In the previous section, you learned how to find prospects through Google or Twitter or writing on LinkedIn. The next step is to vet them and make sure we're working with a list of high quality prospects. This goes back to the idea of finding a good fit prospect. To recap, when we're thinking about the ideal type of customer you want, it comes down to two things, one, the company and two, the person at the company you talk to. It isn't a good fit unless you have both a good fit company and a good fit person. If you're at a mature company, you're often told what the criteria is for a good fit. If you're at a newer company, you may have to determine what a good fit is on your own and iterate on it as you speak to more prospects and customers. Let's dive in to how you can do research to filter for a potentially good fit customer. When researching people, look at their job title, their length of time at the company, and their responsibilities. These things are generally found on LinkedIn. When researching companies, pay attention to their industry, the size of their business, both the number of employees and the amount of revenue if possible. The age of the business, their website, and their location. Let's say you work at a web design agency. Your company is focused on building websites for software companies with about 10 to 50 employees. Your target persona is generally someone in marketing leadership, maybe a marketing director, maybe a VP of marketing. At a company with 10 to 50 employees, you might even be able to talk to the founder, the owner or the CEO. So as you go through our prospects for good fit people, look for people in marketing leadership. Their job titles might include head of, director, VP, or CMO. If you can't find a marketing leader, you look for the co-founder, owner or CEO instead. These people are likely to be involved in the final decision of whether or not they will hire us to build their website. We call these people decision makers. Remember, depending on what you're selling, the decision maker may not always be the CEO or CMO or VP. In some cases, it might be a team lead or even the end user of the tools. You would also want to look at the company website and review their about page to learn more about the company and the company's history. Since you're a web design agency, you want to pay attention to the design and the layout of the website. Does it look nice or recently updated? Is it easy to use? If the answer is yes, they probably don't need your web design services and you should focus on businesses that have outdated websites instead. Let's pretend you found the VP of a company and their website looks like it could use some updating. This company would be considered a high quality prospect. To learn more about a company, such as their revenue, their funding, the technologies they're currently using, or even more, you can use Datanyze to speed up the research process. Websites like ZoomInfo, and AngelList are also super helpful for finding information about your contacts. Once you have two to three prospects that you believe are good fits, you'll do deep research into them. That means reviewing their LinkedIn, their other social media profiles, Google searching their name to find news about them, their industry, any information about competitors, even blog posts they've written, and so on. Your goal is to understand what they're thinking about and where their interests lie. All the information you collect will inform your talking points and how you actually reach out to them. We're going to go over that in an upcoming section. In the next activity, you'll review your list of prospects and find two to three to focus on. Don't worry if you aren't completely confident in your target persona. You'll learn more about your persona once you start actually contacting people and having these conversations. In the meantime, stick to the example we have of web design agency. Research the prospects you have and keep notes about them in your CRM. [MUSIC]
