Marketing - Building a Target Customer Profile

It's all about walking in and knowing what your'e talking about.  Are you relevant to their needs?

• Why Profile the customer?
• How to Create a customer profile
• Actually using the profile

Why Profile the Customer?

This helps us market the same solution to multiple customer segments.  Called "positioning".  The profile helps us understand our exact value proposition TO THAT CUSTOMER and helps us work with that customer.  Profile gets better the more you do.

Easy answer: SO THAT YOU KNOW TO WHOM YOU ARE SELLING

Things to include in the profile:

• What will the customer buy? -
• What do you want to sell them? - You are NOT selling computers or software or implementations services. You are selling an IT solution.  Now we can do a mailer, with a feature list, target business
• Why will they buy from you or anyone else? - Why would they be interested you? Build value around our solutions. They must understand that buying our solution will help them make more profit and/or perform better.
• What is your value to them? - We know who, what and why now.  We hav a view of our customers and their hard characteristics.  As well as softer ones.  Don't go outside your target market.

 It's all about getting a lot of information quickly, but also ongoing.  Other questions to ask:

• How much time to invest in each sale?
• Who are the stakeholders most interested in offer?
• What does their business plan look like? - B1 may be a catalyst for change within their company.  Find companies that want to change. Not companies that need band aids.
• When will they buy? -
• WHat price will they pay?
• Who else will they consider?
• What will be their decision process? - owners? subsidiaries? Tim in accounting? Build your qualification map around the customer profile (more on this later)
• What is your value to them?

How to creat a customer profile:

A typical mySAP All-in-One (not us) partner may well have a custome profile like this: 

• 25-250 million revenu, 2k employees
• In my industry
• transitioning from national to international business
• understands their supply chain pressures
• wants best practice workflow
• wants stock market listing
• limited IT department, low project resources
• start small, not limited

Also make sure you have script for each C level exec meeting and broad understanding of competitive landscape.

A typical SAP Business On (us!) partner may well have a custome profile like this: 

• Companies from 10-100 employees
• BAsic business processes, not requiring a high degree of industry specific functinality
• light mfg needs
• disconnected apps and scattered data
• outdated apps that are end of life or no longer suported
• outgrowing low end accounting apps
• subsidiaries of large enterprises, especially those running SAP something