Effective Prospecting: Quality Over Quantity

Effective Prospecting: Quality Over Quantity 
from
Miller Heiman.com
Prospecting-Quality-Over-Quantity

Think about how many times since you began selling you heard someone say, “I wish I’d never closed that order.” And then consider how many times you’ve said it yourself.  Why does this happen? Because the sales professional allowed himself to believe that it’s quantity, not quality, that counts, and so ended up selling to a customer with a nonexistent match to their product or service. Learn how creating an “Ideal Customer Profile” will help you separate your best prospects from the ones who will prove to be liabilities.

The Ideal Customer Profile’s aim is really twofold: to anticipate problems in your current customer base, and as a sorting device that will help you cut down on those prospects you probably shouldn’t be working with in the first place—leaving you with a shorter but real prospects’ list. Your own personal Ideal Customer Profile will be based on your current and past accounts; you can then use that profile to test the real prospects of a winning sale with all of your current sales objectives.

1. Create your Ideal Customer Profile. Make five columns with the following subheadings:
   1. Best Customers
   2. Characteristics of Best
   3. Ideal Customer Profile
   4. Characteristics of Worst
   5. Worst Customers


2. Identify your best customers. List your best current and past customers, not prospects—be sure to limit yourself to accounts where you’ve already done business. Concentrate on those accounts that have given you the maximum number of wins and minimal trouble.


3. Identify your worst customers. List your worst past and current customers. Concentrate on those accounts where either you or the customer—or both of you—have lost even though you’ve closed the order.


4. List best customer characteristics. List those characteristics that are common or unique to the “best customers” you’ve just identified.


5. List worst customer characteristics. List those characteristics that are common or unique to the “worst customers” you’ve just identified.


6. Create your Ideal Customer Profile. Study the lists you’ve just made of “best customer” and “worst customer” characteristics and distill out of those items a new list of characteristics you consider the most significant to put in your Ideal Customer Profile column. (Note: When assessing “worst” characteristics list, your takeaway will be the opposite of the significant items listed there, i.e., if a common characteristic of your “worst customers” is that they’re “unable to make decisions,” write in the ICP column something like, “Has a process for making buying decisions quickly.”) Then zero in on the five most significant characteristics. These five characteristics will form your Ideal Customer Profile.


7. Test your current accounts. Measure a current account you’re working on against each of your five ICP characteristics, asking yourself for each one, “How well does this particular customer match with this ideal characteristic”?

You now have a useful screening tool for both sorting your prospects and anticipating problems. Once you know how close (or not) a given account is to your Ideal Customer Profile, you’ll be in a better position to make a decision about how to improve your strategy for that account.