How to Prioritize One Audience Over Another

Audience Prioritization Vs GTM Strategy

Deciding which audience to target first or which represents the better investment opportunity is a crucial task, but it differs significantly from determining the audience focus of a company in the context a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. 

For GTM development, we use the strategic toolkit of Where to Play/How to Win, which extends beyond audience prioritization to guide decision-making across the organization’s entire value chain, integrating elements like resource allocation and customer value creation into a cohesive strategy.  

Relative Targeting

For prioritising an audience within a GTM motion, Relative Targeting, a technique described by SiriusDecisions (now Forrester), is ideal. It is based on the simple principle that market opportunity should be matched by your ability to address it. In the words of the SiriusDecisions Research Brief, ‘propensity is driven not only by factors found within targets themselves but also the ability of your collective marketing and sales engine to capitalize on these factors.’

In practice, this means making a checklist of questions for the Market (External) Factors and Company Capability (Internal) Factors. Below is our take on that checklist:

Market (External) Factors

  • Trends: Can we identify trends that indicate increased purchasing of our type of solution in the target market?
  • Triggers: Can we identify specific purchasing triggers, i.e. ‘pending events’ in a given vertical?
  • Competitive Landscape: Is the competitive landscape more or less favourable in the industries we are considering?  I.e. is a competitor particularly active in one sector and less so in another?
  • Economic Health: Are there differences in the economic health and growth rate of these industries?  I.e. is one booming and another stable?
  • Adoption and Adoption Rate:  Are there differences in the adoption and adoption rate of our category or relevant adjacent categories?

Company Capability (Internal) Factors

  • Domain expertise: How much we know collectively about the space
  • Advisor/Influencer contacts: Who we know, or we could get to know, who could get us to speed on the space quickly. 
  • Solution fit: Any advantage to a particular vertical as a result of product design
  • End user contacts: End user customers and prospects we know and can approach.
  • Channel contacts: Ditto in the channel.

Relative Targeting can be done relatively quickly and, even with limited data, can really help guide the tricky decision-making behind audience prioritisation.