An ideal customer profile worksheet for a B2B SME

Ask your salesperson whom to ring this week and the answer is usually "anyone who buys". An ideal customer profile is the written answer to that question, built from the ten customers who were most worth having. This post gives you the worksheet and the order in which to fill it, so you finish with one page and a score for every new enquiry. It needs at least five past customers. With fewer, start with how to build an ideal customer profile when you have fewer customers.

Pass one: choose the ten by what they left you with

Rank customers by what remained after the work was done. Look at margin, how late the money came, how many times the drawing changed, and whether you would take their next order gladly. Invoice size comes last on that list.

Write the ten names. Then write the three customers who cost you sleep. The worst three matter as much as the best ten, because they fill the "walk away" lines later.

Pass two: copy facts from files, not impressions from memory

Here is the sheet. Fill one line per field, using invoices, job files and call notes.

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE   draft 1   date:

THE COMPANY
Kind of business:
One size signal visible from outside:
Town or cluster:
What was happening when they first called:   <- the trigger

THE PEOPLE
Job title of who enquired:
Job title of who signed off:
What they asked for first:

THE EVIDENCE
How they found us:
Days from first call to first order:
Orders in the first year:

WALK AWAY IF
1.
2.
3.

Where six or more of the ten agree, write the common answer. Where it splits five and five, write both and mark the line "split". Do not smooth a split into something neater than the truth.

Two lines are worth more than the rest: the trigger and the walk-away list. Anyone can find a buyer's size and industry. Only you know what was going wrong on the day they picked up the phone. If your records cannot fill a line, leave it blank and start noting it at the next enquiry.

Imagine: a laboratory-glassware maker in Ambala

Imagine, as an invented example, a workshop in Ambala that makes beakers, flasks and burettes. The owner was sure the best customers were science colleges, and wrote that on the sheet before opening a single file.

The files disagreed. Six of the ten were small dealers who supply school laboratories in districts the owner did not visit, and four were colleges. The dealers reordered without a reminder, paid inside a fortnight and took standard sizes. Two of the colleges wanted three quotations before every order.

The trigger line surprised the owner. Five of the six dealers had first rung in the weeks before schools reopened, when their usual supplier ran short. The owner's first draft said "educational institutions", which fits a hundred other makers and tells a salesperson nothing. The second said: "Dealers who supply school labs outside our district. First call comes when their supplier runs short before term. The owner decides, usually the same day." Walk-away: "Wants a colour or size we do not stock, or three quotations each time."

Now the salesperson knew whom to ring, and roughly when, and which buyers to stop ringing: the colleges that wanted three quotations went to a later list. The catch was that dealer orders were smaller, so each freed hour brought fewer rupees than the owner had hoped. The names, the district and the figures here are illustrative.

Pass three: turn the profile into a score

Take five to seven yes-or-no questions from the lines that mattered. For the Ambala maker there were five. Is the buyer a dealer to school labs? Are they outside the owner's own district? Has their supplier just run short, or is term near? Does one person decide? Do they buy standard sizes?

Give one point per yes. Four or five means ring today. Two or three goes on a later list. One or none stays off the list for now. Any walk-away line that applies ends the matter, whatever the score.

Check the score against what already happened

A score is only a guess until it has met real cases, and you already hold the cases.

Score the last ten enquiries you failed to convert. If most score high, the profile is fine and the weakness sits after the enquiry, in your reply or your quote. If most score low, the profile is working and your marketing has been reaching the wrong people; how to improve lead quality picks that up.

Then do the reverse. Score your last ten orders. Note every case where the score and your own feeling about the buyer disagree, because those are the questions that need rewording. An order that scores two tells you the profile missed a reason people buy. Add the reason and rescore, and keep the old score beside the new one so you can see what changed.

What the sheet cannot tell you

Ten customers who all arrived through one distributor describe that distributor, not a market. And a profile built from who bought can say nothing about who might have, so now and then ring a few buyers who fall outside it and see what happens. If you do, record them in a separate column, so they do not blur the main pattern.

The quiet danger is a profile so narrow that it needs luck. If your own district holds only a handful of matching buyers, widen one line, usually size, before you widen the buyer type.

Fill the trigger line tonight

Start with the trigger. A competitor cannot copy it from your website. If ten files will not fill it, the gap is in how you record enquiries, and that is worth fixing first. Ideal customer profile development is the service for this sheet, and once it is done your marketing can aim at the buyers it describes. For a second pair of eyes on yours, tell us what you need.