Define A Clear Target Customer Profile; Who Is Your Match?

Sales and marketing teams are most effective when they have a crystal-clear picture of who they’re targeting and how their offering can help that target. Any fuzziness in the definitions of the target industry or prospect will slow down the marketing cycle.

If your Chief Spousal Officer told you to meet them at a Starbucks in New York, but couldn’t tell you what street it was on, you’d waste a lot of time in the wrong neighborhoods. And likewise, if your CEO tells you to close “Fortune 1000” customers or “companies with money”, but can’t tell you exactly what kinds will buy when, you’ll waste time working the wrong deals!

So – assuming you know what you’re selling and its value proposition (a dangerous assumption), map out as clear a picture as possible of who will buy from your company. Get a cross-functional team together and sort your customers into a handful of groups or buckets, sort of like customer personality profiles.

* Each customer profile needs to be easily identified by the sales team, and must be distinct from the other profiles.

* Each profile should have a consistent buying process and set of needs…which in other words, means the sales team can use a consistent set of messages and sales process to close them.

Example attributes are: type of industry, champion title, economic buyer, problems faced, attitude, size of company, type of company or organization, previous experiences…

Greg Galle (who’s scary smart) of www.c2llc.com also described it this way: if your company was on match.com, what kind of person would be your match?