Sales targeting is a management strategy that helps you prioritize efforts around the deals most likely to result in sales. However, for it to work, you must first be able to identify your top leads. Customer profiles and customer relationship management software (CRM) are great tools to help you recognize leads with the most potential, and when incorporated into your sales process, make sales targeting easier to do overall.
Here are the seven steps for more effective sales targeting using a customer profile with your CRM:
1. Create a Customer Profile
Create a profile of your targeted customer that defines their hobbies, interests, and background. This helps you hone in on your best prospects and the most effective ways to reach out to them, whether it’s promotions, email campaigns, or cold calling. You can also learn more about how to do this step in our article on how to create customer profiles, which also includes a free downloadable template to help you get started.
For the purpose of this article, we will be using the following customer profiles as an example of the types of customers that might visit a high-end bakery:
Morning Commuter | Seasonal Celebrator | One-time Wedding | |
|---|---|---|---|
Type of Customer | Come often, spend little. Our most common customer stops in for a quick coffee and pastry in the morning. | Middle-aged matriarchs catering their celebrations. A smaller segment, but our biggest source of revenue. | Though only a tiny portion of our customers, newlyweds-to-be make up 15% of our revenue. |
Age Range | 25 - 45 | 35 - 55 | 26 - 38 |
What’s Most Important to Them? | Fast service and fresh food/coffee | Unique seasonal treats that make celebrations special | Unique flavors, attentive service, delivery option |
Effective Marketing Strategies | Use sidewalk promotions to draw them in. Loyalty rewards and email coupons will bring them back. | Email marketing with seasonal/holiday promotions. Also, show off your latest creations on Instagram. | Use targeted Facebook ads to draw them in. Continue promoting with wedding, newsletter, and Instagram/Pinterest posts. |
Preferred Communication Channels | Email, loyalty app | Email, Instagram, Facebook, direct mail | Email, Facebook, Pinterest |
2. Sign Up for Customer Relationship Management Software
While having a customer profile you can refer to during sales management training sessions or pin on a wall is a good first step, in order to make consistent targeting decisions, the strategy works best if you are also using a CRM. This is because these tools allow you to assign attributes to specific leads and contacts and to track where they are in your customer’s sales journey.
You can then use these attributes to compare individual leads against ideal customer profiles. Another reason CRM software are great tools is that some will even auto-generate a customer profile score based on how the leads were sourced.
For example, Pipedrive is a CRM tool that helps you manage multiple, highly visual sales pipelines. It has the unique ability to customize messaging and marketing sent from the CRM to specific customer profiles so you are more likely to convert leads into sales. It also offers a number of additional reporting and collaboration features, so your targeted leads don’t fall through the cracks. Sign up for a free 14-day trial today.
3. Upload or Manually Enter Contacts
To get started, you will want to add your first contact. For example, in Pipedrive, you do this by going to the Contacts section and clicking the green “Add person” button. This will pull up a form for you to fill in with all your customer’s contact information, which will include first and last name, title, company name, website, email address, phone number, and additional fields for notes you may want to include regarding your customer.
Adding a new contact in Pipedrive
Pro tip: If your sales organization doesn’t currently use a CRM, most of them will you allow you to import a CSV file when setting it up, making it easier to get started without all the manual input.
4. Create a Custom Field for Customer Profile Types
To start matching your customers with the profiles you created, create a custom field called customer tag. You will then need to create values for this field, which can also be referred to as “tags,” to define the different groups of contacts that are in your CRM. This step will allow you to sort leads, customers based on their customer types, and be more effective in your customer relationship management strategy.
The process for creating custom fields and tags varies by CRM. However, to do this in Pipedrive, you will need to click on the widget icon next to your customer details and then click on “Customize fields.” Then click on “+ Add new field” and assign a name that you chose for the different customer types. Select “Multiple options” for the field type. This will let you create a standard list of tags to use when you add new customers into your CRM.
For example, our high-end bakery has three customer profiles: Morning Commuter, Seasonal Celebrator, and One-time Wedding. So to complete this step, we would need to type each profile name into the values field by clicking on the “+” to add a new value. Check the box beside “Always visible on sidebar,” and then check the box beside “Appears in ‘Add new person’ dialogue.”
When you are finished, your completed custom fields should look like this:
Customer profile custom fields example
5. Assign Tags to Customers
When you are on a customer’s contact page, you can click “Customer Tag” and click on “+ Add value.” You’ll then see a drop-down menu to select which customer type to assign to that customer profile. Pick the one that fits the best and then click “Save.”
Customer tag in Pipedrive
6. Create Customer Filters for Segmentation
Now that you have your customers tagged according to the customer types, you can filter your main contact list to only display the customer type(s) you want to target. In Pipedrive, click on “Contacts” in the primary navigation bar at the top and then “People” in the sub-navigation drop-down menu. This will display your full contact list.
To filter your contact list by customer profile type, click on the “Filter” button to display the menu, then click on “+ Add new filter.” Now you will see a new menu. Under “Show people that match ALL of these conditions,” click on “+ Add condition.”
Leave “Person” selected in the first field and select “Customer Tag” in the second. In the new fields that appear, leave “Is” selected in the first field and select your tag for the second field—a drop-down menu will appear when you click on the field. Once you have selected all of your desired tags, click “Save.”
How to add customer tags in Pipedrive
When you click on the “Filter” button, your customer type filter will appear in the list of available filters. Selecting this new filter will limit your contact list to only those customers that you’ve tagged with your chosen customer type. You can now view the list, export it to a file, or export it to a third-party application, such as Mailchimp, that you’ve integrated with Pipedrive.
Filtering customer types in Pipedrive
7. Begin Using Your Customer Profile
Once you’ve finished creating your customer profile and adding customer types in your CRM, start referring to it when you are creating advertising campaigns, messaging, and sales targeting efforts. For example, our example bakery might target certain customers based on the time of day they come in or what occasion they are shopping for.
- Morning Commuter: Sending out early morning emails to the commuters with their breakfast or coffee specials for that day. You could also use Instagram and Facebook to post images of people enjoying these treats.
- Seasonal Celebrator: Timing holiday offers in ads and emails around the holidays and featuring the creations or flavors you are creating for the season. You could offer early-orders discounts and ensure they receive a “thank you” gift for buying from the cake shop every year.
- One-time Wedding: Creating a Facebook targeted audience using exported contacts and sending them ads with pictures of the business’ most recent wedding cake creations.
These are examples, but you can see how customer profiles can help you hone your sales targeting and lead generation strategies. Don’t forget to track and measure how each group responds and what your return on investment (ROI) is for each promotion. You can add different tactics as you start to see results from the targeting of your specific customer types, but be sure to use your CRM’s tracking features to make the most of each campaign.
How Sales Targeting Works
If you’ve ever heard of the “Pareto Principle,” you’re familiar with the 80/20 rule. In sales targeting, this means that 20% of your customers account of 80% of your sales. This makes sales targeting so important because once you can identify that 20% of your customers who make up 80% of your sales, you can focus your advertising and outreach methods on those people. Creating customer profiles and using a CRM help you do this effectively because you can understand your buyers and track their behavior.
Bottom Line
Sales targeting is a way to generate leads, engage customers, and determine the most effective outreach methods to increase sales. Crafting robust customer profiles for your target audience and using a CRM to track interactions and behaviors are two excellent ways to sharpen your sales targeting efforts.
