Getting better leads and selling more is easier when you find the right fit for your brand.
Why? A higher number of loyal brand advocates, faster sales cycles, and higher customer retention rates are all benefits of the right leads.
- To be successful, you need to identify and market to your ideal customers instead of marketing to everyone.
- To better understand your market and target audiences, you can create an ideal customer profile (ICP).
- Shortly, an ICP is a narrative that tells the story of your brand’s customers.
- If you want to make your products and services as valuable as possible, you’ll need to target B2B customers.
- Furthermore, an ICP provides valuable insights throughout the entire sales and marketing process.
- Customer profiling can help business owners allocate resources more effectively, focus on prospects with high intent, and provide more value to customers.
The following points will be discussed in this article:
- The different methods and hacks that can be used to simplify the sales process based on customer profile analysis.
- What can customer profile analysis do for your research and execution in a CRM environment.
- What customer data you need and how to interpret it to create your ICP.
Let’s begin!
How does customer profiling work?
Customer profiles are created using CRM data to describe a business’s ideal customer.
It is possible to analyze customer profiles without a CRM, but it would be extremely time-consuming and tedious. Your ICP will have already been developed by another company by the time you discover it.
It’s all about timing in today’s market to stay on top.
An ICP with a CRM system enables you
- To discover new markets
- Develop new customer profiles
- Enhance existing customer service.
Segmenting your ideal customer profiles, using CRM software, is another advantage of developing a customer profile analysis.
- By analyzing customer profiles, you can make better business decisions based on your CRM data.
- When seeking investors and funding, a customer profile analysis is often a requirement.
- The process of analyzing your customers and creating several ideal buyer personas will help you gain a deeper understanding of them.
- The characteristics of a company that indicate your brand is a good fit can be identified by marketers and sales representatives through deep customer insights.
Analyzing customer data and finding out what it means
Your entire operation depends on your customers.
Knowing what they want and who they are is essential. By doing so, you will be able to create products that are needed by your customers. Making more sales and building your brand loyalty is easier when you look at the right customer data.
Jeff Tanner, a marketing professor at Baylor University, stated:
“It is easier to treat each customer individually when you collect customer data.”
In addition, Tanner explained that higher margins are essential for B2B sales in addition to offering the customers the products they expect.
In order to build ICPs that really reflect your ideal customers, where can you find the information, you need?
Existing customers
Businesses should take advantage of their existing customers’ wealth of information, even if they aren’t all your perfect customers. In order to determine who most benefits from your products, what drives the most value, and what their satisfaction level is, you need to conduct regular surveys and discovery meetings.
Potential customers
Your website and marketing campaigns may have engaged potential customers, as well as those who are dissatisfied with their current service provider.
Connect with potential and existing customers via social media. Social media is an excellent tool for identifying key account personas since 84 percent of millennials use it regularly.
Analytical tools
Quantitative and qualitative data can be collected using digital tools. The ability to discover more about their website visitors and customer profiles is essential for B2B businesses using tools like Google Analytics and CRMs with analytic capabilities.
It is possible to imagine how your ideal customers might look when you combine these data sources.
Data interpretation for customers
After collecting data, you’re ready to analyze it. We need to interpret what all this means now.
To analyze customer data, sales and marketing teams use a few main methods. To visualize large amounts of customer information, charts and spreadsheets are popular methods.
In Google Sheets, you can analyze business data using the Explore tool. Insights can be gained quickly through the use of machine learning.
The data in pivot tables can be narrowed down to particular parameters so that meaningful information can be derived from the data.
The 7 best methods to boost sales based on customer profile analysis
Having discussed where to find and interpret customer data, let’s examine some proven methods for analyzing customer profiles.
If you want your company to perform well, you need to analyze customer profiles. ICPs are analyzed and boosted by B2B sales teams using a variety of methods.
With customer profile analysis, you can boost sales in seven ways:
- Sales-specific ICPs should be created
- Customer profiles can be used to segment leads
- Target your emails based on the ICPs
- Organize each ICP into pipelines
- Make sure your ICPs are up-to-date
- Data analytics: the process of generating and applying insights about customers
- Predict the future by learning how to do it
Ready? Let’s get started!
1. Sales-specific ICPs should be created
Sales teams benefit greatly from ICPs, as is evident. By understanding their customers’ needs, sales reps can better communicate with them.
- To make the most of your ICPs, make sure you capture the right data.
- The sales specific ICP helps salespeople customize their pitch to fit the needs of customers, since their focus is on sales conversations.
- It is imperative that they have information about how ICPs typically handle purchases.
- The representative should also have easy access to all customer profiles.
- Making or losing a sale depends on having these ICPs on hand.
2. Identify customer profiles and segment leads accordingly
The marketing team is not the only one who benefits from highly segmented leads. Segmentation can also be beneficial to your sales representatives.
- Leads are segmented based on demographics, behaviors, and purchasing histories the better your sales reps understand your B2B customers.
- By understanding the customer better, they are able to go into sales conversations more confidently, helping them stay one step ahead of their competition.
- As qualified leads enter your pipeline, they are generally segmented in some way.
- You can narrow down your leads further based on their profiles in order to better understand the needs of your prospects and how to approach them.
- Segment leads according to ICP data points using your CRM system.
- Leads can be segmented by the size of an organization, the industry they belong to, how they prefer to be contacted, and many other factors.
3. Ensure each ICP receives targeted emails
If each ICP has a unique email template, sales and marketing efficiency can be greatly improved.
- Your salespeople will interact differently with each company you work with.
- Create targeted emails based on your ICPs that speak to the needs and pain points of each profile.
- They are eager to hear what you have to say when they speak with your representatives.
- On the first call, sales can pinpoint the problem using this approach.
4. Each ICP should have a pipeline
The creation of ICP-specific pipelines is just as important as sending highly personalized and segmented emails to your B2B clients.
- Initially, the additional headache seems inconvenient. Particularly if your business is already building targeted marketing campaigns.
- A personalized pipeline might seem unnecessary to you. What is the time commitment this will require? ”
- For B2B customers to understand the value of your product and services, they need personalized experiences.
- Every outlet imaginable is used by vendors to reach B2B consumers with offers.
- Trying to sift through so much information can be challenging for companies.
- A customized pipeline speaks to their unique experiences and captures their attention unlike general messages and blanket sales statements.
- Also, it helps you better understand your customers by collecting more data.
- Marketing and sales pitches are more effective when data is better.
5. Make sure your ICPs are up-to-date
- It is rarely useful to have outdated information.
- Consequently, poor decisions can be made as a result.
- Maintaining your customer data and ICPs is critical to understanding your customer’s needs and motivations.
- Stay on top of your updating schedule.
- Stay on top of sales and market changes by evolving your process as necessary.
6. Analyze data to generate insights about customers
Analyzing your website’s analytics can provide you with valuable customer insights.
- What kind of visitors do you have?
- Can you tell me how they got there?
- Are your CTAs clicked?
- Is your blog being read by them?
A sales or marketing team can gain valuable insight from every action they take.
Tracking key metrics and user behavior can be done with many tools available to businesses. Getting started with on-site data collection is easy with Google Analytics and Hotjar.
Taking the insights from the data and applying them across the entire customer journey.
7. Become a future-predictor
- Plan for what’s to come by creating better sales forecasts.
- Behavioral data can be used to discover which features customers like and dislike.
- Seeing which of your web pages are most popular, especially those related to your ICPs, would also be a good idea.
- When you build better sales forecasts, you can plan growth activities and marketing campaigns that align with your target companies.
- The customer journey can also be predicted better using customer insights.
- By using a B2B CRM system, you can gain a better understanding of your ICP’s purchasing behavior.
Putting it all together
- It depends on your data and how you use it that determines the quality of your customer profile analysis.
- To understand your customers’ needs and create ideal customer profiles, CRM analytics are crucial.
- To optimize your B2B products, services, and targeted marketing, you need to analyze customer profiles properly.
- CRM software can be used effectively by your marketing and sales teams if they follow the strategies discussed today.
- Teams need to look beyond metrics if they want to succeed in B2B sales.
- In addition to understanding your ideal accounts’ motives, needs, and behaviors, they need to understand what motivates them.
- To develop a customer-centric sales process, it is important to analyze customer profiles.
- You’ll see sales increase once you have established your ICPs and use them effectively.