When salespeople are laser-focused on the right prospects, they don’t waste time with buyers who are simply poor fits or not yet ready to buy. Inbound salespeople have a secret weapon they use to figure out who those leads are: An ideal buyer profile.
Before you can identify potential buyers, you need to define which buyers you can help and which you can’t — in essence, the ideal buyer profile, states Lauren Hintz, an Asia-Pacific marketing manager at marketing software platform provider HubSpot. “The ideal buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your offering and which ones are not. If you are a B2B company, the definition should be at the company level, not the contact level — that is, even if your point of contact doesn’t typically make the purchasing decision, they’re still valuable to speak with if their company matches your ideal buyer profile.”
Hintz offers these six questions for identifying the ideal buyer profile:
1. Are there company sizes that are ideal or not ideal who would buy your product?
2. Do you define size as employees, revenue, customers or another metric?
3. Are there industries or verticals that are ideal or not ideal?
4. Are there geographic locations that are ideal or not ideal?
5. Are B2B customers better than B2C?
6. Are there other attributes that make the buyer ideal or not ideal?
Hintz emphasizes that an ideal buyer profile is different than a buyer persona. “Sometimes, buyer personas are referred to as marketing personas; they are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Buyer personas define the different buying patterns of companies within your ideal buyer profile.”
Once the ideal buyer profile has been identified, it is important for salespeople to incorporate it into their daily selling routine. Hintz recommends printing the description out and posting it at your desk like a mission statement. Prioritize active buyers who also fit the ideal buyer profile.
“If you are calling cold leads, during the initial connect call determine if your prospect is a fit for your buyer profile. Pursuing only good fit prospects will save you time in the long run,” Hintz states.
