Ideal Customer Profile

As the late management guru Peter Drucker stated "What business are you in?" is one of the most important questions a business leader can ask of him or herself.  A corollary to "What business are you in." is the question "Who are your ideal customers?"

"Who are your ideal customers?" is one of the first questions to ask when starting on a B2B lead generation program. This is called an Ideal Customer Profile.

A great article at squidoo (by marketing expert Seth Godin) described an Ideal Customer to be:

• A customer who wants your product
• A customer who has the ability to pay for your product
• A customer who has the authority to purchase your product

Let's examine these one by one.

1) A customer who wants your product

Seems simple. Right? But be careful. Many business leaders say that "everyone needs" their product. But marketing to everyone is prohibitively expensive and nearly always leads to failure. What you are looking for is specific group who have specific pains you can appeal to.

The tighter the definition, the easier it is to market to them.

2) A customer who has the ability to pay for your product

Many businesses look internally at their marketing, their tagline, or their sales messaging. But in reality, they are selling to the wrong people. Too often they think "Our product is so valuable, people will come up with the money to pay for it."  But what that really means is if you make a great widget, you'll get stuck with a warehouse filled with widgets.

What you really need is people who have real pains and the funds to address those pains.

3) A customer who has the authority to buy your product

This is the area most marketers overlook.

For those of us with years in sales, it's a phenomenon we like to call "Happy Ears." We find someone so enamored with our product that we love to talk to him. But he has no pull with his boss and his boss has no intention of buying your product.

Maybe your product addresses the needs of marketing managers. This was tested by the book and course Small Business/Big Profits. The author marketed it to business owners and marketing managers. He predicted it would do best with marketing managers, as it would make them vastly more effective in their jobs.

Not one marketing manager every bought the course.

The net result was that the buyers of the course were the business owners. Follow-up found that marketing managers wanted to buy, but they could not get their businesses to authorize payment.

Your lead generation programs need to target the prospect who has the authority to make the purchasing decision. Without that person, there is no sale.

Spend some time crafting your Ideal Customer Profile as you begin crafting your lead generation programs.