--- title: "Latest B2B Guide: Understanding your “Ideal Customers”" description: "B2B Sales: Here's how to really identify with your most valuable customers - and understand how key stakeholders make buying decisions..." --- This is a search field with an autosuggest feature attached. - There are no suggestions because the search field is empty. # Latest B2B Guide: Understanding your “Ideal Customers” ![Bob Apollo](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/78fa41976d534cacbb0e22e151bc6816) Post by [Bob Apollo](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/author/bob-apollo) November 29, 2011 In today’s business climate, you would think that few organisations could afford to invest large amounts of sales and marketing effort in pursuing opportunities that are never destined to close. Yet I continue to come across examples of sales people chasing deals that they have no chance of winning and - equally frustrating - loosing otherwise well qualified opportunities to either the competition or to “no decision” because of a failure to identify, understand or address the key decision-makers’ motivations and concerns… ## Beyond Demographics ![Darts Left](https://www.inflexion-point.com/Portals/41408/images/Darts%20Left.JPG?width=245&height=208&name=Darts%20Left.JPG)Identifying your ideal prospects and customers isn’t simply about company size, sector or location. Most B2B organisations are finding that these traditional demographic-based approaches to segmentation are proving an increasingly inadequate and incomplete means of describing the common characteristics of their most valuable customers and prospects. I strongly recommend establishing an **Ideal Customer Profile** for each of your key product or service offerings. Whilst it’s still useful to capture the core prospect demographics of size, sector and location, I urge you to to pay particular attention to structural, environmental, behavioural and situational factors - the “softer” values that often have a huge impact on your chances of doing business with the organisation. In fact, I haven’t yet come across a single B2B sales environment where these factors weren’t far more important than size, sector or location when it came to accurately qualifying potential sales opportunities. ## Stakeholders Rule! Every complex sale involves a group of key stakeholders in the prospect organisation. These stakeholders each have an important role to play in the prospect’s buying decision process, and while each sales opportunity is unique, every opportunity involves a number of core stakeholder archetypes whose likely responsibilities, motivations and concerns can be anticipated. These stakeholders will typically fall into one of the following categories: **Operational Champion** (the person most likely to drive the project), **Executive Sponsors** (the people most likely to fund the project), **Technical Gatekeepers** (the people who have to approve your technology) or **Financial Gatekeepers** (the people who approve financial and legal terms and conditions). Understanding these common archetypes can help ensure that your messages, materials and sales tools address the most common issues facing each type of stakeholder as they play their role in the buying decision process. But archetypes are only ever “averages” - but the same thinking can be applied to profile the specific attributes of named individual stakeholders within each qualified sales opportunity. ## Putting these Principles in Practice I recommend that you systematically review a representative cross section of your recent sales opportunities and identify both the common characteristics of won/lost/no decision deals and the most common stakeholder types in each of those transactions. This is often best achieved by running one or a series of internal workshops with key representatives of your sales, marketing and other customer-facing organisations. These workshops can help to build up a series of provisional profiles for both your ideal customers and your key stakeholders. It’s often helpful to validate these draft profiles by holding a series of “Voice of the Customer” conversations with a representative sample of your recent customer base. These conversations should seek to validate the assumptions you’ve made about the issues that are most important to these recent customers, who was involved in the buying decision process, and how and why they went about their buying decision process. ## Download the Guide I’ve captured all that I’ve learned from a series of recent client engagements in a [brand-new guide](https://www.inflexion-point.com/templates/) to creating “[**Ideal Customer and Key Stakeholder Profiles**](https://www.inflexion-point.com/templates/)” which you can [download here](https://www.inflexion-point.com/templates/). I recommend that you invest the modest amount of time required to apply the principles to your own organisation - I’m confident that you’ll find the effort highly worthwhile. Let me know how you get along.   ###### Tags: [B2B Marketing, ](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/topic/b2b-marketing) [Intelligent Targeting, ](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/topic/intelligent-targeting) [Complex Sales](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/topic/complex-sales) ![Bob Apollo](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/78fa41976d534cacbb0e22e151bc6816) Post by [Bob Apollo](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/author/bob-apollo) November 29, 2011 Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and Top Sales World Magazine, and the driving force behind Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the leading proponents of outcome-centric selling. Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and market leaders, Bob now works as a strategic advisor, mentor, trainer and coach to ambitious B2B sales organisations - teaching them how to differentiate themselves through their provably superior approach to achieving their customer's desired outcomes. [Follow me on my website](https://www.inflexion-point.com) [Follow me on LinkedIn ](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/bobapollo) [Follow me on Twitter ](https://twitter.com/bobapollo) ### Comments ###### Related Articles ### [Should B2B marketing be employing more scientists than artists?](https://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/94420/Should-B2B-marketing-be-employing-more-scientists-than-artists) Posted by **[Bob Apollo](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/author/bob-apollo),** **Feb 21, 2013** That’s the question implied by one of IDC’s recently published “Top 10 predictions for 2013”. Driven by a number of profound ... ### [The Information Arms Race Between B2B Buyers and Sellers](https://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/66536/The-Information-Arms-Race-Between-B2B-Buyers-and-Sellers) Posted by **[Bob Apollo](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/author/bob-apollo),** **Jul 14, 2011** The term "arms race" was initially used to describe the competition between two or more nations to establish the most ... ### [The 5 Top Reasons Why B2B Partnerships Fail](https://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/63137/The-5-Top-Reasons-Why-B2B-Partnerships-Fail) Posted by **[Bob Apollo](https://www.inflexion-point.com/blog/author/bob-apollo),** **Jun 03, 2011** A recent study involving more than 200 organisations by Channel Dynamics has highlighted some of the key reasons why so many ... 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