ideal customer profile

A well defined Ideal Customer Profile can make or break your business. Businesses take months if not years to create an Ideal Customer Profile.

But what is Ideal Customer profile anyway?

Ideal customer profile defines the kind of customers who are most fruitful revenue generating buyers for your product or services.

They are the ones because of whom your business is in good shape. They are the ones who give you the most referrals. They are the ones who give you good word of mouth.

They are the ones for whom you would like to build a new feature in your product. They are the ones for whom you would like to run a new sales or marketing campaign and like to get them to buy your product or service.

There is no universal defining of an Ideal Customer Profile but you may think of these customers as your dream customers.

How to create an Ideal customer profile?

Its a long and iterative process and involves experimentation.

Its always good to choose your customers. If you are lucky enough to choose your customers then you are in a good shape of your business.

A good customer can bring more customers but a bad customer can kill your brand, waste your resources and make you lose your focus and energy on unnecessary things that will hurt your business in the long run.

When UBER started their business in San Francisco their ideal customers were the wall street people who can afford to pay for a luxury sedan.

UBER started out their marketing by putting up kiosks in places where people like these gathered a lot and had money to pay for a luxury sedan.

UBER did not offered any lost cost rides at the beginning because they wanted these rich folks to tell other rich folks about UBER Services.

These folks can afford easily and would not bother to try UBER service. If they liked it would be a big hit. Which happened in UBER case eventually.

There are three methods to create an ideal customer profile:

• Market based approach
• Account based approach
• Lookalike based approach

Market based approach for Ideal Customer Profile

In the market based approach you define your Ideal customer based on their firmographic and demographic attributes.

This approach is used when you want to reach out to customers based on their industry, location, size or other firmographic factors OR you don’t have specific companies in mind that you want to reach out OR your market is broad in size.

Lets say you are a customer support solution provider. Your ideal buyers are the ones who will need customer support tools to assist their own customers.

While making this ideal customer profile you will have to understand what kind of customers are more likely to buy a customer support tool.

In case of a customer support tool the companies who are in B2C space and have a more web traffic will be a good fit for this customer support tool.

So instead of randomly targeting companies who start with companies who are in B2C space and have a decent web traffic.

Based on your initial testing of doing outbound outreach aka cold emails to these prospects you understand what is the response rate and closure rates.

After that you can improvise your Ideal customer profile based on who all shows more interest to your customer support tool.

Firmographic attributes in Ideal Customer Profile

• Industry like Real Estate, Internet, Consumer Goods etc.
• Size of the company – Startups, SME, Mid sized, Enterprise customers
• Location of your Ideal customers – City, State or Country
• Company type – Ecommerce, SAAS, Product or service based company
• Estimated Revenue
• Business model i.e B2B or B2C
• Monthly web traffic
• Their recent activities like funding, hiring, product launches, top level changes
• Other company attribute

Demographic attributes of Ideal Customer Profile

• Title of the buyers or influencers
• Department of the buyers
• Authority of the buyers or level of the buyers in the organisation

You can use tools like EasyLeadz to define your Ideal customer profiles based on persona of your buyers.

The more precise your Ideal customer profile is the better your outreach will be and eventually your response rate.

If you are reaching out to ecommerce companies then your approach to these companies will be having a different cold email subject line or cold email copy which will give you better results.

Personalisation can be done based on ideal customer profile. The higher the personalisation the better is your response rate.

One most important profile attribute is the title of the prospects based on the size of the company. Cold emails generally do not work on CEO’s of large size companies.

If you are reaching out to founder of a 500+ employee size company for a chat bot solution then do you think s(he) will care to reply you back? Most likely s(he) wont.

So you will have to define your targeting based on the size of the company and the title at-least if not something else.

Account based approach for Ideal Customer Profile

Account based marketing approach works when you have specific company names that you want to target. This approach is defined based on a limited market.

If you are selling to only Fortune 100 companies. So your target market and approach for selling and reach out to these prospects will be more relationship driven than outbound approach.

Cold email generally do not work on account based marketing approach.

Account based marketing or ABM is used when you have a high ticket product or service and you want to focus on certain companies that you believe are more suited as a buyer.

EasyLeadz offers a free email finder tool using which you can find contacts in specific companies.

Lookalike based approach for Ideal Customer Profile

Lookalike based marketing approach in B2B sales is used when you already have certain companies using your products or services.

You can define your ideal customer profile based on the attributes of your existing customers.

Example: If all of your existing companies are ecommerce companies and they are based out of United States and they have an employee size of 50 then you can use these attributes to create an ideal customer profile.

The more attributes you can pick up from your existing customers the better your targeting becomes for your B2B sales campaign.

Furthermore you can also check who all your existing users and their titles. If founders are using your product then you should reach out to more and more founders.

As said the better your Ideal customer profile is defined the better your outreach is and the higher your response rates will be for your outbound campaigns.