How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile

How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile

by | Jul 27, 2011

This blog outlines the steps we take to build a successful outsourcing lead generation strategy and the sales consulting options we provide, as well as the steps you may be able to take on your own if you have the sales bandwidth.

In What is an Ideal Customer Profile we talked about why the sales consulting step is critical to our success as an outsourcing sales company.  To recap – It allows us to find and target your potential customers based on a number of hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker type.

During launch, the first step we generally advocate as part of our initial sales consulting (especially when selling Professional Services or launching lead generation for a highly complex sale) is to apply Pareto’s Principal to your existing customer list.   Also know as ‘the law of the vital few”, or the 80:20 rule, it states that 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your customers.   These are the customers we want to go after.  You can then score the customers based on the hard criteria discussed in What is an Ideal Customer Profile with a specific focus on

  • Title and Level of Contact
  • Functional Area
  • Annual Revenue and Number of Employees
  • Vertical Market

We also recommend that you look at the customers that you don’t want, which means looking at your failures.  Who makes up the 80% of your customers who are driving 20% of your revenue?    Here we recommend that you look at:

  • Functional Area
  • Level of Contact

If there is a trend here, as an outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation company, we will avoid them like the plague and label them WCP (Worst Customer Profile).  You then make a decision about what you want to replicate and don’t want to replicate when you do your new lead targeting.

If you are starting from scratch with no history you need to start making intelligent guesses.  We recommend that you start with determining what percentage of someones budget your solution would qualify for.  You then need to target companies that will produce large enough size revenue deals to cover the costs of sales and marketing and determine who in that company will own the P&L for your product or service.

The second step is to understand the size and scope of the market to see where the biggest opportunity is.  Gabriel Sales we recommend the following three-part approach:

  • We take your internal Ideal Customer Profile and map it against our historical data to examine connect ratios.  This helps us to determine how many calls it typically takes to get the decision maker.  From this we can do a semi accurate forecast of how often the will to actually pick up the phone or open an email.  This lets us determine the ease of reaching.
  • We do a deep dive leveraging Hoovers and other Database Research Tools to match SIC codes of your existing ICP to determine the target market size based on the hard criteria and get a hard decision maker count by vertical and determined ease of reach.
  • You look at Social Media including Linked In, You Tube and Influential Blogs to do a preliminary landscape of ancillary tactics to determine Social Media Adoption.

The third step (and the one often skipped) that we recommend is an honest assessment of where you are best equipped to Sell Money and provide Success Stories for these new targets. Essentially it’s about selling to the customers you are better equipped to service than anyone else.  Where there is alignment is where you will win.  So, ask yourself where does this customer alignment meet existing sales and marketing alignment too, so I can win and the customer can win faster. (Both of these tactics are detailed in other blogs).   This step will make your outsourcing lead generation or internal lead generation more effective.  It will also accelerate your ability to sales qualify and increase your pipe velocity.

Bottom line is that an Ideal Customer Profile is (in the words of Steven Covey) starting with the end in mind.  It will drive sustained and exponential returns by helping you to:

  • Find deals faster
  • Close higher volume and higher deal size
  • Build a strong pipe to nurture for future deals
  • Eliminate customers that do not scale or take too much time to service
  • Increase your profitability
  • Create a focus that drives sales and marketing alignment

Other blogs we suggest checking out if all of the above makes sense:

What is an Ideal Customer Profile

Selling Money -ROI Statement Early

A Successful Sales Script Starts with Building a Winning Sales Story

 

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

by | Jul 8, 2011

This is part one of a two part series that explains how being strategic in planning how you target customers will produce significantly better results on the back end.  Part two can be found here,How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile.

An Ideal Customer Profile is a process for identifying what customers you should be targeting to get the best return from your sales lead generation efforts.  As an outsourcing sales organization this is one of the key areas we focus on when providing our initial sales consulting during the launch of a client.    We believe this aspect of the sales process deserves careful attention because what goes into the sales funnel is going to have a huge impact on what comes out of the funnel.   It is also the critical first step in building an aligned sales and marketing effort, so you can create a sales machine.

Ultimately, an Ideal Customer Profile should allow you to find and target your potential customers based on a number of hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker:

  • Annual revenue of the company
  • Number of employees
  • Level of Contact – C-level,  senior Manager, middle manager
  • Functional Area –  business Area, technical Area
  • Title
  • Revenue Responsibility – budget maker or budget spender
  • Geography – global, national, local
  • Technology Adopted –  in some cases knowing what  ERP, CRM, and if they have virtualized may be critical
  • Their Clients – e.g.  are they doing business with a Procter and Gamble, Federal government, education (local gov.)  Walmart, Intel,  EMC etc.

In addition, there well could be some softer qualitative criteria:

  • Business Pain/Need
  • Vertical Industry Trend –  established or in transition,  growth or decline
  • Competitive –  large competitors or a volume of competitors
  • Psychographics – company culture, leadership style, corporate values

It is also important to know who you don’t want to sell to:

  • Decision makers whose jobs could be threatened
  • Internal Support Functions – for example, if you are selling data analytics you may want to avoid MR groups, or if you are selling operational efficiency services you may want to stay away from operations managers and start with supply chain directors

The purpose of this type of hard and soft segmentation is to establish clear, hard criteria that can be leveraged across your sales and marketing machine to:

  • Purchase  direct dial contacts for cold calling
  • Purchase direct mail and Electronic direct mail contact information
  • Filter leads from publishers
  • Leverage for a “Cost Per Click Campaign” like Google Adwords
  • Decide where to place your online advertising budget
  • Instruct your social media outreach program

We realize this can look like a daunting task.  But, as an outsourcing sales organization with 10 years of data we can guarantee that if you give this the attention it deserves upfront, you will see significant returns within 6 -12 months. You will see exponential returns in months 12-18 when your first wave of nurturing deals start to fall out of your pipe as closed deals.

For additional information on how to build and Ideal Customer Profile, we recommend you check out our companion piece entitled, interestingly enough, How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile.

 

Sales and Marketing Alignment

by | May 24, 2011

As an outsourcing sales company, outsourcing lead generation company, a sales strategy consulting and a digital sales marketing execution company, we have a great deal of conversations with existing and potential clients about what sales and marketing alignment mean.  For Gabriel Sales it means that you have a sales machine where your team is focused on closing business.  That means:

  • Marketing is focused on putting leads in the pipe that will close
  • Marketing drives deals forward with the right sales collateral at the right time.
  • Sales provides marketing with the insights they need
  • Marketing provides “Sales Collateral”, that moves deals through specific stages of the pipe
  • Sales will actually use the collateral
  • Sales trusts marketing to do its job to nurture deals that are not yet ready to buy

The first step in building Sales and Marketing alignment is to agree on your Ideal Customer Profile.

The second step is to agree on definitions for early stage leads. You need to do this so you can build a lead generation machine that matches the buyers readiness to buy with the expectations of your sales team. This way they will understand how much time, effort and money should be invested.    To do this you need to clearly define your lead generations and lead qualification stages.

The following are quick definitions that Gabriel Sales uses:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – A lead that has accepted information and is open to understanding what you have to offer. They have registered for an event, or engaged in conversation with a telemarketer and indicated an openness to be contacted again.

MQL Hot  – They are actively digesting your content.   They have registered for and attended a webcast.  They are opening multiple pieces of digital content.  They are asking your telemarketer buying questions.

Sales Accepted Leads (SAL) – There is a fit between the customer’s pains or needs and your product or solution.  It makes sense to invest sales resource time to do some initial discovery.  A telemarketer can identify this fit by asking some pain questions and then setting an appointment.  A marketer can do this by noticing a shift in the content they are absorbing.  Are they moving from digesting digital sales content that is educational to digesting digital content that is verifying content?   Are they moving from opening emails onto white papers, case studies, testimonials or your blog?  (This is why an investment in marketing automation software like Marketo or Pardot becomes critical).

Sales Qualified Lead  (SQL)  – Your inside rep has established the decision making process, budget and/or path to budget and confirmed the need, which includes some combination of the following:

  • Company Profiled as to:
  • Vertical
  • Public or Private
  • Annual Revenues
  • Spend in Solution Area
  • Strategic Initiatives
  • Contact(s) title and role(s) known
  • Basic understanding of need/pain
  • Spoken to lead several times
  • Potential opportunity identified- product matched to pain
  • Timeline identified 3-12 months (depending on sales cycle
  • Stakeholders identified)
  • Initial compelling event identified that drives the timeline
  • Decision makers identified
  • Agreed to meeting with “Senior Sales” or “Executives” and a next step beyond that meeting (even if that next step is a yes or no on moving forward)

Nurture – Not yet ready to buy.  Have expressed interest, but have not shown an interest in moving beyond Sales Accepted Lead.    In some studies and across several of our clients we are seeing as many as 77% of our deals coming from the pipe a year after we have made first contact.  This requires we stay in touch with digital content and an occasional voice mail on a sustained and consistent basis.

Once you have agreed on the definitions it is much easier to give your marketing team a sales quota by evaluating their tactics and giving each tactic both a primary and secondary function in building sales momentum.

Getting the All Important Executive Meeting

by | May 4, 2011

In Selling to the C-Suite Nicolas Read and Stephen Bistritz (page 84) provides some fantastic data that gets to some of the realities of what it now takes to get to the Senior Decision Maker.  Below is what they found (detailed in the table), our strategic insight and how we approach the challenge of how to get a meeting with an executive.

Question – “When would you take a sales meeting?”

Answers:

Point #1

Strategic Take Away –  You have an 80%  shot of getting to the Decision Maker with an internal champion.  You are almost guaranteed (4 out of 5 is as close to a guarantee as you will ever get in sales) a meeting if you can gain the trust and confidence of the technical buyer whose job it is to screen for the DM.

Action Item –  Focus on creating content and a pitch that addresses the needs of the technical buyer first.

Point #2

Strategic Take Away –   An outside referral works about 50% of the time.

Action Item – Success stories and on-record clients need to be part of your content and pitch mix.  This  also takes the pressure off of your technical buyer being out there solo recommending you especially if the recommendation is from the equivalent of a peer of the Decision Maker at a comparable company.

Point #3

Strategic Take Away – Just Cold Calling Senior Executive no longer works.

Action Item – A home run for Gabriel Sales has been getting very pointed video testimonials from Decision Makers.  This allows your technical buyer to easily share them with the Senior Decision Maker.

We hope this blog has been helpful in understanding how to get a meeting with an executive. For more information, please contact us.

Digitizing Your Intro Pitch to Increase Sales Pipe Velocity

by | Mar 4, 2011

At Gabriel Sales, we have over 12 years of experience helping B2B companies drive sales results and meet their business goals.  Over the years, we have come to understand when and how a prospect likes to be pitched to. This blog outlines the option of digitizing your first pitch to save you time and money.

We have all been there.   That first presentation you give a potential customer can be done in your sleep.  Even worse after a month or two the sales rep (or the executive) can get so bored with it they start diverting slightly and it becomes less effective or even worse it starts to sound rote to the prospect.

One significant opportunity we have seen emerge over the past several years to increase our pipe velocity is the ability to take that first presentation digital.  With the tools now at our disposal we can do that without completely losing the customization required for the technical buyer and the business buyer.  And even more powerful, once we have the sales conversation mapped and we understand the first level of objections we can take that first sales presentation, script it for the product specialist and/or even a senior executive.  Prospects love this because this first experience is with the team that will be serving them.  All these in combination create wins for everyone across the board.

To learn more about Gabriel Sales and the B2B sales and marketing outsourcing work we do, please contact us. For more on B2B sales content development, please check out our Knowledge Center.