The basics of client profiling

Profiling your ideal client - why and how

We all want to sell more of our stuff. Whether that’s bringing on new clients, or whether its selling more services to existing clients, I’d imagine anyone reading this is targeting some kind of sales growth (or at least the business you work for probably is). 

Endless books have been written about how we should be qualifying our prospects and presenting our services as a solution to their challenges etc, etc, etc. But before you get anywhere near that stage, you are hopefully going through a process of narrowing down the groups that your services will bring the most value to (i.e don’t try to sell Ice in Alaska) . You might be trying to attract these suitable prospects through social content. You might have a more direct approach. You might even (uh oh) be waiting for the right prospects to come to you. Either way, you should have some idea of the key characteristics of the business you want to speak to. If you don’t, then you are likely to end up having a lot of conversations that simply don’t go anywhere because the fit isn’t right. 

Your prospect funnel

What we are talking about here (if you’ll excuse some sales terminology) is engaging at the ‘top of funnel’. If the sales funnel is a new concept to you, here’s the summary; prospects come in at the top of the funnel, then slowly progress downwards through the funnel as we engage them more and more, qualifying them along the way. What we hopefully end up with by the time we get to the bottom of the funnel is a smaller group of well qualified prospects who are ready to buy our services. 

But even at the top of the funnel, we don’t want just anyone engaging with us and teasing us with a purchase they are never going to make or benefit from. So to avoid wasting time and energy we need to define who it is that we are the best placed to provide real value to. Because if we don’t work out who our ‘best fit’ prospects are, then odds are we are going to end up engaging with businesses who aren’t actually a good fit. And that is a proven drain of your team’s time and resources. Simply put, bad leads cost you more than you will ever make from them. And in the unlikely event that some do end up becoming clients, they will not be the best fit for your service or your pricing model, which in turn makes them unlikely to stick with you for very long. So when thinking about who we want to engage with, any firm with specific growth goals or tailored services should avoid the scattergun approach. Targeted lead generation should always be about quality and not quantity. 

What is prospect profiling

But anyone can visit your website. Anyone can engage with your social media posts. So how exactly does a business control who it is engaging with at the top of the funnell? This is where customer / client profiling comes in. Profiling is the process of building a clear set of attributes which can allow you to separate a good fit client from a bad fit one. This knowledge in turn allows you to frame your services in a way that appeals more to those you want to engage with, than those you don’t. 

Start your profiling by asking yourself a question; What are the defining and common characteristics that all your best clients have and none of your worse ones do? Once we work out what those defining characteristics are, we can start to build a process that engages specifically with businesses who have those desirable attributes.

Size doesn’t matter

Here’s my golden rule for profiling; it can’t all be about size. So often businesses tell me that they know who their ideal client is. They’ll say something along the lines of ‘ we target businesses in X sector with a revenue of between Y and Z’. That’s not profiling. Yes, the size of the prospect is likely to equate to what they might have to spend on your services, so it can factor into your profiling. But it cannot be the end of it. 

Mindset data

A more meaningful way to segment your targets would be to look at possible mindset differentiators in your market, and consider whether there is a particular mindset group that you are looking to attract. For example, perhaps businesses with rapid growth ambitions are going to be particularly well placed to benefit from your services. An attribute like growth ambition goes beyond just size, and tells us something about the desires and intentions of our key targets. Whereas if we used only size as our criteria you could be reaching out to a ton of large companies, but maybe half of them have moderate growth goals and so aren’t going to invest in your services. Mindset is just one example, but the trick is to find what attributes are common across the good fits and absent across the bad fits.

Let data lead

You already have clients (hopefully). Looking at your existing client data can be the key to understanding your ideal client profile. Take the last 5 clients that increased their spend with you. What do they have in common? Perhaps 4 of them just changed their leadership team and have a group of new execs looking to make an impact. Or perhaps they 3 of them worked with one of your competitors before moving across to you. What you are looking for is themes of commonality. Now by contrast, look at the last 5 clients you lost or clients where things didn’t go well. What do they have in common? Maybe they all moved offices in the last 12 months. If so, prospects with those attributes might be the ones we should be looking to put off from engaging at the earliest possible stage. When you are trying to win new business the concept of trying to ‘put anyone off’ can be scary, but long term it can save you a lot of pain and resources. Better that you weed out the bad fit clients at the top of the funnel than letting them get to the bottom after investing time in meetings etc. 

What is hopefully clear here is that the more data we have on our existing clients, the more informed our thinking can become about who we want to target going forward. Not many businesses tag their CRMs with mindset based data. But if you want to start with a simple exercise you can create 3 or 4 mindset categories for your clients e.g ambitious, content, conservative. Then take a portion of your client base and try to assign each of those clients to one of your mindset categories. You will likely see a pattern quickly emerge. 

Messaging for the mindset

Once you have a clearer idea of who it is that you are wanting to target and what separates them out, you can start to think of ways to engage exclusively with these types of prospects. Often this is done through content. Using our earlier example, let's say you want to engage exclusively with businesses who have major growth ambitions. If you were to create some content focused around ‘gaining rapid growth’ then you can be confident that any prospect who engages with that content is likely to have one of the key attributes that you are looking for. Prospects with more conservative growth goals simply wouldn’t enter a funnel with that kind of content at the top. Immediately you have qualified out a ton of bad fit prospects without even having a conversation. 

If you have key prospects who you aren’t in a position to categorise by mindset (i.e you don’t know them well enough) then these kind of campaigns can help provide the answers about how well they fit. Clearly anyone engaging with content on rapid growth is likely to fall into the ‘ambitious’ mindset group themselves. 

Equally if you are engaging your prospects more directly (email, LinkedIn), you can begin to focus your messaging and materials on high growth. And the same logic can be applied to any category / profile. For example if you wanted to attract the more conservative group, talking to these in a way that places more emphasis on stability and efficiency will resonate more with them.

Matching services to segments

Putting your clients into groups can have negative connotations (for more information see most banking advertisements on TV). But the idea of profiling is not to come up with large groups who you simply want to rule out working with. Grouping prospects can be a great way of identifying early on which of your services a prospect is most suited too. If you have a range of services you offer, then using the mindset groups mentioned above, we can likely map which of our services might be the best fit for each group. An accounting firm for example, will have a range of services which would appeal to the conservative profile group. It is entirely possible to have 6 different profile groups and find a service that is appropriate for each one. This knowledge allows you to engage with each group in a which is most likely to resonate with them, and will mean they end up working with you in the right way. 

True Nature Sales provides sales coaching for businesses using psy-lution sales methodology which taps into the psychology of buyers as well as the principles of selling a ‘solution’. Our online course ‘Sales 101’ has a full modules covering prospect profiling.