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Creating a profile of your ideal client is an exercise that serves many purposes for any business that has limited resources (which is all businesses, right?). Especially in a B2B business, it is much more efficient and profitable to acquire, manage, and delight a client that you know your business is optimized to serve.
If you have gone through the process of profiling your ideal client and haven’t looked at it for a while, or would like to validate your decision making process, here are 3 considerations to filter your work:
As our Visionary Darrell Amy says in one of our previous blogs, “Buyers don’t buy products, they buy outcomes…people don’t buy drill bits, they buy holes.” To take it a step further, you need a hole in your wall for a specific reason. For example, I would like to be able to fly a flag in my front yard, but the front of the house is stucco, and hanging a flag mount on stucco is not all that easy.
So, while I actually need to buy a drill bit that can drill into stucco, what I am investing in is some sense of pride that I might get from flying the stars and stripes or raising a flag when the Baltimore Ravens are competing in the playoffs.
But let’s turn back to your ideal client profile: Do your ideal clients want the same outcomes?
Yes? If they do, it makes it a lot easier to connect with them using messaging that’s focused on the outcomes they want.
No? If they don’t, it will be hard to connect with your ideal prospects in your efforts to sell net-new business because your messaging may only resonate with some of these prospects.
Think of two fictitious restaurants as an analogy to illustrate this point:
I love to eat, and anyone that knows me knows that I typically do extensive yelping before I make the seemingly life altering decision as to where to eat. I typically have a better experience and meal when I eat at a place that has a clear identity. I have found that the quality of the burger, steak, chicken, or salad that I might get at a restaurant like the Downtown Bistro is sub-par to a place that has a specialty like A+ Burgers.
Interestingly and more relevantly, A+ Burgers is more than likely able to deliver phenomenal burgers more efficiently with less cost than the Downtown Bistro is able to deliver their extensive, less-yummy menu of diverse offerings.
Is your business set up to do too many things for lots of customers? Or are your products and services well aligned to serve the needs of specific clients? Businesses that are more focused on a tightly defined ideal client typically have better client satisfaction.
I met with an associate recently that told me he had about 100 clients and annually goes through the exercise to fire the 6 of them. How cool is that? So, they fire the 6 clients that cause the biggest drain on his resources from either a time or emotional standpoint in order to serve the other 94 better. I’m quite confident the flywheel result of that is happier clients, resulting in more bandwidth to serve Ideal Clients. I am quite certain that it is not too hard for them to replace those 6!
Ideally your suite of products and services are targeted at your ideal client. Given that, you should be well positioned to expand your share of wallet with all of your ideal clients to maximize your revenue.
It is probably a good exercise to take a look at your client base. What percentage of them do you feel are a fit for everything that you offer? Going through that exercise should help you determine which ones you should be focusing your limited resources on. Not to say that you need to get rid of the ones that are not able to enjoy everything you do, but it should help you prioritize your efforts.
Speaking of limited resources, shouldn’t your sales and marketing efforts be focused on the ones that you can fully service? Having a focused, aligned sales and marketing strategy focused on the clients that can maximize your revenue seems like a good idea, huh?
One way to grow your EOSⓇ business faster is to attract and cross-sell ideal clients. These are the types of clients that appreciate what you do and can buy everything that you sell.
Unless you have a limitless marketing budget and massive sales team, trying to sell to everyone is a recipe for failure. Both your message and efforts get diluted, lost in a vast ocean of noise. Plus, you end up wasting a lot of time talking to prospects who really don’t value what you do.
It’s kind of like your garden hose. When you first turn it on, there is a stream of water, but not much pressure. When you add a nozzle to the end, you can focus the stream of water and create pressure. If you want to kick it up a notch, connect your hose to a pressure washer.
The more you focus your stream of water, the more effective you can be. Similarly, the more you focus your marketing and sales efforts around ideal clients, the faster you can grow your business.
In Traction, Gino Wickman talks about building “The List”. We call the companies on this list, “Ideal Clients.”
Let’s explore how to identify ideal clients and focus your efforts to grow faster.
In our Revenue Growth Workshops, we lead teams through the process of building their ideal client profile. At the end of the process, they have identified three things:
With the description and data profile in mind it is possible to identify “The List” talked about in Traction.
In reality, you should have two lists:
With your ideal client profile, it becomes possible to build a list of ideal prospects. These refined lists can be created with the help of data providers who can source information on the specific companies that fit your ideal client profile.
Once you know the companies that fit the profile, you also need data on the key decision makers and influencers in each of these companies.
These ideal clients and prospects should be clearly marked in your CRM and marketing automation systems. This makes it possible to track metrics around sales and marketing processes such as:
Processes can be created, trained, and documented in each of these four core areas.
Step one is to get clear about your list. The more focused your Ideal Client Profile, the more you can focus your marketing and sales efforts. This will help you accelerate your growth.
Want to grow revenue faster? Increase your pipeline velocity by reducing the friction between stages. How do you measure this? Here are two sales pipeline metrics to look at that can make a huge impact on your top line on the P&L:
The first thing to measure is the conversion rate between each stage in your pipeline. Simply calculated, what % of clients that come into any stage of the pipeline move to the next stage.
Here is a simple sales pipeline as an example:
Most CRMs track these metrics as a default feature, but most sales teams do not closely consider how they can impact Stage Conversion Rate. Let’s look at how a 5% improvement on each stage can impact a business that has 50 opportunities per month move into a pipeline with an average transaction value of $50,000:
Using those example metrics, only a 5% improvement in each stage results in a 49% impact on Annual Revenue.
This is not a new metric either, nor is it hard to track. But, few sales organizations consider this metric as a way to impact performance. The time spent in each stage impacts:
Let’s look at this metric a bit closer using the same simple pipeline example:
Fair to say that these 2 metrics have a huge impact not only on your sales team but on your business as a whole. Easy to say, but how to you do it?
Prospects encounter what we call friction as they move through the various stages of their buying process. Friction comes in the form of their own mental blocks that might be typical of each stage, or can unintentionally stem from your sales process. Here is an example of each:
There are 2 approaches to minimizing friction to realize the results that you saw when you calculated the impact on your business using the calculator above:
The first step is to create an “ideal client” experience by broadening your sales process in both directions including both your top-funnel lead generation and your client stage of your pipeline. Ensuring that sales, marketing, and even operations are aligned with this experience is the first step in impacting the 2 metrics.
The second step is to have a process in place to continually optimize each stage in your experience to minimize friction to improve conversion rates and minimize the time spent in each stage. This approach will also help improve your actual “client” stage.
Ensuring your prospects and clients have their questions answered as they navigate your experience is critical to reducing friction. A simple 2 step process can put this into motion:
1. Implement a process for content creation that answers your clients’ questions as they navigate their experience with your organization. This process needs to be implemented into the culture of the organization with input from sales, marketing, and operations.
2. Put a plan in place to ensure the content gets in front of your Ideal Clients and Ideal Prospects. This plan involves leveraging this content in the following areas:
When all are on board with the Client Experience and the content plan around it, your clients have a more positive experience with your business. Maybe just as impactful, your sales team has 1 consistent framework to support clients through their experience as opposed to having 20 different approaches for 20 different reps.
Great News!: The top-funnel leads come as a product of your executing the above plan. What metrics are you tracking to improve your hit rate and accelerate your sales cycles?
Need help calculating the impact of your sales pipeline metrics? Download the worksheet, Calculating Sales Pipeline Metrics Impact.
As we have previously written, Buyers Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Outcomes. I see a perfect example of this as I look out my window into my driveway. I bought a car to get to the places I need to get to support the outcomes that I need:
I don’t drive very often, but the car I drive is reliable, it allows me to transport my gear and delivers the outcomes I need. Quite frankly, it is less than impressive for anyone that would consider themselves a car junkie. Sounds like I may be cheap but trust me that the outcomes I need require plenty of investment over and above a car.
The outcomes that your business delivers should be woven throughout the operational as well as the sales and marketing aspects of your business. Let’s focus on sales and marketing given this is your focus if you landed on this blog.
Outcomes are in play at each stage of the process that you have in place to help your ideal prospect to become an ideal client:
Having a resource, let’s call it an Outcomes Framework, shared by the sales and marketing team that is updated regularly, and shared centrally between sales and marketing provides many benefits:
Leveraging an Outcomes Framework with real-world client success stories can be a game-changer for your revenue generation team.
4.7 million people work from home in the United States [source]. The need for collaboration and meeting with co-workers does not go away when people transition to working from home, so it is no surprise that products like Zoom Meeting have realized huge growth.
The recent Coronavirus spread is creating challenges for sales teams that did not need to make this transition to meeting virtually until now. My anticipation is that the number of people that work from home will be drastically increased for the long-term once we get back to normal.
Virtual or not, We have all been in our share of meetings that were good, productive meetings and others that were a waste of time for all involved. So, ensuring that you can effectively conduct a meeting is critical in business continuity during these times.
The 3 keys to having quality virtual meetings are:
Failing to plan is planning to fail. The nature of virtual meetings makes planning even more important. Here are some specific things you can do to plan for a fantastic meeting:
Improper use of tools and technology can derail any meeting regardless of how prepared you are with your message. Specifically:
When I was in college, my Astronomy class (we had to take a lab science!) was a lecture with a couple of hundred students. My literature classes were a lot smaller, which made it a lot easier to create an engaging environment.
There are many ways that you can create an engaging meeting to increase its effectiveness:
Ensuring you are able to facilitate virtual meetings effectively can minimize the impact of our new reality. Put these things into practice to minimize the disruption to your business.
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