Salespeople can’t truly excel in their roles unless they have an intimate knowledge of their ideal sales prospect. That’s where customer profiles come into play.
While it might sound reductive to boil your consumer base down to a single persona, understanding the ideal customer profile is much more than a quick characterization of a group of people. It serves as a straightforward guide to identifying and reaching your best client prospects.
Sales teams can use an ideal customer profile to build a strategy for targeting, understanding, and engaging your company’s top prospects. By building sales strategies covering location, job type, online behavior and more, you can target your efforts in a way that inevitably reaches a highly relevant audience.
If you’ve already developed your ideal customer profile, the work of researching and analyzing your customers has already been done. Now you just need to apply that customer profile for more effective sales prospecting. Here’s how to turn that customer profile into tangible sales improvements.
Customer retention rate is a critical metric for most sales teams. Converting new prospects into clients isn’t as valuable when they’re merely serving to replace past clients that are leaving your company.
Effective prospecting and converting needs to be additive. Your ideal customer profile can support this goal by helping you identify your top clients, in terms of sales volume, loyalty, or other metrics. Being able to identify these top clients lets you dedicate your best resources to retaining these customers, preserving your best clients and a large share of your revenues.
Once you have this priority list in place, you can strategize to retain your best clients, setting up a solid foundation to grow your company’s revenues through proficient sales prospecting.
A Template For Finding New Customers
The data composition of your ideal customer profile can be used to identify prospects who are likely to be interested in your company. These identifiers can cover a range of data points, and they should be used to narrow down your potential online audience to the highest-value potential customers.
Since multiple data points are likely to be useful in distinguishing strong prospects, sales teams should establish “market segments” that group prospects into smaller segments based on the data points they have in common with the ideal customer profile. This will make targeting much easier for sales teams, allowing you to design sales strategies and custom content for each customer segment.
For example, in creating your ideal customer profile, you may notice that your customers have a higher likelihood of acquiring other companies within two years before purchasing your solution. Knowing this, you would create an M&A market segment. Then, you would create a custom strategy for targeting prospects at companies that have recently bought another company.
Your existing customers can tell you a lot about where and how to find new potential clients. Building an ideal customer profile is a reliable way to turn this internal data into an actionable game plan. Once you have this profile in place, use it to reach new prospects with greater proficiency than ever before.
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Topics: Sales management
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