Tips for Effective Prospecting: Customer Profiles

Every business needs to know who their ideal customer is in order to grow. When you have an ideal customer profile, it becomes much easier to make decisions about your marketing strategy and product development. It is a powerful tool that can help guide your business in the right direction. It can be challenging to figure out who your ideal customer is. But luckily, Rusty Jensen and Ron Halbert have prepared a prescription to help individuals and organizations create their ideal profile of a customer. In today’s episode of The Sales Prescription Podcast, Rusty and Ron discuss in-depth the key aspects of prospecting from a B2B perspective, why customer profiling is the foundation to effective prospecting, and how the salespeople's success should start at the leadership level. The key aspects of prospecting:Market profileAccount profileContact profile Enjoy! In This Episode2:16 - Why getting caught up in the numbers game when prospecting hurts salespeople 3:23 - Ron's story about how working hard in the wrong direction is demoralizing 6:04 - How the sales machine is similar to an actual engine 7:34 -The three aspects of prospecting from a B2B perspective 8:38 - The most important aspects of building a market profile 10:55 - What new sales reps need to do to sell their products 13:41 - The power of ‘intent’ when it comes to sales 17:55 - How to decide which persona to target within an account 22:11 - How to determine if you have targeted the right account, market, and contact 23:56 - Why data is important from the sales perspective 27:14 - How ‘the sales prescription' works for both individuals and organizations Favorite Quotes9:33 - "So it's not to say that you can't pursue any market. But when you look at your customer base, you'll start seeing these trends of which markets are actually fit. And then one of the things you have to avoid is this temptation that comes from scarcity to try to go after everybody. And you can, you just have to do it in order of priority. That's a secret sauce." - Rusty Jensen 21:51 - "You do not want to be working super hard, running the wrong direction. You're not going to finish the race running in the wrong direction. So you want to make sure that you're directed in the right way." - Ron Halbert 26:29 - "If you don't set your people up for success, you're doing the opposite. And so all this profiling that happens, there are tools out there that can do it. But it should happen at a leadership level. A rep should be able to walk into work and know exactly what market, what account, and what contacts they should be targeting because that should have been built out for them." - Ron Halbert 27:14 - "The sales prescriptions we're writing here, they're for you and they're for organizations. We want you to have the kind of skills where you can be thrown into any pond and you can swim. But what we also want to do is help clean up the pond." - Rusty Jensen Connect with our HostsRusty Jensen on LinkedInRon Halbert on LinkedIn Listen to more episodes of the Sales Prescription PodcastSpotifyiTunesGoogle Podcast