A Customer Profile of Your Ideal Customers Will Give You Develop Better Prospects?
Why is important to create a customer profile? To help your salespeople find their ideal customer. Salespeople love to sell, but most hate prospecting. The reason is simple. It takes time – lots of it – and most of what they see is rejection. Hundreds of calls generally yield few good prospects. As rejection leads to frustration and the fear of rejection builds, the results of the activity produce fewer and fewer sales. The pipeline is small and most of those in it don’t turn into the revenue you’re anticipating.
However tedious it may be, prospecting to find the best possible candidates to enter your sales pipeline is by far the most important part of the sales
process. Creating a customer profile will help. Filling the pipeline with the wrong people can be an unbelievable waste of time. For a salesperson or team to be a successful, you must choose your prospects well. I consistently see salespeople going after the wrong kind of client – complete waste of time. Knowing who you’re looking for is key to developing your sales strategy. You need to have one strategy for acquiring new clients and another for maintaining your existing ones.
Define Your Target Market
The first place to start, in developing your customer profile, is to define your target market. Let’s say you sell fire alarm systems to commercial buildings. Does this mean all commercial buildings are your target market? No. Your market is a particular type of commercial building. You need to understand what types of commercial buildings represent your target market. This is the same for any product or service. Don’t run around thinking everyone represents your target market.
To identify your ideal client, consider the answers to these questions:
• Who are your high margin clients?
• What industry are they in?
• How was the lead developed?
• How long was the sales cycle?
• How do they pay?
• Which ones have bought your products or services more than once?
• If a majority of your current clients are in the same type of business, what type of business is it?
These are some of the questions you need to answer to develop your customer profile and find your ideal customers. Brainstorm a few more, based on your company and its industry.
Your Customer Profile Helps You Understand the Clients You Don’t Want
Just as it’s important to identify your ideal customer, you need to know what type of customers you don’t want. Ask yourself (and your sales team) which of your current customers represent the type of business you don’t want?
• Is there an industry type?
• Is it the low margin business?
• What customers have the highest cancellation rate?
• Are those customers in similar industries?
• Which ones are the slow pays?
Develop a list of the good and the bad. If they fit your ideal customer profile, their good. If they don’t, their usually bad. Once you have the list, you can develop your strategy for targeting those that represent the best in your market.
Identify the Prospects in Your Territory
Now that you’ve identified the type of prospects you want, you’ll need to find them in your market. What’s the most effective way to do this? Get a list. You can go to places like Don and Bradstreet or infoUSA.com and buy leads with names, phone numbers and email addresses with a minimal investment. You can search their database by type of business, SIC Code, number of employees, sales volume, executive title and other great options. Build your list and download it in minutes.
This doesn’t eliminate the hard work, and you’ll still get rejections, but by creating a customer profile, you know your ideal customers and can target them with a solid prospecting plan, at least you know when they hit your funnel, they should be just what you are looking for.
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Related podcast:
SMW 002 Developing your strategic sales plan – Part One
SMW 003 Developing your strategic sales plan – Part Two