Categorizing accounts and prospects
Marketing and sales departments have for years qualified clients and their target market through the attribution their size. The industry utilizes terms to identify them and it is very common to see them referred to in news, blog articles and marketing materials to easily convey this to the reader.
- Very Small Business
- Small Business
- Medium Sized Business
- Enterprise
There is one issue with this type of classification system. When referring to size, it is not always the number of employees within a company. Inc Magazine, Indeed and even the US Government have their standards in measuring the size of businesses.
The most important standard to you should be how your company and marketing department have identified these common identifiers within the organization. While some sales teams classify companies by number of employees, others may look at revenue. Knowing that a corporation manages a fleet of 3,000 vehicles may put them in the Enterprise level for one company but meaningless to a company that evaluates how much a brand spends on online advertising.
Once you find out what metric is most important, it will be easy to understand these standards and how they apply to your sales process.