Finding Your Ideal Customer

by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja

Traditional selling, which sees the profession as a numbers game, tends to envision customers like cats: all of them, according to the proverb, are gray in the dark. That's fine, if you don't mind selling in the dark. If you sell with your eyes open, you know that's not true. One of the first things you learn about customers, in fact, is that they are as different as cats and dogs. Some are consistently a pleasure to do business with, while others make you daydream about becoming a beach bum.

Everybody has sold business that looked like a necklace but that turned out to be the rope you hang yourself with. But by profiling your ideal customer, you can avoid that kind of business. You can concentrate on customers who are as committed as you are to obtaining Win-Win outcomes. You can screen out the turkeys who have apparently taken vows to make you miserable.

The ideal customer profile is a checklist of characteristics that you and your company have consistently found in the customers that you most enjoy doing business with. Your ideal customer, then, is the model of the customers that your salespeople would most like to sell to again. By implication, this list of characteristics is also a "negative image" of the prospects and customers you'd probably do better avoiding.

Constructing your ideal customer profile is a matter of distillation. Think first of the characteristics that are shared by your best customers--actual customers; not prospects. You determine the criteria for what's best. Think of the customers who have made you leave the sale singing, with whom you would do business again without hesitation--not everybody you feel ok about, just your prime accounts. Think of what characteristics appear again and again with these accounts, and jot them down. Next, think of your worst customers--the people you would cross the street to avoid, who make you think about starving rather than doing business with them again. Jot down a list of their most frequently observed characteristics.

When you make these two lists, don't just look for the obvious "hard" features, such as need for your products or financial solvency. Look for "psychographics" that deal with values and attitudes. Trustworthiness, dedication to quality, personal integrity, responsiveness--these are examples of psychographic characteristics that Miller Heiman clients often identify in their best customers. In making your list of "best" traits, include those values and attitudes that are most important to you and to your company.

Similarly, focus on psychographics in making up your "worst" list. In the workshops where our clinets construct their ideal customer profiles, participants frequently name qualities such as lack of loyalty, rigidity about prices, a confused buying process, and a suspicious, closed attitude towards relationships with vendors.

From these two lists, distill the most significant characteristics you seek in an "ideal" customer. These would be the most common traits in your best list and the opposite of the most common traits in your worst list. In our workshops, we have clients hone down their final lists to five ideal customer traits. You may find your list holds four or six traits. The idea is to translate your gut feelings about customers into a set of objective "performance measures," against which you can test the suitability of future business opportunities. The final list is your ideal customer profile.

What Do You Do with a Profile?

You apply it to current customers and prospects, and see how they match up. For example, we here at Miller Heiman have developed the following five characteristics for our ideal customer profile:

1.Their management wants a permanent change in the sales process, not just a two-day training workshop.

2.Their management places value on developing people.

3.They play Win-Win with their vendors, their employees, and their own customers.

4.They have a "complex sale."

5.The company has at least 75 to 100 sales people.

The first three characteristics are all psychographics. They reflect our dedication to the sales process, our belief in sales as a profession, and our commitment to mutual satisfaction as the linchpin of every solid business relationship. In utilizing this profile, we seriously measure prospects' likelihood of fitting these characteristics, and we are extremely reluctant to pursue business where there isn't such a fit. We might be able to make a sale to a firm that wanted merely a two-day training program. But we would be making that sale under false pretenses because that's not our expertise--and to do that would diminish the value of our services. So in cases where we're asked for "just training," we typically say no.

The fourth and fifth characteristics are more "demographic" than "psychographic." They reflect the fact that our client base is made up of corporations who have the complexity to require our consulting, and the resources to profit from it.

It's important to emphasize that, although a company as a whole may establish stable qualifying criteria that reflect its business philosophy, the ideal customer profile is also a very personal thing. Different members of the same company's selling team may use it slightly differently.

The lesson of the ideal customer profile is clear: Don't waste your time making connections that you don't really want. Maximize your time and your opportunities by zeroing in on those places where the match is real.

Adapted from Selling Machine by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman and Tad Tuleja © 1997 by Miller Heiman, inc. All rights reserved by permission of Random House, Inc. Miller Heiman, Inc., is a Reno, Nevada-based Corporation that helps businesses develop sales processes. You can phone Miller Heiman at (800) 526-6400 or visit our micro site for more information about our products and services.