When you sell to other businesses, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of not only demographics, goals, motivations, and pain points (which you might document as a buyer persona), but also how the other business operates as a corporate entity. Having this extended understanding and documenting it as a customer profile can help you to target your ideal customers with more finesse.
In this article, you’ll learn about customer profiles — what information they should include, why that information is useful, how to find out who your ideal customers are, and where to find more of them using your customer profile.
A customer profile is a document that outlines the ideal customers of a business-to-business (B2B) company. Stakeholders can refer to this document to understand, recall, review, or revise these ideal customers in order to target them better (for sales, marketing, branding, UX design, or whatever).
Customer profiles are different from buyer personas, which as the name suggests are more personal. Buyer personas depict the consumers that purchase business-to-consumer (B2C) products for personal use or employees that purchase B2B products for work use on behalf of their company, whereas customer profiles depict the overarching companies that buy B2B products. You might find buyer personas being described as B2C customer profiles, though.
Here’s a quick recap, because it is confusing: customer profiles profile businesses, whereas buyer personas profile people (even if their purchase is on behalf of a business).
Profiling a business refers to collecting information about its revenue, corporate structure, and expenses (to name just a few things). This information is obviously a bit different to the information that you’ll see on a buyer persona, even if there’s some overlap (e.g., pain points and goals). If your ideal customers are very corporate-y (i.e., there’s a lot of hierarchy and bureaucracy), then you’ll want to use a customer profile. Buyer personas are better for targeting on a more personal level (yes, again, even if the purchase is on behalf of a business).
That being said, collect whatever information you feel is relevant and don’t worry about the technical definition of it.
Customer profiles have four sections — demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral, although you don’t actually need to categorize the information into sections.
Demographics are surface-level ballpark characteristics that make businesses (in this example) different from other businesses, but not necessarily unique. For example, a business might be in, say, the $500,000-$1,000,000 revenue bracket with many other businesses.
Geographic profiling is the collection of information related to businesses’ locations, including the language and culture there.
Demographic and geographic profiles are useful for sales, marketing, and brand targeting.
Psychographic profiling boils down to what businesses think and feel.
Behavioral profiling boils down to what businesses do and why.
Psychographic and behavioral profiling can help your organization determine what to do and how to communicate with your customers after targeting them.
To help you get started on developing a customer profile, let’s take a look at some of the most important things to include.
Here you want more of a short description than a box to check. This isn’t an application form, so you don’t need to decide between marketing and public relations, wonder why freelance is its own category, or determine what the heck technology even means.
“Marketing agencies specializing in SaaS products, no freelancers” is a perfectly fine description of your ideal customer’s industry/niche/type of business. Type of business, if relevant, could be “non-profit” for example.
This essentially means the number of employees. Now even if your B2B product caters to individual consumers as well as provides solutions to businesses at scale, it’ll probably generate more revenue from businesses of a particular size, so we’ll need to note this down too.
Determine how much money it has to spend. Naturally, your ideal customer has a budget that realistically allows for the cost of your product among their other expenses.
You’ll want to know how much money the company makes. Targeting customers based on revenue can be advantageous if your product’s return on investment is high and easily communicable, and/or budget constraints are a problem that your customers face.
Targeting higher revenue customers and illustrating how much money your product makes them or targeting low budget customers and illustrating how your product frees up their budget are both great strategies, but you probably need to target businesses with a particular revenue.
Here you want to describe the attributes of the location that affect people’s mood, and in turn, their behaviors. The vibe could be described as relaxed, claustrophobic, welcoming, unfriendly, party-like, or just vibrant for example. If the employees of your customers work in-office, what’s the ideal vibe there?
Ultimately, what makes them feel like using your product? For example, remote workers might be more open to using a chat app for communication if they feel lonely working at home, but perhaps not if they enjoy the tranquility of working alone in a nice environment such as near the beach.
Influencers are the people who feel empowered at work to talk about the challenges they face and have a say regarding tools and processes, whereas decision makers are the people that make the final decisions. But who are they exactly? What are their job titles? Those are the people you list here.
List the “blockers” too — Who’s the wrong person to pitch your product to? You can do this for every criteria. Also make a note to revisit businesses who have had a significant change in leadership (decision makers/influencers).
In many ways, a customer profile is a summary of all the research you have on your most profitable customers, so if you haven’t done any research, doing so for the purpose of creating a customer profile could take some time. But it’s still worth it even if you’re starting from scratch.
The first thing that you need to know is that you can format your customer profile as a simple document, almost as I’ve done above and exactly as I’ve done below in the free template.
Start with any kind of post-purchase survey, ideally one that’s presented immediately after purchase to increase the chance of the respondent being a decision maker or influencer (screen for this person regardless). During this survey you can pretty much learn about any of the customer profile criteria. Certain snippets of information, such as how they consume content that leads them to make purchasing decisions and who actually are the decision makers/influencers, can only be discovered this way.
That said, you can also hunt down a decent amount of information (mostly demographic information) using websites that list company data such as TechCrunch and Wellfound (formerly AngelList), presuming that you can tell who your customers are from your customer records.
Insights into goals and pain points can be found in your buyer personas or user personas if your product/UX team have explored anything of the sort.
For technologies you can try running BuiltWith on its website or scour its social media to see which tools they brag about, but it’s probably best to just ask during a survey.
You can find out a customer’s location via any of their public presences. However, the vibe is more about how they feel about it — what’s the mood and atmosphere like in your customers’ work environments and how does it impact how they prefer to work?
And finally, try to grab your product’s customer journey map (or create one if you haven’t already). This is ideal for painting a picture about how customers explore a problem they’re facing, how they discover and adopt your product, and how they feel about it afterward.
I’ve put together a customer profile template in Google Docs that you can use for free:
Many examples of customer profiles and even some templates that you see online are nicely designed, but it doesn’t make sense to worry about how it looks and waste time making the information fit into the design’s layout. It doesn’t need to be formatted in a specific way or even segmented into the four customer profile categories (demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral). The information just needs to be there — loud, clear, and easily editable.
So, should you use customer profiles? Absolutely! They can be useful throughout entire organizations — for sales, marketing, branding, perhaps even product design or UX design.
Putting a customer profile together might seem like a huge undertaking, but it’s worth it considering that it’s a summary of the research you’ve done or would’ve done anyway. Sure, they can be quite comprehensive, but they provide everyone in your organization with an aerial view of your ideal customer, which translates to focus, direction, and confidence when making decisions.
Got a question? Or several? You know where the comment section is (it’s below). Thanks for reading!
Featured image source: IconScout
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