For years, sales and marketing teams have used demographic data—such as job titles, age, and income—to identify potential leads. While targeting methods based on demographics can be effective, they typically result in high volumes of low-quality leads, requiring teams to sift through countless prospects to find the few that truly matter.
The solution? Skill-based targeting—a revolutionary approach that could be the future of prospecting.
What is Skill-Based Targeting?
Skill-based targeting is a marketing strategy that focuses on identifying and connecting with professionals based on their abilities and expertise. By understanding a prospect’s skill profile, teams can gain a deeper understanding of a prospect’s capabilities and how they align with the products or services they’re offering. Targeting potential customers based on their skills–like object-oriented programming or supply chain management–allows teams to identify high-quality leads that are more likely to convert. To use this strategy, revenue teams need market data that provides detailed information about professionals and their skill sets at scale; we call this “skill data”.
Understanding Skill Data
Skill data is information about the capabilities, qualifications, and expertise that professionals develop throughout their careers. When analyzed effectively, it can offer valuable insights into professionals’ areas of expertise and how well they align with industry or role requirements.
Skill data is often broken down into hard and soft skill categories. Hard skills represent technical, job-specific abilities, like Ruby on Rails or Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Soft skills represent nontechnical abilities, like emotional intelligence and communication.
When it comes to skill data, quality matters. High-quality skill data is not inferred from a professional’s job title or resume–it’s determined by an in-depth analysis of their career trajectory. To create a single skill profile, Rhetorik’s AI models analyze more than 20,000 factors related to a person’s career, including their educational experiences, certifications, patents, media mentions, and more.
Uplevel your sales strategy with skill data
The Limits of Demographic Targeting
Traditional demographic targeting is a go-to prospecting strategy for many revenue teams. By focusing on specific job titles, industry sectors, and company sizes, businesses can narrow down their potential customer base and identify leads. However, this approach has significant limitations. Job titles are often specific to particular industries and regions, which means that using job-title based searches alone might cause teams to miss out matches from valuable markets. Thanks to social media networks like LinkedIn, variations in job titles proliferate as new trends (and increased access) encourage users to shift their titles at will.
Even established roles are often subject to change. Two individuals with the same job title (like “content strategist”) might have vastly different skill sets, like UX design and copywriting, even if they work in the same industry. Similarly, workforce teams in niche industries or emerging markets often create new job titles to reflect specialized roles. As a result, targeting programs that rely on job titles are only partially effective. By using demographic targeting alone, sales teams might miss out on valuable prospects who have the skills to benefit from their products or services.
Why Skill-based Targeting is More Effective
Skill-based targeting addresses these limitations by going beyond the surface to understand a professional’s capabilities. Instead of focusing on what a person’s job description says, skill-based targeting focuses on the things that they’ve done. In other words, advanced skill-based targeting goes beyond basic resume analysis to analyze the experiences, certifications, and responsibilities that define a person’s career.
One of the advantages of skill-based targeting is its ability to identify highly skilled prospects in niche markets or prospects with rare combinations of skills. For example, a sales team targeting cybersecurity professionals might look for individuals with expertise in organizational change management and GDPR compliance. While neither of these skills are likely to be mentioned in a job title or description, they can be uncovered through a careful analysis of a professional’s skill profile.
Conclusion
By adopting a skill-based approach, sales teams can streamline their prospecting efforts and improve lead quality. As markets continue to evolve, demographic data may no longer be sufficient for prospecting when used on its own. Skill-based targeting allows for a more nuanced and effective approach–allowing teams to engage with prospects who are the most qualified to benefit from their offerings.
