Today, when competition is at its peak, acquiring customers is an uphill battle! Do you agree or not?
But are you leaving no stone unturned to draw potential customers & make the best out of your leads?
Well, if Account profiling is not a part of your strategy, you are missing out on great opportunities!
Wondering how?
Let’s get to know…
Account Profiling: A great way to stay ahead of the game
Attracting & winning customers in business is not a cakewalk, especially if you are a b2b company. We’re sure a lot of you can relate to this. To survive today’s fierce competition, acquiring customers & retaining them takes much more than simply offering quality service. In the age of bespoke services, having a gist of generic information about your target prospects will not be enough to attract them.
And so, to attract, engage & acquire customers, you must know your target customers inside out. This means that you must have insights into:
- What are your customers’ needs & requirements?
- How can you best serve their needs?
- What are their preferences, values, buying behavior, habits & needs?
- What challenges are your customers facing?
And this is where Account Profiling Services help! Especially in a B2B scenario, account-based marketing (ABM) is one of the proven ways to augment sales & boost your conversions.
In fact, 87% of marketers believe that the ABM technique beats other forms of marketing activities.
So, what is Account Profiling & what is the buzz around it?
Account profiling generally refers to identifying, organising, and categorising your customers into specific groups, based on their goals or characteristics. This implies that your customer profiles encompass detailed information about your prospects. This data may typically include buying behaviour, their problems, demography, psychological data, etc.
By profiling the accounts of the customers, you can better understand:
- Where to spend your valuable time
- How can you target & engage specific customer groups
- Which customers have the best chances of being converted
Why does your B2B business need account profiling?
1. Lands you to the right audience
Account profiling enables you to create a clear picture of your customers, identify which amongst them are your hot leads and who have the highest chance of being converted. It also ensures that your marketing efforts are directed towards the right audience.
2. Helps you make the optimum use of your marketing expenditure
As account profiling enables you to bracket your ideal customers. This helps you to allocate your market budget to the right audience and the right platforms, thereby making the most out of your budget spent.
3. Enables you to deliver an excellent customer experience
Once you know your customers’ preferences, interests, habits, and expectations, you will be able to provide a seamless & enhanced customer experience.
4. Helps you identify your qualified prospects
Often the sales team wastes valuable time on closed-lost deals. However, with smart customer profiling, you can identify which customers are better-fit prospects & are most likely to convert.
5. Cuts down your cost of customer acquisition
CAC implies the amount you shell out on marketing to attract & attain a customer. As account profiling helps you know your customer better, you can build your campaigns around your customers’ needs. This will ultimately cut down your customer acquisition cost.
6. Boosts your customer’s response & conversion rate
Customer profiles can help you attract more qualified leads, target the right audience, and foster your relationship with customers. This ultimately gives a boost to your conversion rate & inspires customers to respond better.
7. Makes your customer data enforceable and ready-to-use
As customer profiling ensures that all your customer data is stored in one place and well-organized, it makes it ready-to-use and more actionable.
8. Helps you give a personalized experience
Today’s marketing is all about personalization. The more you show people things of their interest, the better response you are bound to receive. This technique allows you to scrutinize your customers’ choices & needs, which enables you to deliver an excellent personalized experience.
9. Drives better engagement in customers
Delivering customized messages and planning your campaign around your customers’ interests, will help you drive better engagement in your customers.
10. Helps you perceive your customers well
To run a successful business, you must know every aspect of your potential customers. And this is where account profiling services have come into play. Right from your customer’s demographic & geographic information, to their interests, buying behavior, preferences, and habits, account profiling techniques can help you with all.
What if you do not create account profiles?
Think of a scenario when you have no clue of the position of your current customers.
Whom will you target?
How will you know whether your marketing efforts are moving in the right direction or not?
How will you know who is most interested in buying your services/products?
How will you address your customers’ challenges & problems?
So, neglecting customer profiling will ultimately lead to
- Waste of time & marketing budget
- End up reaching the wrong audience
- Lost deals & customers
- Missed sales opportunities
- No engagement in your marketing messages
- Failure of delivering a personalized experience
And hence, you will not be able to identify warm leads unless you have an account profiling process in place!
Well, now that you know the importance of account profiling, the next big question is,
How can you create customer profiles?
You simply cannot classify your customers based on some assumptions. To have solid customer profiles, you need access to the following data-
| Demographic | Geographic | Behavioral | Psychographic |
|---|---|---|---|
| This involves gathering data based on social characteristics & stats of your audience. | This data sheds light on how location & environment may affect how customers connect with your business. | Behavioral data helps you understand what triggers your customers to go ahead with the buying process. | This involves chalking out your customers’ values, attributes and other psychological variables. |
| This may include your customers’ age, education, sex, income, status, & other related information. | This data majorly involves the country, city, and region in which your customers reside. | This includes gathering information about the inclination to buy a product, purchasing history, engagement, etc. | This broadly includes lifestyle, goals, habits, needs, interests, opinions, among others. |
Here’s what a Customer Profile may look like:-
Ideally, your customer profile should have the following details:
- Customer’s personal details
- Customer’s job position/profile
- Customer’s geography details
- Customer’s demography
- Customer’s pain points/ current challenges
- Customer’s buying pattern
- Customer’s behavior & habits
- Customer’s interests and preferences
However, this may vary depending on your business type & requirements.
Here’s a sample customer profile:
How can you create winning customer profiles- 5 must-follow tips!
1. Dig deep into your analytics
Once you have access to all the customer data, analyzing it is the first step that brings you closer to creating solid customer profiles. Using the advanced analytics tools, you can identify:
- Which customers are most interested in your products
- What kind of customers are falling upon your web pages
- Which marketing content performs the best
The deeper you get into finding your analytics, the better insight you will have on your customers. This will also help you highlight your loyal customers and identify segments of the audience that are most interested in your products/services.
2. Use surveys & interviews to collect your customers’ feedback
Simply diving into your analytics is not enough! To actually figure out what your customers expect, it is critical that you collect their feedback. This can be done following either of the two ways:
- By creating & conducting customer surveys
- By conducting direct customer interviews
Collecting feedback through surveys is a great way to build quality account profiles, it also helps you to know what your customers want & like. This will help you to better analyze how your customers perceive your service offerings and brand.
Note: Make sure that your surveys aren’t too long & overwhelming. Try to make them interesting by keeping them crisp or by offering an incentive.
Similarly, customer interviews give you an opportunity to connect with your audience directly and collect feedback. This will not just help you to know your customers’ needs but will also improve your connection with them.
3. Use other techniques to research your customers
Do you think all your customers will fill out your survey form? Not really. You can expect only some of your customers to participate in your surveys and provide you with honest feedback. So what to do in this case? Well, this is where your personal research will help. By using techniques like web research, data analytics, and data mining, no stone will be left unturned to gather information about your customers.
Things to research & find out about your potential customers:
- Their team size
- Their business challenges
- Their company goals & objectives
- Their major pain points
Using the aforementioned techniques, you can dig out important data from different channels & sources. Once you have the required data, make sure to draw a customer journey map. This will help you outline various touch points by which your customers interact with your company. Furthermore, it will make you familiar with your customer’s buying protocol.
4. Create account profile ready-to-use templates- Perform regular data entry
At this point where you have all the relevant data about your customers, the next crucial step is to create a ready-to-use account profile template in your central CRM/database & store all the details. You can create separate profiles and add all relevant data that you’ve collected so far. Your sales team can access these customer profiles & know which customers to target & engage. This way, you will know which leads to target & nurture to reap the maximum benefits.
Ensure to create the same template for all your customers. They must have sections for demographics, psychographics, behaviours, and habits.
“Keep in mind: Do not overcomplicate your customer profiles. Make sure to keep it clear and concise.”
5. Consistency is the key- Don’t forget to keep your customer profile well-updated
After creating your customer profiles, it is important to keep them well maintained and updated regularly. As your customer’s preferences, challenges, and needs may change over time, it is critical to keep your toes on the latest findings and update your account profiles. You must also keep taking surveys at regular intervals to keep your toes on your customers’ changing preferences, likes, and habits.
How can professional Account profiling services help?
Here’s how an account profiling company can help you:
1. Access to the latest software & tools
To build winning account profiles, you need different tools and software. Some of the main tools include data analytics tools, customer feedback software, CRM, among others. Purchasing them can be expensive. And so, when you outsource account profiling services, you can have access to the latest tools & software without having to pay for it individually.
2. Access to a team of skilled resources
Building solid customer profiles is not as easy as it may sound. By hiring an account profiling company, you can have access to the most experienced and skilled resources who can dedicatedly work on your project and bring your maximum return on investment.
3. Support in other data & research functions
Customer account profiling involves a great deal of research. If you’re outsourcing account profiling services, you should have data experts by your side who are adept with other data functions including data entry, data mining, and data research. This way you can get unparalleled support & find all necessary information about your customers.
4. Unmatched data security & accuracy
Another advantage of partnering with an outsourcing firm is data security & accuracy. You can find various companies that are ISO-certified and keep data security at their core. This will ensure that all your data shared with the company will be completely safe and secure. Furthermore, data professionals will also ensure that you attain data accuracy close to 100%.
5. Superior outcomes
This is the reason why most companies prefer leveraging professional account profiling services. Outsourcing vendors usually have the capability, technologies, tools, experience, and skilled resources to create winning customer profiles, thereby giving you superior results.
6. Flexible hiring models
The best part of partnering with outsourcing firms is having flexibility in hiring resources. Depending on your requirements, you can hire resources on an hourly basis, monthly basis, or yearly basis. You can also scale up or scale down your project anytime, as per your needs.
Though you can create customer profiles on your own, it requires immense time, effort & research skills to build perfect profiles. Leveraging professional sales account profiling services will help you grab better sales opportunities and reach out to hot leads in the best manner.
For service consultation you can email us at info@suntecindia.com.
