Your Ideal Customer Profile

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

Traditional selling, which sees the profession as a numbers game, tends to envision customers like the proverbial cats: All of them, goes 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 extremely varied -- and some of them are best not doing business with.

Everybody has sold business that looked like a necklace but turned out to be the rope you hang yourself with. A simple qualifying test helps you avoid that business. It helps you concentrate on customers who are as committed as you are to Win-Win outcomes, while screening out those who have taken corporate vows to make you miserable. We call this screening device the Ideal Customer profile.

The Ideal Customer profile is a checklist of characteristics that you and your company have consistently found to be present in the customers that you most enjoy doing business with. By your Ideal Customer, then, we mean your company's ideal -- the model of the customers that you and your company's other salespeople would most like to sell to again. By implication, this list of characteristics also is a "negative image" of the prospects and customers you would probably do better avoiding. Constructing your company's Ideal Customer profile basically is a simple 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 ecstatic, with whom you would do business again with no hesitation -- not everybody you feel OK about, just your prime accounts. Think of what characteristics appear again and again with these Win-Win accounts, and jot them down. Next, think of your worst customers -- the people you would cross the street to avoid, who would make you think about starving rather than do business with them again -- and jot down a list of their most frequently encountered characteristics.

In making these two lists, we urge you to look not only for the obvious "hard" features such as need for your products and financial solvency, but for "psychographics" having to do with values and attitudes. Trustworthiness, dedication to quality, personal integrity, responsiveness -- these are examples of psychographic characteristics that our clients often identify in their best customers. In making your list of best traits, you should include those values and attitudes that are most important to you and your company.

Similarly, focus on psychographics in making up your worst list. In the Strategic Selling workshops where our clients construct their Ideal Customer profiles, participants frequently name things like lack of loyalty, price rigidity, confused buying process, and a suspicious, closed attitude toward vendor relationships. Write down whatever irks you the most, the patterns of behavior that make you feel like you're losing.

Finally, distill from these two lists the most significant characteristics that 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. In your business, you may find a four- or six-item list to be more appropriate. The number isn't etched in stone. The idea is to translate your gut feelings about your customers into a small cluster of concrete, clearly definable "performance measures" against which you can test the suitability of future business opportunities. However many traits you decide are appropriate, write them down, in the order of their importance to you. This final, distilled list of characteristics is your Ideal Customer profile.