An ideal customer profile is a description of the type of company or person for whom your offering brings the greatest benefit and with whom cooperation is most profitable. It is not built from wishful thinking but from your own data: look at the customers who stayed the longest, had the highest margin, the fewest complaints and the shortest sales cycle, and look for what they have in common. These tend to be specific traits such as industry, size, region, technological setup, decision-making style, or the situation they were in. The profile then serves three purposes: focusing marketing, prioritising sales enquiries, and deciding when to turn a job down. Supplement it with a negative profile – the types of customers you deliberately do not pursue – so that the whole team knows this in the same way.
See also: Lead qualification, Negative definition in content.
