Updated on July 26, 2022
Does a small enterprise have the same challenges as one with $5 million in revenue? Of course not. Well, imagine writing a sales message to a person responsible for web design at a specific company. Would you achieve your goal of selling the product? Absolutely not. You can’t count on a “one size fits all” approach to sales anymore to deliver the results you are aiming for. Having a clear definition of who is your Ideal Customer by identifying your target audience, is one of the most important things you can do for your SaaS business.
That’s why it is important to know that not having identified your ideal customer profile is one of the biggest mistakes for your business. The main purpose of every business nowadays is to match the value of their product or service with the right customers.
But, if you don’t know who your audience is, how can you sell to them? Well, in a nutshell – you can’t. You might be wondering where you can find information that can guide you in the right direction. We’re here to help you when it comes to understanding and identifying your ideal customer profile.
Identifying your target audience with company research
Rather than target a broad audience of every single person in every industry, you should focus on identifying the ideal customer for your business, especially in the SaaS industry. Many business owners make the mistake of thinking that their service or product is right for everyone. For example, targeting Google Ads to all job positions, industries when your product is clearly for salespeople doesn’t make much sense. Not only is advertising to everyone rarely reasonable, but it can actually harm your marketing efforts by annoying people and wasting your advertising budget unnecessarily.
Aligning around a target audience is step one in better attracting, engaging, and converting the individuals that matter most to your business. First, you need to identify the typical stakeholders involved in purchasing your solution. If you have already sold your solution to a significant number of companies, review your customer database to identify who influenced the purchase, who made the ultimate purchase decision, and who is using the solution. Then look for common denominators within each of these key stakeholders, such as title or role, industry, company size, etc.
More important here is their type of interest. Some of your clients might find your solution “the best fit” also for their clients and even refer it. Some of your clients will also be open to become affiliates of your product and present it to their specific target market. Watch out for both! Either of these is a valuable source of information to form your ICP.
With detailed company research, you will get all the necessary information we mentioned above. The Company Search Module at Sales.Rocks can help you do this by giving you a whole picture of all companies in your ideal customer profile from over 115 million companies. By following these 4 steps you will learn how to use them for filling your sales pipeline and executing a successful marketing strategy for your desired prospects.
1. Define your Ideal Customer Profile
In order to begin your hunt, you first need to create your ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile in short is the type of company that would gain the most value from your product or solution. These kinds of companies tend to have the most successful and quickest sales cycle, the highest number of prospects for your company, and the greatest customer retention rates.
When creating the ICP, you can use key parameters like contact person, contact level (ex. VP, CEO, CFO), departments (ex. Marketing, Sales, HR), and web-technologies used. These criteria will help you target individuals more efficiently from your general audience and you can proceed with identifying the customer responsibilities. For example, when contacting SDR’s you have to be aware of their everyday activities like contacting potential customers through cold calling and emails, proactively seeking new business opportunities, or developing growth strategies to attract more prospects. This way you will know how to offer the solution for the challenges they are facing in a way that they will find useful.
2. Identify Customer Pain Points
Finding new leads and turning them into customers is a complex process, especially in the B2B industry where people often have a hard time recognizing a problem and finding the right solution. A customer pain point is a problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing during the buying journey. What is stopping your salespeople from meeting your company standards is a question that will pop up often if you haven’t segmented the different pain points your customers are facing.
For example, since sales agents do a lot of reach out via emails, the fear of their emails being marked as “spam” is always there, and we all know – once your email is seen in spam, no one trusts you anymore. Due to all of those sales campaigns, customers can easily notice that the emails they receive are not personalized and that sales agents couldn’t care less about them or their needs. If you know the pain point they are facing, it will be easier for you to offer them a solution.
How we assist SDR’s in solving this pain point is through the use of our hyper-personalized drip campaigns, with setting different triggers and conditions based on the email opens and link clicks. Additionally with the Email Warmer option, which will warm up their domain before sending the emails, we make sure to increase the deliverability.
3. Identify Customer gains of your SaaS solution
Customer gains make your customer happy, save time, effort, or money. These are the goals that when achieved would make their life and the primary job-to-be-done easier. It’s very important to frequently ask yourself how you are creating value for your customer, in terms of:
- What risks can you help them eliminate?
- How do you go beyond their expectations?
- What superpower do you give them to make them look awesome in front of their colleagues?
Getting to know your customer is the biggest treasure for your SaaS business. Great product teams develop an obsession like focusing on the customer. Get out of your comfort zone and talk to as many people as you can. That will help you find your ideal customer profile and will make it easier for you to offer a solution that can solve their problem.
Having the lead data directly transferred to a CRM with a click of a button saves a lot of administrative time to marketing agents. Working with tools that are both truly efficient and with lower subscription, is the true blessing for the marketing budget and that’s where automation tools (in our case Sales.Rocks) show their superpower, by connecting your business tools with the data you are missing by selecting the Integrations function.
4. Start Filtering your Targeted Audience
Once you know your ideal customer profile, what are you offering and what pains are you solving for your customers, start filtering your desired audience based on various filters like location, industry, company size and hierarchy, revenue, founding year, contact options, social media profiles, web-technologies used, recent recruitment events and many more. This way you have the opportunity to search a big pool of companies with which you can get in touch and sell them your product.
The days of putting a lot of effort and going from one page to another just to get the main info for your leads are over. Where to find all this data? At Sales.Rocks of course! You can have all of the information you need in a few seconds, which helps you focus on the next stages of the sales cycle with ease. After the filters are applied and you have all of the data you need, you can continue with adding your leads to a new list and export them to Excel.
To sum up…
Ideal Customer Profiles are the key to SaaS businesses becoming data-driven. A well-formed ideal customer profile will clearly define your target customer data model and the data you need for identifying your best-fit customers from your majority audience. Automated sales and marketing tools will assist your sales and marketing people in expanding their solutions to businesses worldwide. With the click of a button, they can: search for the ideal customer profile, add the leads to a list and download them to Excel.
Our main goal is to make sales and marketing fun so that they will enjoy every step of the journey while assisting them in having the most advanced tools for their business. The only thing that they need to have is the desire to achieve their goals and rock sales in 2021, the rest is a piece of cake.
