Every business shares similar struggles: there aren’t enough hours in the day, a limited marketing budget, maybe only a few sales team members. It’s important to filter through clients and projects to ensure that goals are being met as efficiently as possible. Therefore, it’s important that your sales and marketing teams gets focused on making sure you are bringing in your ideal clients.

In today’s discussion, we’re talking about using filtering criteria to ensure all of the focus is on our ideal client. 

There are two ways to think about filtering your clients as they move through your funnel: Proactively and Reactively.

Proactive

When we talk about proactiveness, we want to look at which companies that we should target. If you know your ideal clients, it makes it easier to focus your sales energy on them. One way to focus is to compile a list of local businesses. You should do some preliminary research to which companies you should be reaching out to — the types of clients that are more likely to engage in your services and foster a healthy working relationship.

When thinking “proactively”, you might want to ask yourself these questions:

• Who or what companies should we be proactively reaching out to?
• How can we focus down and work efficiently off of our prospect list?
• Are our marketing processes designed to target ideal clients?

Reactive

When we talk about being reactive, it’s more than just someone picking up the phone or clicking a link. Although this interaction is the ultimate goal, it’s more about quality than quantity. We want to make sure that the people who are calling or visiting the website are a viable option to continue with sales’ and marketing’s, and ultimately operations’ efforts. Having forms to filter out the less compatible prospects can help us regain focus on what the actual mission is — to serve ideal clients. To make reactive filtering function best, it is important to be creating and promoting content that those ideal clients would want to interact with. Don’t make it exclusionary to other companies, but focus your energy trying to attract ideal prospects. You’ll make less work for your sales and operations teams if your marketing is targeted at the right people.

What’s The Bottom Line?

This prospecting step is crucial. If we’re not filtering proactively or reactively, we can very easily drain the operations team by bringing in clients that aren’t exactly right for your business. Having a clear and focused plan and process yields better results. It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of overworking, giving proposals and quotes to every prospect that asks for one, and bringing on any client that expresses interest. But sometimes, you have to make choices based on which clients are going to bring more to your table.