Are You Targeting the Right IoT Customers?

Mar 194 min read

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers wide-ranging opportunities for businesses across various sectors. However, suppliers and connectivity providers need to think carefully about who they are aiming their sales activity at in order to achieve revenue growth.

TecFutures has worked with MNOs to help align sales activity with real IoT revenue opportunities - but most importantly, opportunities that fit well with their strengths and their revenue goals.

This asks several big questions of suppliers:

1. Are you selling to the ‘right’ customers?

2. Are you clearly talking to prospects about the business benefits of your IoT offering?

Customers and Use Cases – Finding IoT business that meets your revenue goals

Ideally, suppliers want to find revenue opportunities that have longevity and growth, but that also that match their broader revenue ambitions. This means being completely clear on two core sets of definitions:

1. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that your marketing and sales teams are targeting

2. The Ideal Use Case Profile (IUP) that will drive the best revenue opportunities for your business

Here TecFutures summarizes the key criteria for the ICP and IUP that we have found to be essential in helping marketing and sales teams drive the ‘right’ sort of IoT business.

ICP – Ideal Customer Profile

There are five core customer profile criteria that are important in defining what makes an ‘Ideal’ customer.

1. Size of business: What size of customer business are you aiming for in terms of turnover? Are you looking at the largest of customers, where there may be a lot of competition, or are you looking to take advantage of IoT in mid-size companies? Large customers may have longer decision cycles, but smaller customers may have less technical expertise and need more handholding. A further consideration is whether you are looking for completely new customers to the organisation, or whether cross sell and upsell opportunities are acceptable.

2. Vertical sectors: Are you targeting prospects where you can leverage your vertical sector expertise, or looking at adjacent markets to expand into?

3. Longevity and growth: Do you prefer established companies or are newer companies acceptable? Clearly successful growing companies are an ideal type of customer so some consideration of company size (turnover or employees) may be important.

4. Geographic location of customers: Does location matter? Are you able to support global service requirements or is a regional or single country customer base more suitable?

5. Geographic location of decision-making: Does location of product design and decision-making matter?

IUP – Ideal Use Case Profile

Use cases are many and varied. TecFutures maintains a growing database of over 170 separate cellular IoT use cases, and these represent a diverse range of revenue opportunities for suppliers to navigate. Here we identify seven core use case criteria that can be used to define the Ideal Use Case Profile for your business to focus on.

1. How many target customers are there active in each use case? Bearing in mind your preferred geographic market, ideally you may have many potential customers active in a target use case as that offers your sales team more opportunities.

2. What is the ideal IoT ‘data traffic profile’? Does your business need high data volumes from, for example, use cases that involve high bandwidth and lower latency? Or will lower data volumes (and higher customer numbers) drive sufficient revenues?

3. What is the market volume? Some use cases, especially in B2B2C applications, can involve potentially very high product volumes. Others may be much lower so there is a volume / value trade-off to consider.

4. What are the global connectivity requirements? Do you have any geographic constraints in terms of connectivity support?

5. What are your ideal geographic markets? Do you have preferred geographic target markets that may impact the customers you approach?

6. What are the use case barriers to growth? Some use cases are just emerging and working through product or feature challenges, while other use cases may be more mature and established.

7. Are your competitors already active in the use case? Some use cases may offer ‘new entrant’ potential customers to approach. However, well-established use cases may already have competitors actively selling connectivity and, in these cases, a supplier must have a well-tested and competitive connectivity proposition.

Selling the Business Case

Most target customers will be open to considering IoT solutions on the basis that it offers them business advantage – they are not buying technology for its own sake.

Consequently, connectivity provider sales teams need to consider gathering pre-sales insight that will form the foundation of the sales conversation – a simple business case analysis. This conversation has to rest on the following foundations:

How does IoT add competitive advantage for the products that the customer is offering? Does it open up new markets for them?
What new product features might be IoT enabled?
Which of your customer’s competitors are already offering IoT driven product features?
How is your service better than other connectivity providers (price, availability, data, global connectivity, service wraparound)

All the above can be provides to sales teams as a package of use-case specific pre-sales insight that will help to drive successful opening conversations and demonstrate sector and use case understanding.

How TecFutures Helps

Navigating the complexities IoT revenue growth can be challenging. With a unique combination of tailored flexibility and research-driven insights, we are geared to support our clients' growth with speed and agility. Unlike many consultancies that offer generic solutions, TecFutures provides client-specific, actionable analysis focused on the telecoms, messaging and IoT sectors.

We already support MNOs with specific revenue opportunity assignments. We maintain and continually grow a detailed database of over 170 cellular IoT use cases.

Additionally, our flexible engagement model—with options for high-impact projects and ongoing monthly retainers—means our clients receive exactly the level of support they need, without long-term commitments, enabling rapid response to evolving business demands.

We support clients with

Market Analysis and Opportunity Assessment: Identifying high-potential markets and use cases.
Go-to-Market Strategy Development: Developing effective go-to-market strategies and marketing campaigns.

Strategic Projects or a Monthly Retainer - You Choose. TecFutures’ unique flexibility allows clients to select high-impact, research-based support on their own terms, whether for one-off projects or ongoing advisory services.

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Reach out to us on marketing@tecfutures.com to discover more about how we can support you.