Selling into Micromarkets

Reprint: R1207F

Sophisticated sales organizations now have the ability to combine, sift, and sort vast troves of data to develop highly efficient strategies for selling into micromarkets. While B2C companies are typically adept at mining the petabytes of transactional and other purchasing data that consumers generate as they interact online, B2B sales organizations have only recently begun to use big data to both inform overall strategy and tailor sales pitches for specific customers in real time.

Micromarket analyses involve five steps: defining the optimal micromarket size; determining the growth potential for each; gauging market share in each; understanding the causes of variation in market share across them; and prioritizing high-potential markets to focus on.

Exploiting new-growth hot spots will be successful only if salespeople have a solid understanding of how micromarkets work and the simple tools for selling into them. Sales leaders must coach their teams in developing sales “plays” for groups of structurally similar micromarkets. That requires cross-functional collaboration—in particular, between sales and marketing.

To sustain early wins, companies also need to change their approach to sales force management in three ways: They must rethink performance management, open new channels between sales and marketing, and invest in talent development.