Our leadership team is deeply divided on who our ideal target market actually is, leading to sales, marketing, and operations pulling the business in completely different directions. How do we force alignment on our V/TO target market?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your leadership team is not aligned on your target market, you waste massive amounts of cash, time, and talent. Sales chases bad clients, marketing builds the wrong messaging, and operations struggles to deliver. This misalignment is a major red flag for potential buyers looking for a scalable, exit-ready business. To resolve this, you must dedicate a portion of your next quarterly offsite to aligning on your V/TO®. Stop trying to be everything to everyone and focus on your core customer. Start by looking at your current customer list. Have your finance seat run a report to identify your top twenty percent of clients by profitability, ease of delivery, and retention. Next, analyze the characteristics of these top clients. Ask your leadership team to define their demographic, geographic, and psychographic traits. Who are they? Where are they? How do they think? Use this data to define your ideal client profile. This is your target market on the V/TO®. Once defined, write it down and make it an absolute filter for all future decisions. If a sales opportunity does not fit this profile, the leadership team must agree to walk away. This requires discipline, but it forces your team to pull in the same direction. When your entire operations, marketing, and sales models are built around serving a single, highly profitable target market, your enterprise value will soar.