Notes for owners · Business growth
How to identify the right target market for your business
Find your target market by testing what you already sell profitably against five checks: can you find them, reach them, and serve them at a profit.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
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Identify your target market from what you have already sold profitably, not from where you think the opportunity is. List your last twenty orders with the margin and the trouble each caused, and the pattern is usually already there. Then test each candidate group on five things: can you find them, reach them affordably, and serve them at a profit. Do they have money, and a reason to act? A group that fails any one of those is not a market, however large it looks.
Start with what you have already sold
Take the last twenty or thirty orders. For each one write the industry, the size, the location, what they bought, who decided, the margin, how long they took to pay, and how much argument the job involved.
Then mark the eight you would take ten more of. Not the biggest. The ones that paid a fair price, paid on time, did not consume your weekends, and came back.
This exercise is uncomfortable because it often shows that the customers the owner is proudest of are the least profitable. For example, a printing unit in Rajajinagar may find that wedding card orders bring visible volume and endless revisions at thin margins. Carton printing for small food brands, by contrast, is steady and profitable, with an illustrative order of ₹35,000 that repeats every six weeks.
Five tests a candidate market must pass
Findable. Can you make a list of them by name? An association directory, a market cluster, an exhibitor list, a search term with volume. If you cannot enumerate them, you cannot sell to them systematically.
Reachable affordably. Is there a channel that reaches them at a cost your order value can carry? A ₹6,000 product cannot support field sales visits. A ₹6,00,000 machine cannot be sold on Instagram alone.
Able to pay. Do they have a budget, and who releases it? Many small businesses spend a year courting a segment that wants their product and has no money for it.
Urgent. Is something forcing a decision this quarter? A regulation, a season, a breakdown, a capacity limit, a rent agreement ending. Markets with interest and no urgency produce long pipelines and no orders.
Profitable to serve. After delivery, service, collections and the argument, what is left? Some segments are profitable at the quotation and loss-making at the bank.
The dimensions worth segmenting on
| Dimension | Useful when | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Industry or sector | Your product solves an industry-specific problem | Dairy units needing effluent treatment |
| Size: people, turnover, plant count | Buying process changes with size | Units of 50 to 300 people, where the owner still decides |
| Geography or cluster | You depend on service response or freight | The Peenya and Bidadi industrial belt |
| Buying trigger | Your best orders always follow one event | Factories adding a second shift |
| Who decides | Your message must fit a role | Purchase manager against proprietor |
| Current supplier | You win by displacement | Units already importing the part |
| Order pattern | Cash flow depends on repeats | Monthly consumable buyers over one-time projects |
Most small businesses over-use industry and under-use the buying trigger and who decides. Those two do more for your conversion rate than the industry label.
Size it roughly, without a research report
You do not need a precise number. You need to know whether the market is large enough to matter and small enough to reach.
Count the population you can enumerate, such as the units listed in an association directory, the exhibitors in a relevant category, or the shops in a market. Multiply that count by a realistic share you could win over three years, and by your average order value. If that number is not worth your attention, choose differently. If it is enormous, you have defined the market too broadly and should narrow it.
Then check demand with Google's keyword data for the searches that segment would type. Ask five people in it a plain question: what did you buy last time, who from, and why.
Test it before you commit
Pick one segment and run a small, honest test for six to eight weeks. A landing page written for that buyer, not your home page. A list of a hundred names in it. A small advertising budget on the searches they would use. One follow-up sequence in their language.
Then read three numbers: how many enquiries, how many reached a real conversation, and what they said no to. The reasons for the no are more valuable than the enquiry count, because they tell you whether the failure was the market, the message or the price.
Signs you have chosen wrong
Every quotation becomes a price negotiation. Payments take ninety days as a matter of course. You cannot name the ten companies you most want to win. Your sales team keeps drifting back to a different kind of customer, which usually means they have found the real market and nobody has updated the strategy. And your pages and quotations have to be rewritten for every enquiry, which means you are serving too many segments to be good at any.
What to do next
Do the twenty-order exercise this week, with the margin column filled honestly. Write one paragraph describing the customer you want more of, specific enough that your salesperson could name five companies that fit it. Then run one six-week test against that paragraph before spending anything larger.
