Middle Market (or midmarket) companies are most often defined by a revenue range or an employee count. The revenue range can vary, most agree on somewhere between $5 and $10 million on the small end. At the high end of the revenue range, opinions vary from $250 million to $1 billion. Some marketers prefer to focus on employee counts, midsize businesses are organizations with 500 to 999 employees. Midmarket companies constitute a significant target audience for many marketers, here are some additional stats from investopedia.com:
Middle market companies are responsible for about 30 million jobs and comprise about one-third of the annual $30 trillion in U.S. private-sector gross receipts. That makes the middle market a powerhouse of the U.S. economy.
Investopedia.com
At TeleNet, about 60% of our outbound teleprospecting calls are to this midmarket segment. We have over 22 years of tele experience targeting this segment and have learned and created many best practices. Here are just a few of our messaging tips for targeting the middle market…
- Midmarket audiences tend to value attributes like trust, loyalty, and “home town” knowledge
- Incorporate verbal examples of how your solution is working in businesses like theirs
- Have case studies on hand for a call-email-call
- Midmarket companies often have more limited resources (time, labor, bandwidth) as compared to enterprise organizations. When positioning your solutions, focusing on how they alleviate these challenges is very valuable.
- Midmarket is looking for solutions that fit them, specifically. They are not interested in watered-down versions of products designed for large companies.
- Share value points that demonstrate how your solution can meet their needs. Midsize businesses value scalability, having a variety of pricing and payment options, and consumption-based models is advantageous.
- Beware of terms that imply “expensive” or “large.” Words like “global” or “enterprise” may sound to the midmarket listener like your describing a solution that was not made for them.
- Many midmarket companies may purchase on a more “as needed” basis, and the sales cycle is typically much shorter than in enterprise markets. It may be unreasonable to plan a purchase for 12 months in advance. Keep this in mind when defining lead criteria.
These are just a handful of our best practices relating to the midmarket market. Contact us to learn more about our approach and success stories targeting medium sized businesses, and learn about why we recommend you target this space in 2022, here.