Profiling to Drive Sales – Part 1

We all know the feeling of being approached by salespeople, often for products we have no need for. How often do those work? Very rarely- it doesn’t matter how good of a salesperson you are, or how charismatic, or what tactics you utilize, if you sell peanuts to someone who is allergic to them, they will never buy.

This is the importance of knowing your customers. Why waste time and money selling to people who may never buy no matter what? The most effective way to sell is to know who you need to sell to- these are where your customer profiles come in.

How do we build profiles? Data. There are a number of ways we can get this information.

Existing Customers

The best place to start is with your own customer base.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

-Carl Jung

Take a look at your customers and try to see which one’s provide the most value, obtains the most value from your product, and who shares your product the most. There are a number of KPIs we can look at to derive this information: Customer lifetime value, the customer’s ROI on your product, and their net promoter score.

Potential Customers

Having existing customers to tap into is nice, but that may not always be the case. For most startups, you need to find your potential customers, and learn from them. Fortunately, the internet is a treasure trove of information, and you can usually find a community of these potentiates on Facebook, Reddit, Slack, or other websites.

Another option is to go search for your competitors, and find either negative or positive reviews written about them. You can also simply abuse warm leads and your existing network to get referrals.

What to do once you’ve found potential customers? Try to get them to interview or answer a survey. Of course, without offering anything in return, it is unlikely you will get a response. Easy offerings are exclusive access to your product, or  gift card of sorts.

Analytics

Whatever software you may be using, whether Google Analytics or other 3rd party software, using these tools to analyze your website traffic is a good way to understand what kind of customer your product attracts. Most importantly, try to isolate the segment of website visitors and users who actually pay for your product, otherwise you might end up optimizing for the “non-paying majority” simply because the data told you so. Here’s an example: Google Analytics might tell you that 80% of your website visitors come from Europe, but if only 5% of your paying customers are in Europe, then that’s probably not who you should optimize for.

And there you have it- a whole wealth of methods and sources to gain access to all the data you need to create your customer profile. What’s next? Analyzing and interpreting the data. But we’ll save that for next week, so mark your calendars!