What is an Ideal Customer?

One of the most overlooked components of a successful go to market strategy is the definition of the ideal target customer.  Knowing the type of person who buys the product or service offered is crucial because it helps you focus resources.  Understanding where you well get the best chance of success allows your marketing group to develop messaging specifically targeted to the group most likely to buy your offering.

If you are

• struggling to meet sales projections
• difficulty identifying/winning new customers
• think your product or service is the answer to a very broad set of customer needs,

it is time to redefine your target market, and more importantly, your target customer.  Consider the case of the door to door sales person in the mid 1900’s.  A company decided that their product (vacuum cleaners as an example) was targeted to housewives and therefore a good go to market strategy would be to get to your customer, literally, where they live.  Hence the door to door sales approach.  Granted, in the mid 1900’s, there were very few options for a manufacturer to get the word out to customers.  A more focused segmentation of  of the market by income, neighborhood type, house size, number of children etc would have provided the sales person a subset of more likely to purchase customer base and increase the win percentage.

Some key customer attributes to consider when developing a customer profile

1. What do you want their experience to be like when working with you/your service/your product?
2. What is your clearly defined value proposition for that customer profile – are you solving some core issues they are dealing with?
3. Given the value proposition you have defined, what type of customer is likely to be the most profitable? (think recurring…)

You can avoid wasting money on marketing to the wrong people and start attracting happy and loyal customers by creating a set of customer profiles.  There are a number of LinkedIn forums and groups focused on the discussion around customer profiles and go to market strategies that are really helpful as you try to identify ways to narrow the focus of your sales team and your overall go to market strategy.