It is entirely possible that I will never stop talking about the ideal customer profile for your agency. It is just THAT important. The ideal customer profile helps you target your marketing, obviously, but the ideal customer profile is the perfect launchpad for creating prospect scorecards. The prospect scorecard is a wonderful way to use the ideal customer profile to prioritize your business development activities. As you engage with leads and qualify them into prospects, the prospect scorecard becomes your phone call list. The higher a lead scores on the prospect scorecard, the better that target is for you. And, the scorecard becomes an integral part of refining which attributes of the ideal customer profile are truly the most important for your business.
Hey gang, it’s Tim. I want to keep on this theme of the ideal customer profile. So I talk to a lot of people, and they’re a little bit confused what you do with the ideal customer profile. So once you go through all the mechanics, and there will be a link down here somewhere where you can read some of the other stuff that I’ve written about mechanics of the ideal customer profile.
What you really need to do is think about this as a filter. The ideal customer profile is here to help you not waste time, and not waste money. So when we create the ideal customer profile, what we’re doing is we’re defining the attributes of the customer that is good for our business. So, we’re also, therefore, defining the things that are not good for our business. And what I want you to do, as you create this ideal customer profile, is once you’re done with it, and you used that to inform your marketing, right, because you only want to target those customers that fit your ideal profile, and you want to use that ideal customer profile to tweak your messaging as well, because you’ve got to say the right things to that customer.
But what I really want you to do is build in a prospect scorecard. So as you start to get inbound leads, and you start to have conversations with these customers, or new customers because no marketing targeting is perfect, so you’re going to have some people that don’t fit the profile. What I want you to do is create a scorecard that basically scores from 1 to 5, or 1 to 10, or whatever metric you want, how well that particular prospect fits that desired attribute of the profile. And if you get really fancy, you can take those attributes and weight them. If size of customer is less important than industry or vertical or whatever, then you can weigh that one less.
What I want you to do is score everybody according to their fit in that profile attribute. So basically, grade them according to how well they pass your filter, because what you want to do, as you’re looking at your prospects as people coming in, if you’ve got prospects … you know, I’m using a 1 to 10 scale here, if you’ve got prospects that are 7’s, 8’s, 9’s, 10’s even, in terms of matching your ideal customer profile, those are going to be the ones you’re going to want to put your sales efforts into.
If you’ve got a 6, maybe you want to chase that one because of strategy or opportunity or the kind of customer, maybe the revenue, but you know that’s a little bit of a stretch, and they may not turn out to be as good as you hope, but maybe worth pursuing if your pipeline is not full of 7, 8, 9’s, 10’s. But if you’ve got a 5 or a 4, a 3 or a 2, whatever, anything below 6, I think what you want to do is create a referral program with another agency for whom that is an ideal clients. So you can talk to that customer and say, hey, we think you’re great. We’re not the right fit for you. We think this company might be a better fit for you, and hand that lead off.
Because frankly, that’s … you want to treat the customer well, because you have spent money to typically to get them to talk to you, and you’ve spent some time and energy talking to them to assess whether or not they fit your ideal customer profile, so we don’t want to waste that touch, right. We maybe want to hand it off to a different agency, where they might be able to give us a referral fee or something, but at the very least we are keeping a great relationship, a great impression, of us with that customer that we’ve handed off, right. Because we don’t want to just drop people cold, because that’s kind of a waste.
So, you want to take that ideal customer profile, and we’ll talk about how to use it for targeting, and messaging in a different chat, but what I really want to focus on is making sure that you’re looking at that ideal customer profile as a way to filter out those people that you talk to, so you don’t excited about or chase after a client that is not a quality client for you.
Now over time, of course, we can adjust and create multiple different ideal customer profiles, but really, every ideal customer profile really does need to be followed with a prospect scorecard, so that you know that you have that you can say, okay, awesome, this customer really does fit the profile, and we’ll talk about this a lot more later. Once they become a customer, you can keep on appending that customer profile, so that you can then track … let’s say if you have enough, you could track how well 7’s do in your customer profile versus 9’s or 10’s, because it might turn out that your concept of the ideal customer profile doesn’t actually match the physical reality of that customer.
So, that you want to use that as a feedback loop into your ideal customer profile over time, but really, customer profile, targeting, messaging, off to the side for right now. Use that customer profile to create a prospect scorecard that helps you sort of quantify, not qualitatively, but quantify exactly how close this prospect matches your ideal customer profile, because that will give you the information that you need about how aggressively to pursue, and how important this prospect is to you in your financial future.
Thanks, guys. Talk to you soon.
