If you have a solid grasp on your current customer base, the next major thing to look at is, who else could align with your offering?
Aligned prospects are those potential customers that you haven’t dealt with much – but who could become customers. If you’ve identified key attributes of your historic customers, you could actually start looking for other groups of prospects who share those attributes. For example, who else is in that geographic area, or in that industry, that you have access to, and think you might be able to connect to your story?
If you’ve been selling to CFOs in Industy X, you might be able to sell to CFOs in Industry Y. Or, if you’ve been selling to women through grocery stores and you want to have a direct-to-consumer offering via the web, then you focus on women. That would be a case of alignment.
You’re looking for those customers that naturally line up with your historic base – and more importantly – that line up to what you’re offering. If you’ve been selling accounting software to small businesses, and selling directly to their CEO, and you want to move upstream, you may not be able to get to the CEO of larger companies. Perhaps the best aligned prospect would be to market to the CFO at those larger companies because that level would be analogous to the smaller company CEOs. That is where you would start looking for opportunities for alignment.
Bottom line:
1. Identify the attributes of your current customer base.
2. Look for those attributes in other markets or other customer “pools”.
3. Align to the newer prospects – adjust your messaging and programs and…
4. Drive new revenue into your company.
