How do you plan a sales campaign if you don't know who to target?

A lot of companies start sales and marketing campaigns by thinking about the what — what is this campaign going to entail? What is our budget? What collateral do we need?

Instead, you should start by focusing on who. Who is going to get a promotion because they purchased our product? Who is going to get fired because they didn’t (and had a problem as a result)? Who is going to get so much value out of the product that they’ll tell all their colleagues about it?

Who is both individual — you ultimately need to convince an individual to love your product — as well as organizational. You need to narrow down the characteristics of the company or organization as well as the characteristics of the individual. Those characteristics should absolutely be relevant to your product, though.

Pro tip: Developers at Fortune 500 companies are not a specific enough who, especially if you’re a small startup and you don’t have tons of resources.

Once you’re clear about who you want to reach, the rest becomes obvious.