Free target market worksheet for a stronger first draft.

Saltmarsh Payroll is a three-person bureau that runs monthly payroll for other businesses. The offer put into the worksheet is narrow: fully outsourced payroll for organisations with roughly five to fifty employees, priced per payslip, with a named person who answers the phone. The buying situation is the part most definitions skip, and here it is written first.

The segment reads: owner-managed businesses in the East of England with five to fifty staff, running payroll in-house on desktop software, where the person doing it is the office manager or the owner's partner rather than a qualified payroll professional. That is narrow enough to build a list from, which is the test. Companies House filings give employee bands, local trade bodies publish member directories, and the accountants who already refer work can name twenty firms fitting that description without checking anything.

The trigger events are listed separately: the office manager who has always done payroll hands in notice; the business crosses the point where pensions auto-enrolment duties get complicated; a penalty letter arrives after a late submission; the company takes on a second site with different working patterns; the incumbent accountant drops payroll as a service. Each of these is a moment somebody starts looking, and each suggests a different opening sentence in an approach.

The exclusions are explicit and shorter: not sole traders with no employees, since there is nothing to run; not businesses under five staff, because the per-payslip price makes it worse value than doing it themselves; not organisations with heavy shift patterns and weekly variable hours, because the bureau has no timesheet integration and those clients have historically eaten the margin. The worksheet ends with a review date six months out and one sentence on what would falsify it: if more than half of new clients arrive from outside the region or above fifty staff, the definition was wrong and the pricing should follow the reality.

The weaker version most businesses write is 'small and medium businesses in the UK who want to save time and reduce admin'. Nothing in it can be acted on. You cannot build a list of businesses that want to save time, because that is all of them. There is no trigger, so there is no moment to reach for and no first line for an email. There is no exclusion, so the sales conversation never ends early and everybody's time goes to prospects who were never going to fit. And because the definition cannot be wrong, it can never be tested, which means the business will still be working from the same guess in three years.

Do not build one if you have no customers and have spoken to nobody. At that stage the worksheet will neatly format your assumptions, and the format makes an untested guess look like research, which is the specific harm. What you need first is fifteen conversations with people in the situation you think you serve, asking what they did last time this problem came up and what they paid. Come back to the definition afterwards and it will be a hypothesis with something behind it.

Do not build one from scratch if you already have thirty or forty customers. Your invoice ledger is better evidence than any worksheet. Sort it by margin and by how quickly the client paid, look at the top quarter, and describe what those accounts have in common: size, sector, who signed, what had just happened when they got in touch. That description is your target market, discovered rather than imagined, and it is usually adjacent to the one on the website rather than identical to it.

Skip it when the real question is pricing or positioning wearing a segment costume. 'Should we go after bigger clients' is often a question about whether the delivery model survives at that size, and no amount of audience definition answers it. The same applies to 'we need a new market': sometimes the market is fine and the offer is unclear, and redefining the audience becomes a way of avoiding a harder rewrite.

Finally, do not use this to produce a persona document. A named fictional buyer with a photograph, a job title and a set of weekend hobbies has to earn its place by changing a decision about channel, message or price. If it would not, you have made decoration. Keep the worksheet to the things that are checkable: who they are, what happened to make them look, where you could reach them, and who this is explicitly not for.

Four parts, and the definition is incomplete without all of them. First, a describable group: a type of organisation or person with attributes you could filter on, such as size, sector, location, the software they currently use, or the stage they are at. Second, the buying situation: the event that turns a background irritation into an active search. Third, reachability: at least one specific place these people already are, whether that is a trade directory, a supplier who talks to them all, a regional association, a forum, or a referral relationship. Fourth, the exclusions.

Exclusions do more work than people expect. They sharpen the message, because copy written against a defined edge is more particular than copy written to include everybody. They shorten sales conversations, because you can say early that this is not for a certain kind of buyer and be believed for it. And they protect delivery, since most small businesses discover their exclusions by taking on two or three clients who were wrong for them and losing money slowly. Writing the exclusions down converts that expensive knowledge into something the whole team can use.

The fastest check on a definition is whether you can produce a list. Give yourself an afternoon and try to name twenty real organisations, or find one place where at least a hundred of these people gather. If the afternoon ends with eight names and a lot of maybes, the definition is too abstract to sell against, and the fix is usually to add a constraint rather than remove one. Narrower definitions are easier to find people inside, which is the opposite of how it feels while you are writing them.

Then check that the group can be reached economically. A segment that exists but only assembles at a trade show costing four figures behaves differently from one that reads a regional newsletter or asks their accountant for recommendations. Route to market is part of the definition rather than a later step, because a perfectly described audience with no affordable path to it is the same as no audience. Where the path runs through somebody else, an accountant, a supplier, a broker, that intermediary deserves as much attention as the end buyer, and often more.

The three get used interchangeably and answer different questions. A target market or segment is the population: the kind of organisation or group, plus the buying situation. It drives the decisions with money attached, such as which channels to spend in, how to price, and which service lines to keep.

An ideal customer profile is narrower and firmographic. It is the filter you would apply to a database: employee count between these numbers, this sector, this region, this technology in use. It exists to make targeting operational, and it earns its keep when somebody has to build a list or set advert parameters. A persona is a fictional individual inside that profile, and its honest use is tone and message. It helps a writer decide what a reader already knows and what would insult them. Confusion between the three produces the common failure of a beautifully drawn persona used to answer a pricing question it was never able to answer. Write the segment first, derive the profile from it if you need to buy or build lists, and add a persona only when somebody is about to write copy.

Set the review date when you write the definition, six months out for most small businesses, and put one falsifying condition next to it: the observation that would tell you the definition was wrong. Without that sentence, reviews turn into a reading of the original document and everybody agrees with it, because it was written by them.

At the review, take the customers who arrived in that period and sort them into three groups: matched the definition and worked out well, matched it and did not, and never matched it at all. The third group is the interesting one. A steady trickle of good customers from outside the definition is the market telling you where it actually is, and the usual right response is to widen or move the definition rather than to keep discouraging them. The second group matters too, since customers who fitted on paper and were unprofitable in practice normally share a characteristic that belongs in the exclusions. Update the worksheet, note what changed and why, and keep the old version. The history of how a definition moved is often more useful to a new hire than the current version on its own.