Are you targeting the right companies?

Why better B2B prospecting often starts with narrowing the focus, not increasing the activity.

When new business is slow, one of the most common reactions in B2B prospecting is to increase activity. More calls. More emails. More LinkedIn messages. More prospects added to the list. Sometimes that helps. But often the problem isn't how much prospecting you're doing. It's who you're prospecting to in the first place.

A good salesperson working the wrong market will struggle. Put the same person in front of companies with a genuine reason to buy, and the conversation changes completely.

More prospects doesn't necessarily mean more opportunity

Modern sales tools make it remarkably easy to build large prospect lists. Choose an industry, company size and geography and you can have thousands of companies in front of you within minutes.

The difficult part isn't finding companies anymore. It's deciding which ones are actually worth your time.

Two businesses can look almost identical in a database, same industry, similar revenue, similar number of employees, while having completely different reasons to buy from you.

That's why targeting based only on basic filters rarely tells the whole story.

Start with what you already know

Before looking for another 10,000 prospects, look at the customers and opportunities you've already had.

Which companies became good customers?

What did they have in common?

Why did they need you?

Who was involved in the buying process?

Which types of companies progressed quickly, and which consumed months of sales effort without going anywhere?

There is often far more useful information sitting inside a company's CRM, sales conversations and customer history than people realise.

The goal isn't to find a perfect formula. There probably isn't one. It's to develop a better hypothesis about where your chances are strongest.

Then look for reasons to buy

Once you understand what a good potential customer looks like, targeting can become much more intelligent.

Instead of asking only:

Is this company in our target industry?

You can start asking:

Is there something happening here that makes our offer relevant?

That could be expansion into a new market, a change in leadership, rapid hiring, a new product, regulatory change, an acquisition, investment, a technology change or dozens of other signals depending on what you sell.

Not every signal means somebody is ready to buy. But it gives your salesperson something much more useful than a company name and a generic job title.

It gives them context.

The right company is only half the job

You can identify an excellent account and still get nowhere if you're speaking to the wrong person. B2B purchasing decisions rarely sit neatly with one job title. The person experiencing the problem may not own the budget. The person responsible for procurement may not understand the operational pain. A senior executive may approve the investment without ever using the solution.

Good prospecting therefore means understanding both:

Where is the opportunity?

and

Who is likely to care about it?

Sometimes that means approaching several people within the same organisation rather than betting everything on one contact.

Technology can help but it shouldn't make the decision for you

AI and modern sales tools can make this process considerably faster. They can research companies, identify patterns, surface signals, find relevant people and help prepare outreach. That's valuable.

But automating poor targeting simply allows you to contact the wrong companies faster.

The technology should help your salespeople make better decisions, not simply generate more activity.

Better targeting changes the rest of the sales process

When the companies are better chosen, everything downstream becomes easier.

The outreach can be more relevant. The salesperson has a stronger reason for starting the conversation. The prospect is more likely to recognise the problem you're talking about.

And your sales team spends more of its time on opportunities that could realistically become business. That doesn't mean every conversation will convert. Prospecting will always involve testing, learning and adjusting.

But before asking your sales team to do more, there is a more useful question to ask:

Are we giving them the right companies to work with?