The Power of Understanding Your Customers’ Professional DNA

Analytics on Everything Except Your Perfect Prospect!

Today, everything is about analytics. Performance analytics, Web analytics, sales pipeline analytics, billing analytics, portfolio analytics and every flavor of business intelligence. So why haven’t we seen analytics on the actual people you are selling to?

As a B2B sales rep you know full well that you are selling to people, not to titles, contacts or leads. Therefore, to identify the people who will likely be interested in what you are selling, you have to know who they are as individuals: what they do at work, what they are responsible for, what products and technologies they use and where they go to learn and collaborate about their areas of professional activity. We refer to this collection of factors as your ideal prospect’s “professional DNA.”

Do you know the story behind the people you want to call? Do you know the professional DNA of your ideal prospects?

It stands to reason that an analysis of the professional DNA of hundreds or thousands of your existing customers – i.e., those people who have already proved themselves to be perfect prospects! – will reveal repeating patterns which can point you to your next customers. Wouldn’t it be cool to run some analytics on your existing customers to know the professional DNA of your next ones?

The Power of Describing Your Perfect Prospect

When your organization can pinpoint those factors which describe the best prospects to call, a lot of good things begin to happen.

Firstly, prospecting for new leads takes on a whole new context. Instead of searching for customers based only on high-level factors such as industry and title, you can focus on finding customers with a professional DNA profile very similar to your existing customers. You can also look in places (e.g., particular online groups and forums) where you didn’t think to look before.

Secondly, you will be much more efficient when focusing your time and effort only on those prospects most likely to become customers. Out of a list of leads from your company’s website or a trade show, which ones should you call first? If you could match the professional DNA of each lead to that of your perfect prospect, you’ll know which ones should get the most attention. And because you know so much about their professional life, it will be that much easier to make the initial connection you need to get your foot in the door.

Another benefit of having a clear understanding of your perfect prospect is improved coordination between the marketing and sales departments. When Marketing has a well-defined professional DNA profile for the prospects you are targeting in Sales, it will be easier for them to deliver the leads that Sales wants – and there will be an objective way to measure the quality of those leads.

Theory vs. Practice

I admit that much of what I’ve written in this post sounds rather theoretical. In fact, I am not familiar with any existing system that can provide detailed reports on the common factors which define the professional DNA of a company’s perfect prospects.

However, the concepts described herein are at the core of the technology we’ve developed to perform automatic B2B Web prospecting. Our software actually does automatically research hundreds of an organization’s actual customers to compile a professional DNA profile which is then used to hunt for highly-targeted sales prospects within target accounts. I invite you to check it out.