What Is a Customer Profile? Ultimate Guide

Salespeople don't just contact anyone, much less in the world of B2B.

There are some very specific folks we target with our outreach. After all, our solutions tend to be specific to an industry or role that benefits from it the most.

These folks are known as our ideal customer profile, and this article will serve as an ultimate guide for any other SDRs seeking to understand how it works.

Without further ado, let's dive in.

The first to do is start from the beginning and figure out what we mean by customer profile.

We've gone through this elsewhere in the blog, but it's always good to refresh our memory.

A customer profile, or ideal customer profile (ICP), is basically a checklist of what your ideal customer should look like.

For example, if you've designed an application that makes it easier for healthcare providers to connect with traveling nurses. You want to target healthcare providers as well as nursing professionals or the nursing professional companies that help travel nurses match with certain providers and locations.

But it's not enough to simply say "healthcare providers".

Within a healthcare system, there are numerous roles and jobs, and different types of systems, that will have different needs. Your ideal customer should be someone who most desperately requires what you are offering, and someone who understands it. So someone within HR, but that has enough seniority to either be a Decision Maker or close enough to sway a purchasing decision.

On the other hand, let's think about a service.

At SalesPipe, we offer the service of connecting companies with top-quality outsourced SDRs.

Our customer profile is typically Founders or the sales teams of SaaS companies. There are additional factors we can look at, such as budget or funding the company receives, that also help to narrow down our customer base. It's not as niche as the first example, but it still helps us define who to target when we do company outreach, either via email, social media, or blogs.

But why do we do this targeting in the first place?

Firstly, because these are the people who are going to buy your product or service.

If you're following your GTM Strategy correctly, you've determined what problem your product or service fixes. And from there, you've also determined who is most likely to benefit and thus buy your product or service.

If you want to make any kind of revenue, these are the people you will be reaching out to, especially as you start out. The more they fit your ideal customer profile, the better.

You explain how exactly what you offer can make their lives easier, and they are far more likely to understand than someone who does not fit it.

Even when you decide to explore new verticals, you should create a customer profile for those as well. Do some preliminary research, and then start trying different sales channels to see if anyone bites, or you receive information.

One of the best ways to further understand and refine your ICP is to incorporate the feedback you receive as a frontline SDR. And this is because you are often the one sending out those first cold emails or making those initial cold calls. You are directly in touch with potential customers who can guide you on whether you're approaching them correctly or if they're the right person to talk to.

By then providing whatever information you receive to your superiors, the ICP can be further refined, and you can get even more meetings or sales to hit quota.

It's also important to define your ICP to protect your email deliverability, especially if you're using cold email.

Prospects need to be invested in the content you provide them. If your email is not relevant to their needs or interests, the possibility of them marking you as spam increases exponentially.

Once you're marked as spam, email verification systems such as firewalls will share this information with each other, resulting in your landing in spam more often. And this will only go on to affect your email health and that of your entire company or domain, causing your ability to hit quota to diminish greatly.

The prospects you are emailing need to be very specifically targeted and match your ICP to avoid this.

And this is very different when it comes to B2B or B2C outreach.

There are inherent differences between B2B and B2C customer profiles.

Depending entirely on your offer and how it fits into the industry you are in, your goals will also be very different.

In the world of B2B, you are selling to other businesses. As an SDR, your goal is to start building a relationship with a potential customer that fits your particular offer and niche.

You are looking for the people in another business who are most aware of the problems and pain points your product or service fixes. And that have enough seniority to make a decision regarding investing or purchasing the solution you offer.

In the healthcare example used above, the obvious answer was anyone with seniority in the HR side of the healthcare providers. For us at SalesPipe, this tends to be anyone from Founders of new, small startups to Sales VPs of small, medium, and large SaaS companies looking to expand their SDR teams without overinvesting.

B2C is quite different from this, as the goal is to sell directly to a customer, not build a relationship between two companies that results in a long, fruitful partnership.

Your targeting here can still be niche, but you are focusing a lot more on the individual than the company they work for. It becomes more about creating the specific image of the type of person you think will buy your product or service, than the problem you are solving in an industry.

So, if you are selling clothes, for example, you want to have a clear idea of the type of clothes you are selling, and who is the ideal customer for them.

Online retail giants such as Shein or ASOS have made their money by targeting specific demographics in their advertising, relying on diverse modeling campaigns, social media channels, and word of mouth to build brand awareness.

It's similar to the ICP you have as an SDR, as they target a particular audience, but the methods employed once it is determined are entirely different and have very different results.

They've been mentioned above, but there are certain factors that you need to keep in mind when building and determining an ICP. And when, as an SDR, you build your targeting lists.

Let's take a look at a few to understand how they affect you as an SDR:

Perhaps one of the easiest to determine, you want to make sure you are targeting the right industry. You don't want to sell electronics to a vegetable vendor, after all.

If we think back to the initial examples discussed, we've got healthcare providers and nurses as an industry that is fairly niche. We also have SaaS as a whole, which is not.

When you're selling a product/service, it's important to identify the specific industries that would benefit from it the most. This helps you tailor your message and approach to those industries, which can improve your chances of success as an SDR.

Company size will generally be a good tell if they're ready or willing to work with you. Hence why it is used as a factor in ICPs.

They are a good metric for the status of the company – new, growing, large – which provides insight into how likely they are to be interested in your offer at this time.

This tells you if they have the resources to invest or purchase your offer.

It's important to target companies that have a budget that's at least a certain amount. However, you may not want to target companies with a budget that's too high, because they might not be interested in what you're offering.

A prospect's title is incredibly significant.

You do not want to be emailing finance executives when your offer is for the marketing team.

It signifies that you, as an SDR, cannot do your research and brings doubt upon your product or service.

Knowing which titles suffer the most from the problem you provide a solution for is key to getting those meetings as an SDR.

The location of a company can impact their software needs and behavior. By considering geography, you can tailor your product offerings and messaging to the specific needs of companies in those regions.

This can help you prioritize which markets to focus on and increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts.

In the B2B world, this is generally C-Suite.

However, depending on your strategy and the problem you solve, sometimes starting from a Director and working your way up is an idea. Or if your solution is very niche, sometimes the only person likely to understand it is a Director, and they then have to take it to a Decision Maker.

Chat with your Manager and run tests in your outreach if unsure.

There are different types of tools you can use to build your ideal customer profile with the factors laid out above. We'll go over some popular ones here.

Sales Navigator is a popular option for this for a reason. A powerful tool when used correctly, Sales Navigator allows you to build lead lists that have different titles and cover different ICPs as a result.

Using the search tool, you can look up, for example, sales VPs in a specific geographic area for a specific industry, with a specific role, seniority, years in the company, and by company headcount.

And these are just some of the filters you can start out with.

Additionally, Sales Navigator allows you to save searches, so you can keep going back to them and their filled-out filters and update your own list. Because people switch jobs or new ones show up, and the search is constantly updated.

You can also set up filters to either show or not show leads that are already in your lists, further serving to ensure you only see the exact folks you are after.

Of course, if your ICP isn't on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator may prove to be more expensive than what you get out of it. So where else can you look?

Amplemarket is a tool that is essentially several tools in one.

It provides customers with a searcher tool to define their ICP as both people and companies with filters such as company headcount, company budget, and even company software. For the individual, you can select an area, such as finance or marketing, their role title, their seniority, sometimes even their name.

Once you've outlined all of your parameters, the tool then makes the profile for you based on them. And you can then start selecting and sending out email sequences from this same tool.

Your sequences can also be made into larger sales cadences with additional steps such as calls or social media outreach.

Amplemarket also integrates well with LinkedIn, allowing you to directly export your leads from Sales Navigator into it. Or to easily upload any CSV files you may receive into it. The tool will verify all email addresses, ensuring you only aim for real emails. This will further aid your email deliverability and keep you from spam.

It is quite a hefty price, however, so you should think carefully before purchasing.

When you need to share or create customer profiles before you are ready to sell, Make My Persona by Hubspot is a great option.

A wholly free tool made by one of the leading CRMs out there, it make it easier than ever to create and share customer profiles within a company.

Consisting of seven steps, it walks you through a series of questions to create the ideal customer persona you are targeting. Anything from creating an avatar to filling out the precious demographic data that is essential to your targeting.

It's a great starting point for anyone unsure of where or how to start building their ICP.

If your company has a landing page, then it should have a form for leads to fill out to demonstrate their interest. Inbound lead tactics are just as important to helping refine a customer profile as well as the inbound marketing strategy.

Based on the type of profile filling out your form, you can then start building the ICP accordingly. It might offer you new verticals or roles to reach out to you hadn't previously considered.

However, when you are first starting out, you should still have a clear understanding and vision for the ICP. Tools such as Typeform should only be used to reconfirm both your ICP and inbound strategy.

An SDR without a good customer profile may as well be going in blind to their outreach.

Any meetings you book will be completely due to luck if you do not do your research.

Now that you know what a customer profile is in-depth and why you need one, we can help you flesh it out and refine it further.

Join our SDR Community to connect with fellow SDRs and share tips to improve your customer profiles and meetings!