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 to be an increasingly inadequate and incomplete means of describing the common characteristics of their most valuable customers and prospects.
In-depth win-loss analysis typically reveals a variety of other factors, all of which turn out to be more powerful predictors of than pure demographics. These might include, for example, organisational issues, environmental issues, or behavioural issues that relate to how the prospective customer makes buying decisions.
They almost certainly include situational factors - namely the issues, trends and recent trigger events that are affecting both their organisation and the markets they have chosen to focus on. When you are able to combine basic demographics with these organisational, environmental, behavioural and situational factors, you have a much better chance of working out what an “ideal prospect” looks like.
The ability to identify with your ideal customers and prospects can have a profound impact on your organisation’s sales and marketing effectiveness. Your marketing campaigns can target the right people and organisations and focus on issues that really matter to them. Your sales people will be able to qualify potential sales opportunities far more accurately and avoid wasting time on prospects that are never likely to turn into good customers.
We can help to capture and collate the insights that already exist within your organisation through a combination of surveys, interviews and workshops. We can help you validate the resulting “ideal customer” hypotheses through structured win-loss analyses and voice of the customer conversations. And we can enable you to distil what we discover into simple, effective, "ideal prospect profiles" that can inform your marketing efforts and your sales qualification criteria.
Take the Next Step
We would be pleased to share what we’ve learned from helping high-growth-potential organisations to establish their “ideal customer” profiles as part of a balanced programme of sales and marketing performance improvement. As a first step, you may find it useful to download our guide to "Ideal Customer and Key Stakeholder Profiles".
As soon as you are ready to learn more, please email us at idealcustomer@inflexion-point.com, or call us on +44 (0) 118 975 0595. We look forward to discovering whether we might be able to help your organisation to improve its performance in this critical area.