Lee Salz is a Featured Columnist for The Business Journals.
When companies develop their sales differentiation strategy, they often forget that their differentiated aspects don’t matter to everyone — or in all circumstances.
This means that they need a detailed “ideal client” profile to help bring their sales differentiation strategy to life.
Many companies put together a 10,000-foot view of their ideal client, which makes for a great metaphor. Can you hit a target from 10,000 feet away?
I’m guessing you probably can’t, and neither can your salespeople. They need an ideal client profile so they aren’t sitting on dry sales pipelines or running to you demanding a lower price to win deals.
Here are seven areas to address in your ideal client profile:
1. Size
Every industry and every company has its own way of defining size. Some examples are annual revenue, number of employees, number of hires, number of locations, and growth rate.
The profile should address size in terms of range using metrics that are meaningful to your type of sale. For example, if you sell employment services, you would look at the number of hires.