Before we can target potential new customers, we have to define a strategy for our local office. These strategies will vary depending of how mature our business lifecycle is at our individual office.

If we take the United States for example, the US started in 2012, and at that time, we were a new name to the US market, so we wanted to develop our brand awareness. As a result of this, we started by first targeting EMS companies, and this is because for every EMS company that we were successful with, it gave us exposure to potentially five, to ten, to fifteen OEM customers that we hadn’t spoken to previously. Fast-forward to today, and our strategy is completely different. We now have excellent brand awareness, and we’re also one of the US leaders in PCB production in our category. This means that we can now be more selective about which customers we choose to target. So, our strategy now is to focus on OEM customers in high-reliability applications. This is important as it gives a sales team structure, focus, and a target group that they can specifically focus on when looking at lead validation (which will be covered in lesson 4).

It cannot be stressed enough that we, as a group, have to be focused in our approach as to which customers we should – and shouldn’t – be targeting. Now that we know the type of target customers we’re trying to engage with based on the strategy that we’ve defined, let’s move on to the next step in the warm calling process – finding leads.