Profiling to Drive Sales – Part 2

If for some reason you’ve started with this Part 2 without having read the previous piece, you can find that right over here. 

Right. Now we have our data. Whether or not it’s a hundred or a hundred thousand, sorting through them point by point is a headache, and looking at raw numbers gets us nowhere. How do we analyze and make sense of all this?

Make Some Charts

Whether it’s on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, use your spreadsheet know-how and make a chart from all your data. Hopefully, you haven’t used entirely open-ended questions when deriving insights, and can more or less standardize your responses into a range of options (pro tip: definitely do this when data gathering).

For example, let’s say you’ve asked prospective clients what their main challenges and bottlenecks are with doing their taxes. If you broke down options and phrased this as a multiple choice question, you can sort the answers given by frequency, lending you valuable insight into which exactly is the most common problem they face.

To do this, simply highlight the data then Insert > Chart. Use the appropriate graph, or simply the recommended one from whichever software you decided to use. This is a much easier and simpler way to parse through and analyze all your data.

If you’re sticking to Google Sheets, the ‘Explore’ function has a lot of nifty uses to really ask certain questions. You could ask “most frequent company size” and Sheets will automatically give you an answer from the data that you’ve selected.

What’s next after running through your analysis? Using your customer profiles to drive sales.

Segment your leads by the different profiles. How does this help sales? Tactics and approaches may differ vastly depending on which profile the sales rep is handling. Working with a CEO requires an entirely different process versus working with, say, an engineer. Allowing your sales team to tailor approaches per profile will lead to better success across all the different customer profiles you’ve created.

Email marketing should also be segmented per profile for the exact same reason. Being able to dial down your sales processes to fit different customer profiles will lead to more conversions.

In the case of really large differences across customer profiles, you can even explore building out entire separate sales pipelines per profile.

For example, an SME has a much shorter sales cycle, fewer approvals to get, and fewer meetings and demos. On the other hand, when selling to larger corporations, you need to be prepared to deal with the bureaucracy- longer sales cycle, multiple meetings with different stakeholders, demos, approvals from different departments, and more in-depth onboarding.

When you have your sales pipeline set up to match the purchase process of your customers, sales reps get a clear overview of what’s involved in closing the deal and are prepared for the next steps before they even come up.

There you have it! If you haven’t already begun building your customer profiles, looks like it’s about time you do.