Ideal Customers — The 1st Thing You Need to Accelerate Sales

Here we are. On Day 2 of our road trip to the City of More Customers!

(If you missed Day 1, click here. It is a quick read).

Actually, we were still sitting in the car in the driveway.

You in the backseat, and me in the passenger seat.

And it was getting kind of hot in the sun.

(Plus, I'm wearing a new leather jacket I bought in Montreal. Gorgeous. But warm.)

So we stepped out and are sitting under an Eastern white pine tree in the shade.

Talking about what you need to pack for this l-o-n-g and interesting road trip with your buyer. LOTS of companies want to go on this road trip with me.

Probably 30 to 50 companies a year. But not all of them are up to it. They just aren't ready to accelerate revenue. Yet.

Are you ready to accelerate revenue?

I want you to think of this road trip we are going on with your buyer as a highway. A three-lane highway, in fact. And a highway where we can go MAXIMUM speed, 200 km/hr. Minimum speed is 60 km/hr. Anything less than that is a scenic route on the back roads.

Beautiful, great for marketing, but not how we are going to build your revenue. So, to accelerate revenue, we need to be prepare for speed. Car needs to be tuned up, gasoline in the tank, and mindset in place (we settled that in the last blog post — your-buyer-is-the-driver-and-you-are-the-co-driver-get-your-hands-off-the-steering-wheel!). What are we missing?

The 3 Things You Need to Pack

Let’s take a look in the trunk.

The three things you absolutely MUST pack for this road trip with your buyer are:

Your destinationYour buyerAnd a predictable, repeatable sales process for travelling with your buyer to your destination

What I mean by destination is WHO ARE YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMERS? Not just any old customers, but the ones who are a perfect fit for what you do, have a high profile problem you solve, etc.

This is a BIG TIME problem for MANY, MANY companies.

I see them again, and again, and again just selling to anybody who wants to have a conversation with them.

It gets them off the highway.

Going around in circles on the back roads. Pretty. But useless as a route to get to the City of More Customers. (An aside: A friend and I once took a road trip in Nova Scotia with no destination in mind. At every crossroads, we took turns saying “left,” “right,” or “straight.” We ended up on a beautiful but totally inhospitable logging road. Eventually we just headed for the white beaches of the South Shore. Having a destination was way better.)

Yet.

Somewhere in the list of prospects you are trying to sell to, there are a FEW buyers that are PERFECT. And if companies found more and more of those buyers, they would be able to ACCELERATE their business without a question.

Let me tell you a short story about why this is so important.

I was working with a technology startup that had been “starting up” for 15 years. When I met with them, they had 24 types of customers listed on their website.

Yep. TWENTY-FOUR.

In the first meeting, I asked the CEO and his team, “What 20% of your customers represent 80% of your business?”

Their answer was, “Oh, really three types.”

Great. Then let’s build a sales process around them, I said. We took a couple of months to do that.

Rolled it out to their team. A focused sales process built around only THREE Ideal Customers, not TWENTY-FOUR.

And within six months they had doubled their MRR (monthly recurring revenue) from $15,000 to $30,000! That is saying a lot when you are selling a monthly subscription that costs $79/month.

(I just checked their website and now they are at $675,000 MRR. Big SMILE.).

Where are YOU going?

In a business context, so many of the companies that come to me talk to me about their destination like this:

“Our Ideal Customer? Anybody who needs small business software.”

“Doesn’t matter the size or type of company. They are all the same.”

“Fitness users.”

“HR professionals. Any size of company. Any kind of company.”

Not. NOT. Not!! And Not.

None of those descriptions of your Ideal Customer are a DESTINATION. They could be any city or town on any map of any country. Just not specific enough.

Just as you choose countries, cities, streets, and restaurants that you want to visit (yes, right down to that level of detail), you need to be as specific about the destination you choose for your sales and marketing.

A Short Exercise for Picking Your Destination

This is an exercise that will help you identify your Ideal Customers. You’ll need to take a few cracks at it. But it will get you closer. Until we meet or until I share the tool with you someday.

Grab everybody in your company who has a valuable opinion about this and pull them into a room. Then ...

Take a piece of chalk and a blackboard.Make a square and divide it into four quadrants. Have everybody brainstorm every type of organization that you could sell to. One per sticky note, written in a heavy Sharpie marker so you can all see it.Label the bottom-left quadrant “Ideal Customer Candidates.” Put your sticky notes there. Now have everyone brainstorm what makes a GOOD Ideal Customer Candidate. Think about prospects, past customers, the ones who were good. What size, colour, shape, mindset, budget, culture, business, products, people, profitability, did they have? Put all of your ideas on sticky notes. Label the top-left quadrant “What Makes a GOOD Ideal Customer?” Put your sticky notes there. Repeat the exercise for what makes a BAD Ideal Customer Candidates. Same drill. Think about prospects, customers. What size, colour, shape? You get it. Label the top-right quadrant “What Makes a BAD Ideal Customer?” Put your sticky notes there. Then sit back and give everybody 5 minutes to put a * on their top 5 GOOD characteristics and top 5 BAD characteristics. How is it looking? Getting any clarity? Now for the final step. Label the bottom-right quadrant “Ideal Customer Rejects.” Apply the top 5 GOOD characteristics and top 5 BAD characteristics to each of the Ideal Customer Candidates. Which ones PASS? Which ones FAIL? Put the candidates that fail in the bottom-right quadrant.

You may need to take a couple of passes at this to nail it. Maybe I’ll give an example in a future blog post.

Would that interest you?

Lunchtime. Let’s take a little break before we go on to the next thing you have to pack if you want to ACCELERATE revenue: your driver!