Your best customers tell you who to look for next

You will be able to draft an ideal customer profile from your own past customers using traits you can see before a first meeting.

Most people who run out of prospects did not run out of people. They ran out of people they had a reason to call. The list was always there: friends of friends, past clients, companies hiring in their area, people who downloaded something last year. What was missing was a clear idea of who, out of all of them, was worth the next hour.

That idea has a name. An ideal customer profile is a short description of the type of customer who gets the most value from what you sell, buys without a long fight, and stays or refers. It is not everyone who could buy. It is the slice who should buy first.

The fastest way to write one is to look backwards. Take your last ten customers, or if you are new, the last ten customers of a colleague who will share. Sort them into three piles: the ones you would happily clone, the ones who were fine, and the ones you would rather not have again. Then ask what the first pile has in common that the third pile does not.

You are looking for things you can see from the outside before you ever speak to someone. For a business buyer that might be industry, headcount, the tools they already use, or the fact that they just opened a second outlet. For an individual it might be life stage, job type, where they live, or a recent change such as a new baby, a new job or a first flat. A profile built from things you can only learn in a meeting is no help when you are deciding who to call.

Here is how that plays out for two very different sellers. A freelance bookkeeper looks at her best clients and notices they are all food and beverage businesses with between two and five outlets, run by the founder, using a cloud accounting tool but with nobody in-house who understands it. Her worst clients were single stalls who wanted the cheapest price. Her profile writes itself, and it tells her to stop answering every enquiry and start looking at which cafe groups are opening a new branch.

A new financial adviser does the same with his first twenty clients. The ones who stayed and referred were mostly people in their late twenties and early thirties who had just started a family and had never had a proper conversation about cover. The ones who lapsed were mostly friends who signed up as a favour. That is a profile too, and it shows him where his time goes furthest.

Notice two things about both profiles. First, they are narrow. That feels risky, because it seems to shut out buyers, but it does the opposite. A narrow profile lets you speak to a specific problem in your first message, and specific messages get answered far more often than general ones. You can still accept a good buyer who falls outside the profile. You just stop going looking for them.

Second, each profile includes a reason the timing might be right: a new branch, a new child. That is a trigger event, something that changes a buyer's situation and makes the problem you solve suddenly more pressing. You will spend lesson 1.3 on triggers, because knowing who to call matters less than knowing when.

A profile is a working draft. You will change it as you learn which types of customer reply, meet and buy. What matters now is that you have one written down, so every list you build and every message you write in the rest of this course is aimed at someone in particular.

Your task for this lesson: pull up your last ten customers, or ten from a colleague, and sort them into the three piles. Write down five things the best pile shares that you could spot from outside, and one thing that the worst pile shares that you will use as a warning sign.

Sort your last ten customers into three piles and write five outside-visible traits the best pile shares, plus one warning sign from the worst pile.

Course

• Prospecting: build a pipeline that does not run dry