The Ideal Customer Profile

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

One of the biggest issues founders and first-time salespeople have is trying to sell to people who don’t have the problem their solution solves. Instead they prioritize other characteristics—availability being the biggest temptation—when identifying prospects. You see this when founders sell to their incubator-mates or people they know from prior companies, or even friends and family.

The whole purpose of B2B product development is to identify a business pain in the market and build a product or service that resolves that business pain. And the purpose of B2B sales is to identify companies and individuals that have that business pain, propose the product as a means by which to resolve it, and eventually come to a mutually beneficial agreement to exchange money for that product—which then resolves the business pain, as promised. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

The opposite of this approach is trying to sell your solution to anything with a heartbeat, regardless of whether or not they or their company has the pain point the solution resolves. It’s approaches like this that give sales a slimy name. But what’s worse (aside from peeing in the pool for all the other people who are doing B2B sales and just generally irritating people), it’s actually terrible for your business. All you have in B2B sales is your time. And when you spend your time on prospects who don’t need your product, they won’t close. So you’re spending your scarce time (and salary expense, and runway) on prospects who are unlikely to buy. Think about that. Your goal in sales is to scalably acquire customers and revenue. So spending time on people who won’t close is the equivalent of setting revenue on fire.

Running the numbers quickly, you see how bad this can be. Imagine you’re aimless in your outreach targeting and qualification because your ideal customer profile is undefined or sloppy. Maybe you do 20 demos for people who don’t have your pain point. Maybe each of those demos requires, on average, 30 minutes of prep, an hour of execution, and another 30 minutes of follow-up immediately after the fact. To say nothing of further down-funnel follow-up, chasing the opportunity. That’s a full week of your time flushed down the drain, where it will never turn into revenue. You could have spent that time selling to people who might actually buy. Or working on your sales materials. Or doing a better job servicing your existing customers and making sure they are successful.

Even worse, if you do somehow magically convince a bad prospect to buy (because of your extreme charisma and perfect hair), they won’t get value out of your offering because they don’t have the pain (or a sufficient amount of the pain) your solution alleviates. That supposed good trade we talked about above will actually be a bum deal. And the customer will not be happy. They won’t buy more and more of your product. They won’t renew your product (they’ll “churn out” in SaaS talk). They’ll tell their friends. But even worse than that, they may try to be helpful, and in the process actually hurt you. They’ll offer you feedback on how to make the offering better for them—but they’re not who the product is designed for. They’ll try to give you a second chance, and in the process they’ll consume all of your customer success and support time and resources (which, at this early stage, is probably you). And when they do, they’ll be stealing those resources from customers who actually will get value from and might buy more of your product.

It’s a disaster.

The impulse to prioritize prospects you know, even if they may not have a need for your solution, is understandable. If you’ve never done sales before, you’re not used to the potential rejection associated with approaching people you don’t know and engaging them in a commercial conversation. We touched on this in Mindset Changes for First-Time Sales Professionals. The directness that sales demands is foreign and feels frightening, maybe even presumptuous and unwelcome. And it’s so easy to get in touch with people you already know. How could this approach not be better than engaging people who don’t know you from Adam? This apprehension goes back to the age-old vision of a sales guy as a slickster—trying to shove product onto someone who doesn’t necessarily need it—and probably a fair amount of bad sales experiences you’ve had yourself. But you need to change your mindset and start seeing yourself as the bringer of solutions to those who have a problem. Prospecting is about finding those who have your problem.

Think about it this way: If my window is broken and a repairman knocks on my door, do I care that I don’t know him? Or that he knocked unsolicited? No! He can fix my window! Even better if I didn’t realize it was broken. I’m just venting air-conditioning and heat into the world and leaving my house open to wildlife and potential intruders. This guy is my savior!

Conversely, I can be great friends with a window repairman—went to college together, same fraternity. But if I don’t have a broken window, regardless of how great our friendship, is it a useful commercial conversation for me or him? I might be his kid’s godfather and might buy anyway, but am I going to get value? Tell others about how great my repair job was? No way.

Targeting based on relationship rather than need is ineffective and a waste of time.

So let’s avoid it! The absolute best way to stop selling to people who don’t have your pain point is to be able to identify, based on some number of key characteristics, accounts and contacts who do have your pain point. Prospecting is about finding those people in a repeatable fashion. By knowing your ideal customer profile, you’ll be able to identify more prospects in the wild, and then scalably engage them and present your product as the solution to their problem. Additionally, you’ll be able to easily qualify prospects that come to you—whether through your website’s lead capture form or referral by a friend, or even at a cocktail party. If they fit that ideal customer profile, great! Run with it. And if they don’t, also great! Don’t spend any time on it. Instead, spend that time on something more useful—like finding and supporting customers that do match that profile. Or going to the gym. Or taking a nap. Anything other than selling to someone who is not qualified!

You’ll know you’ve nailed your ideal customer profile when you’re discussing what your company does with a friend and she says something along the lines of, “Oh, that sounds interesting, I could use it”—but instead of immediately selling her on it, you pause and take a step back. You ask her a couple quick questions that determine if, yes, she actually could use it, or if you should reply with, “We’re not really set up to do that yet, but maybe in the future! If you have friends that need X, Y, and Z, though, we’d definitely be relevant to them.” You just saved yourself from potentially destroying hours of your time, you did your friend a solid by being respectful of her time, you underscored your trustworthiness by being candid, and you set up a word-of-mouth helper. Wins all around!