sales prospect profile

How Do You Create a Precise Sales Prospect Profile Template?

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To ensure you’re focusing your marketing efforts on the right businesses, you need to know who your best clients are and what makes them the best. Is it that they pay you and don’t cause any problems for your company? Do they refer other businesses?  Do they respond to your follow up emails and other communications?

More than that, you need to know what value you provide to each other. A sales prospect profile template can help you understand who your clients are, why they are working with your company, and how you can find other clients like them.

Helps You Define Your Sales Process

With the right information about your ideal customer profile, you can design a Sales Process that exactly fits your prospects needs.  It also provides material to support your sales coaching efforts.  This then becomes one element of a Sales Prospecting Tool that can be used to help you with prospect research.

 

Input Into Sales Funnel Design

In Hubspot's Inbound Marketing and Sales Methodology, the sales funnel has evolved to become the flywheel.  Regardless of what you call it, you need to design it.  That's why you need to both understand what you sell and to have a clearly defined Lead Generation funnel.  This funnel, which has three layers to it, roughly corresponding to the Top-of-the-Funnel, Middle-of-the-Funnel and Bottom-of-the-Funnel, needs to have content to create and pull through leads from TOFU-MOFU-BOFU.  

What is a Sales Prospect Profile Template?

A sales prospect profile is a fictitious profile of who your best clients are. A sales prospect profile template is your guide to putting together marketing campaigns that drive sales. Think about it – if you know who your clients are, you can target the right organizations in your marketing efforts. How do you define what makes a qualified sales prospect, though?

How do your best clients provide value to your company?

Aside from purchasing your products or subscribing to your services, your clients offer value that you can measure in other ways:

  • They can refer other clients to your company.
  • They can become social advocates for your products or services across various social media channels.
  • They might have additional resources that can help your company.
  • They can offer insight into potential opportunities.
  • They provide continued business with less investment on your part.
  • They offer affiliate marketing opportunities.
  • They can provide feedback on your products and services.

How do you provide value to your clients?

Your best clients are the ones who not only provide value to your company but also receive value from your organization that they wouldn’t get from your competitors.  What is your value proposition:

  • You help your clients increase their revenue.
  • You help reduce your clients’ expenses.
  • Your products or services alleviate your clients’ pain points.
  • Your products or services increase productivity.
  • Your organization helps increase employee morale.
  • You help them provide better customer service.
  • Your products or services encourage success.

How do you profile this fictitious organization?

After identifying which organizations offer and receive the most value to your business, you want to understand how those organizations are both similar and different. This means spending some time gathering and organizing data about your clients. If you’ve done a thorough job uncovering your clients’ needs, you should have sufficient data to get started on a B2B company profile template.

How to Create a Sales Prospect Profile Template That Works

To get an accurate depiction of what your clients look like, you need to approach your sales prospect profile template from three directions.

1. Put Together Your Prospect’s Demographic Profile

Demographics for B2B clients are a little bit different from B2C clients. Rather than focusing on things like age and gender, you’re focusing on what makes a B2B company. Demographic information for businesses might include:

  • The organization’s industry
  • Your prospect’s location
  • Size of your prospect’s organization
  • Length of time in business
  • Information about relevant departments

You may also consider putting together a buyer persona for key individuals in an organization. You might have personas for financial directors as well as marketing professionals.

2. Identify Your Prospect’s Financial Position

To accurately identify and qualify the right leads, you need to understand the financial position and budget constraints of your best clients. You’ll likely have information about budgeting from your sales discussions, but you may have to dig a little deeper for other information. Key data can be:

  • The proposed budget for the current problem
  • Public financial information
  • Average salaries for key executives and decision makers
  • Average revenue for your prospect’s industry

This information can help you determine how your clients’ financial health aligns with their current goal of spending on this particular solution, a great way to target the right businesses in the future.

3. Understand Your Prospect’s Problems

If you want to get the most out of a sales prospect profile template, you need to know exactly what problems your current clients potential future sales prospects have and what solutions you provide to solve those problems. You also want to understand their current situation. Consider information like:

 

  • What products they’ve used before
  • How your product will fit with their current structure
  • What other tools or services they currently use
  • How they found out about your solution

 

The more you know about what your clients need and what you do for them, the easier it becomes to focus your marketing efforts.

Tips to Help Build a Complete Sales Prospect Profile Template

The first thing you need to do is put together a list of key data points that your company finds relevant. While every company will have a different approach to what information is most valuable, it’s a good idea to at least include information about demographics and your best clients’ financial positions.  You may notice that the information you find most valuable can also be used to design your sales pipeline steps.  Those typically include feedback, in some form, from each client prospect decision maker.

 

It can seem daunting to start analyzing data for all of your best clients, but the effort will result in a more efficient sales process. You can use these tips to help build a complete sales prospect profile template:

 

  • Create a thorough sales interview process. The more you find out about your actual customers, the better your prospect profiles will be.
  • Ask your current clients for information. If you don’t know why your clients love you, ask them to give you feedback on what you’re doing right.
  • Review examples from other companies. A solid template will be easy to use, include relevant data fields, and have space for you to include notes.

 

Over time, you may need to update your B2B company profile template. As your organization grows – and your products and services evolve – you may find different information valuable.  The data that you collect here can also help you build a stronger prospect profile for your business, making it easier to design a marketing strategy that can derive better results.

 

Leverage Your Customer Relationship Management System

One of the critical tasks you must do is to create fields within your CRM contact database where you can store information that corresponds to the ideal customer profile characteristics you defined during its development.  These fields, which can be populated from both form field captures and data enrichment activities, can be used to filter your contact database quickly to focus on the 50% of good fit prospects you'll typically find in your database.

 

Create a Precise Sales Prospect Profile Template Today

The best way to target your marketing efforts – which only serves to drive growth and increase revenue – is to understand who your best clients are. This means you need to take a look through your client profiles and spend time analyzing their information.

With the right sales prospect profile template, you can create accurate depictions of your best clients in a matter of minutes.

Once you've completed your Sales Prospecting template,you will want to incorporate it into a complete Sales Prospecting methodology using our guide.

 

Get The Complete Guide To Sales Prospecting

 

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Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

About the Author: Lonnie Ayers is a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing consultant, with additional certifications in Hubspot Content Optimization, Hubspot Contextual Marketing, and is a Hubspot Certified Partner. Specialized in demand generation and sales execution, especially in the SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Partner space, he has unique insight into the tough challenges Service Providers face with generating leads and closing sales using the latest digital tools. With 15 years of SAP Program Management experience, and dozens of complex sales engagements under his belt, he helps partners develop and communicate their unique sales proposition. Frequently sought as a public speaker in various events, he is available for both inhouse engagements and remote coaching.
Balanced Scorecard Consultant

He also recently released a book "How to Dominate Any Market - Turbocharging Your Digital Marketing and Sales Results", which is available on Amazon.

View All Articles by Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

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