one of the big mistakes sales and marketing teams make is failing to define their core audience. Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) refers to all the companies you could possibly ever sell to. It represents the total universe of targets and thus the maximum potential revenue a business can generate with their product or service.

It is unrealistic to think that any one company – not even Amazon – can capture the TAM for their product or service. Even if a company has only one competitor, it would still be difficult for them to convince an entire market to only purchase their product or service. So, any sales and marketing plan should begin with a comprehensive study of your TAM.

Since 100 percent penetration of your TAM is likely impossible, it is best to narrow your focus through the definition of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to determine a more realistic number of companies to focus on. Size, industry, current business challenges, or compliance issues may all go into defining your ICP.

With your ICP in hand, the next logical step is to carve up your TAM into micro-TAMs based on combinations of industry, employee count or revenue size, geographic location, or other segments as you determine relevant.

Just because a company could buy your product doesn’t mean you should invest valuable time and resources in marketing to them. Actively monitor and compare your company’s performance at a micro-TAM or segment level. Identify those micro-segments that perform the best and increase your focus on these segments. Study those segments that under-perform to learn why, adjust your strategy or messaging as appropriate, or eliminate them from your focus all together.

By clearly defining your TAM, segmenting it into logical sub-segments, then focusing your sales and marketing efforts on those sub-segments, you will identify your top performing segments and the ones that most deserve your precious sales and marketing resources.

Next, one of the big mistakes sales and marketing teams make is forgetting that buyers are companies, not individual contacts. When we begin an engagement or new campaign with a client, we often hear, “We have ‘X’ thousands of contacts ready to go!” But once we analyze this monster list of contacts (often procured from a list vendor for a substantial price), we find that it actually represents a relatively few number of companies.

For most B2B offerings, there is only one ultimate decision maker within a company. While it is true that the modern-day buying process for complex technology or services may involve several people, when initiating a sales engagement, there is likely just one or two individuals that matter. Expending dollars and efforts on a vast number of these contacts would be a waste.

Contacts should be acquired and managed within the construct of your TAM. In defining your TAM, you will inevitably create a list of companies. You will then subdivide that into segments that you believe best align with your offering. Next you should define the personas within those companies that are the most likely buyers and influencers for your product. These are the contacts you want to identify and market to within the construct of your TAM and ICP.

Just because you acquire 1,000 new contacts from your latest tradeshow or webinar does not mean you want to load them up into your marketing automation system and go to town. Or worse, hand them to your sales team for calling. Those contacts should be tied to your TAM and assessed against the other contacts within their respective company and where each company stands in terms of your existing sales efforts. These contacts may provide new insight on new initiatives underway for companies you have yet to engage with, or they could be competitors or consultants just doing research. Simple data analysis will provide better insight into the opportunity they likely represent, and thus, what effort and resources they warrant.

Finally, one of the big mistakes sales and marketing teams make is failing to personalize and customize their messaging. In the past, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was a strategy applied to a select set of target companies.  Modern-day sales and marketing technology, supported by basic data analytics and management, however, allows for the application of ABM strategies to literally thousands of target companies.

The next step (and how you avoid mistake #3) is to align your messaging, marketing, and sales activities with your TAM segmentation, defined personas, and your prospective customer’s progress through their buyer journey.

Curating and personalizing your marketing materials for your prospects is how you demonstrate you can provide real value to their specific needs and differentiate from your competition. The trick is you can’t use generic content. You must find ways to repurpose sales and marketing collateral or create assets and messaging that have relevant information for each of your different buyer personas.

Identifying, reaching, and engaging high-value prospects on a deeper, more personal level is sales’ and marketing’s holy grail. By leveraging ABM and personalization tactics, alongside a well-managed segmentation strategy for your TAM, you will fuel a more efficient sales and marketing effort and better engage with those who will most benefit from your services. The strategies described here work hand in hand, building off one another, to drive customer-centric growth and help you avoid costly mistakes.

Growth Orbit is a full-service growth acceleration firm, focused on driving measurable value through growth initiatives that work. We excel at combining sound growth strategy with proven sales methodologies, supported by effective technology. We only consider ourselves successful when we deliver accelerated, measurable growth for our clients.

From developing smart insight driven sales messaging, to filling your funnel with qualified leads, we’ve built our foundation on meeting clients where they are and helping them achieve new levels of growth — what we call reaching Growth Orbit!