Leveraging Customer Profiles

Every company must nail down who its beneficial prospective customers are. And thus, an ideal customer profile is not a suggestion but a necessity since it is a tool for your sales team and the products team to achieve your company’s objectives. Here are the necessities of leveraging customer profiles but first, the outline of what a customer profile is.

What is A Customer Profile?

A customer profile visualizes the type of company interested in your products and services, most likely to remain loyal and recommend you to others. Therefore, first, it includes information about the people in the prospective customer’s company.

Secondly, the size of the company in regards to their employees. Additionally, the business and activities that the company majors in. Finally, and most importantly is, why they’re likely to want your services or products.

Reasons for Creating A Customer Profile

A customer profile is an ideal tool for helping your sales team identify the strength of a prospective customer. It helps you identify the customers you should invest the most effort in selling to and eliminates the eventuality of spending too much time on a prospective customer that will not buy. Secondly, it helps the product team test whether the features and add-ons of a product are the right fit since they have an idea of who the ideal customer is. Eventually, the importance of a customer profile is saving on both time and costs. Also, it should help you find other and similar customers.

How to Identify A Customer Profile

There are three primary strategies for identifying an ideal customer. But first, you should figure out your ideal customer regarding what they are buying, how much they spend while buying it, and what products they use. Additionally, the company’s decision-maker is also an important aspect to consider.

Then now, you can either use

• Top-down sales strategy – Ask executives in the company to refer you to the offices you should talk to.
• Bottom-up sales strategy – Aim for the lower ranks in the company and get them to refer you up the chain.
• Direct Sales strategy –go directly to the decision-maker of the company.

You could decide to use all or some strategies simultaneously depending on the company, although this could backfire. Also, the strategy you use mainly depends on the company’s size in terms of employees and the corporate structure.

Steps to Writing a Customer Profile

There are three main steps to writing a customer profile;

• Identifying the best customer –The major traits in an ideal customer that you should look out for include their network, skills, readiness, ability, and profit. These all vary depending on your line of work. Therefore, the question to ask yourself is, who are the best customers to work with? Who places the highest value on your product?
• Research the market– After identifying the best possible customer for your company, venture into the market and find out why you are a good fit. Why did they buy so quickly? What could you do better? And the best way is to ask them.
• Build a profile– After figuring out the “who” and “what,” build a behavioral profile of your ideal customer. To attain a perfect profile, use a spreadsheet for data and insights, cross-reference similar entries to identify the groupings, tag each grouping as a profile, and eliminate to retain the most suitable.

Final Phase

With the ideal customer profile, you will be able to look at new prospects and run them to see how similar they are to those that have bought your product and are satisfied with it. Then convince them that you are holding the solution to their problems.