At any given point in time, roughly 5% of your target audience is in the market for your product or solution. So, if you have 1,000 targets, 50 of them are in the market to buy your product or solution—or a competitor's solution, now.

Many companies treat all of their targets exactly the same, marketing to them equally. Smart marketing execs, however, know how to apply relational segmentation to more effectively and efficiently ferret out the 50 and save money to boot.

If your average lead rate is 5%, that means among some segments the rate is as low as 1% and as high as 9%, so figuring out which groups of targets have an average lead rate or higher and focusing your energies on them is the best way to be effective and efficient with short-supply resources.

So how do these marketing execs avoid the shotgun approach and pinpoint the 600 or so targets that will yield the best results? Testing. By SIC code, by size of company, by decision maker level, by annual growth percentage, by geography, by offer, by media ... there's almost no end to the variables you can test to reveal your best prospects, at a fraction of the spend.

Take a look at the chart below and see how relational segmentation can work for you.

Download How Relational Segmentation Techniques Help Achieve Higher Sales at Lower Cost for more in-depth information.

By Dan McDade