8 Easy Steps to Creating a Customer Profile

In order to properly market, sell to, and offer support to customers, you need to understand them and get to know them. And you can do that effectively by building a customer profile and developing a system for creating and auditing those profiles.

在这篇文章中，您将了解客户资料是什么以及如何开始构建自己的。

If you don’t create customer profiles, you risk marketing to a non-descript audience, which can lead to wasted time and closed-lost deals. Defining your ideal customers will help you identify the attributes and purchasing behaviors of the customers whose business you’ve already won.

The best part about customer profiles is that you create them from the pool of customers that you already have. Rather than coming up with ideal and imaginary attributes like you would for abuyer persona, you would survey your current customers and find out the types of consumers who are more likely to buy from you.

While a buyer persona provides a fictionalized individual who acts as a representation of your customers, a customer profile is rooted in the data and factual information of your customer base. Everything you need to know about a group of customers is captured within this one description. For this reason, a customer profile comes first, and then you建立买家角色from it.

Once you've defined these qualities of your target audience, you can segment yourcustomer baseinto different customer profiles.

Why is customer profiling important?

When building a business, developing a go-to-market strategy, or giving your sales team direction, it's important to have a clear description of your current customers in place. That way, you know who’s more likely to buy your product in the future based on who has bought it in the past.

它还可以帮助您确定真正从您那里购买产品的买家，这比针对各地的每个人都更有价值。

Trying to build something that solves 100% of the problems for 100% of the market is referred to as "boiling the ocean." You’re “boiling the ocean” when your customer profile is too broad. The irony is that by targeting a broad audience, you end up solving only a few problems for only a few people. You’ll end up spreading your product offering too thin and diluting your value across a large number of customers.

客户档案像护栏产品managers as they develop a new product, marketers as they craft positioning strategies, and salespeople as they search for potential customers.

Customer profiling is incredibly beneficial for all teams and members of your business — let’s take a look at the benefits in more detail below.

客户分析福利

Creating customer profiles is critical if you want to grow your business. Its benefits are impactful across your entire company, starting from your sales team down to your service organization.

Customer profiling helps you do the following:

It allows you to identify better-fit prospects.

By knowing whom benefits from your products the most, your organization can find better prospects and increase close rates. If you’re part of the service team, this might not mean much to you, but remember: a better-fit prospect is a happier customer down the line. A customer who doesn’t really benefit from your product is more likely to submit an unhappy ticket to your service desk.

It lowers customer acquisition cost (CAC).

客户采购成本(CAC)是你的钱花在营销和吗sales campaigns to attract a single customer. By knowing your customer, you can better target your campaigns and increase click-through-rates and form submissions. To summarize: The more specific your customer, the less you’ll spend and the more successful your campaign will be.

It empowers you to serve customers better.

Knowing your customers is key to serving them better. By documenting their pain points, attributes, and characteristics, you can deliver a superior customer service experience before they ever request help. You can predict issues before they arise, provide effective self-help resources, and better align with their needs if they reach out to your service team.

It reduces customer churn.

客户流失happens when you lose customers over a predefined period of time. By creating strong customer profiles from the start, you can attract and serve customers who actually want to use your product or service —reducing customer churnin both the short and the long term.

Now that you know the benefits of customer profiling, what types of customer profiles can you create? Let’s take a look at each one.

Types of Customer Profiling

A refined customer profile can help your company build more impactful features, find and attract more people that are likely to buy your product, develop a stronger relationship with your customers, and put you on a better trajectory for market dominance.

For this reason, it's a good idea to profile customers based on specific types, or "segments." Segments can help you unearth trends in satisfaction, churn, andlifetime valuethat can in turn help you understand more about your ideal customer profile(s).

以几种不同的方式考虑分析和细分：

Demographic

Demographics are the concrete characteristics of a customer and can be used to understand consumer behavior, albeit broadly. Demographics include the following traits (and more):

• 年龄
• Sex
• Job Title
• Income
• Education Level
• 家庭状况

If you’re in the B2B space, you may also consider attributes such as company size, industry, and other attributes for the organization.

Psychographic

Demographics alone aren't enough to understand how, when, and why people make purchasing decisions, and that's where psychographics come in. These factors relate to the attitudes and psychological make-up of a customer and may include:

• Lifestyle
• Goals
• 痛苦
• Habits
• Values
• Interests

心理学对了解购买旅程甚至客户已经从您那里购买后的旅程很有帮助。

Whether it's for understanding the triggering events that lead them to purchase, crafting value-based messaging to attract prospects, empathizing with their situation, or developing new products that address existing needs, psychographics are extremely useful things to consider.

Behavioral

While psychographics relate to psychological attributes, behavioral segments take a look at how that's manifested into action. You may consider segmenting by:

• Engagement
• 准备购买
• Purchasing History
• Product Usage
• Satisfaction
• Loyalty or Account Age
• Attention Required

基于行为特征的细分市场是客户支持中最有价值的部分。它可以帮助服务团队找到与客户互动有关的见解，以及这些趋势如何表现为经常出现的收入和满意度。一旦测量了这些东西，就可以改进它们。

Geographic

当位置会影响客户如何与品牌互动或接收产品时，地理因素很重要。这是基于地理的细分的流行方法：

• City
• 区域
• 地区
• Country

Gaining insights based on geography can help your organization think through logistics, support implementation, and marketing.

1. Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.

如果您有新业务，请专注于您要解决的问题，并确定面临这一挑战的人的类型。如果您有现有的客户群，那么关键是要仔细研究您当前的用户及其行为。

The common denominator between these approaches is people. It doesn't matter if you only have a few customers or are well on your way to 10,000. You need to understand who your customers are (or will be), how they're using your product or service, and why they're using it.

2. Review your customer journey map.

Acustomer journey mapis a document that outlines every touchpoint a customer must pass through to achieve a goal with your company. While these take time to complete, they paint a detailed picture of who's buying your products and interacting with your brand.

But, you don't need to complete a customer journey map to create a customer profile. Simply thinking about the customer's journey will help you understand who you're trying to reach. By understanding their needs, challenges, and goals, you'll develop a stronger sense of what your customers want from your business.

You can even take this one step further by interviewing customers about each stop on your map. When creatingHubSpot's customer journey map, we asked users how they felt about specific points in the customer experience. Then, we charted these stories on the map so we could see how customer perception changed throughout the customer's journey. This gave us a good idea of what our customers liked and didn't like about our products.

3.挖掘人口统计。

To define your customer profile, it's best to start with external demographics, then dive deeper into needs, and finally look at your company's offering.

Here are some external attributes you can use to define your customer profile:

• What market does your product best serve? (e.g. Software for Healthcare)
• What specific vertical do they operate in? (e.g. Patient Management System for Health Systems)
• What is their annual revenue? (e.g. +$10mm)
• How many employees do they have? (e.g. 150 employees or more)
• Where are these companies located? (e.g. located in the United States)

4. Collect customer feedback.

When building your profile, it's easy to just rely on the data your team is given. But, it's hard to get to know your customers if you don't spend time with them. You need to meet your customers if you want to have a clear picture of what they're like. This makes customer interviews one of the best resources to use when building a customer profile.

客户面试使您的团队可以与用户面对面交谈。他们可以实时阅读对问题的反应，并与您的客户建立人际关系。这有助于他们发现原始数据无法显示的有价值的信息。

If you're unable to reach a specific group of customers, consider setting up a phone or video call. While it's not as engaging as an in-person interaction, it's still an effective way of reaching your target audience. If your customers are willing to schedule a call with you, you know they're loyal users and are worth the time investment. The more attention you pay to these customers, the more you'll have in the future.

5.检查上下文细节。

Once you've defined the external factors that describe your customer profile, it's critical to dig deeper into the contextual details. For example, if I was starting a SaaS company, I'd want to understand the following things about my customer:

• 他们的团队有多大？
• What are the biggest challenges they face?
• What technology are they using?
• What are their goals for the next three months?
• What are their goals for the year?
• How do they assess problems?
• What does a perfect world look like for them?
• What impact does the specific problem have on their team?
• How are they trying to solve the problem today?

Based on these external factors and contextual details, you should now have a strong grasp on your potential customers' general make-up and goals. The final step to complete your customer profile is to look internally to see how you can help them based on all of this information. Below are some key questions to answer when completing your customer profile:

• What value can you provide these customers? (Save them money or time, grow revenue, etc.)
• Can you solve their key pain points?
• 区分你的特点是什么competitors or a homegrown process?
• How does your solution fit into their short- and long-term goals?

6. Understand your industry.

您应该考虑的一个主要的上下文细节是，与行业中的其他人相比，您的品牌在哪里。您应该知道您的客户如何看待您的品牌以及您与哪些公司竞争的公司。这应该很好地了解您要吸引和保留的客户类型。

Understanding your industry also helps you define brand identity. If you're going to stand out, you need to find a way to differentiate your product and services. But, you also don't want to advertise changes that your customers will react negatively to. If you know which marketing strategies your customers already respond to, you can mirror your competitor's successful techniques for introducing and educating customers about a new product or feature.

7. Build personas.

Remember that you're marketing to people with actual personalities, feelings, and needs. Once you've identified the attributes for your customer profile, the next step is to identify the individuals within the company that you want to reach. This will be helpful when trying to establish a relationship with the account, as well as understand who the decision makers and influencers are. Here are some key things to uncover about the people in your customer profile:

• Title(s)
• 年龄range
• Education level
• Income level
• 他们将如何使用您的产品/服务？
• On what marketing channels can you reach them?
• What are the key responsibilities for their role?
• What role do they play in the decision-making process?

If you need a tool to help you build, visualize, and share your personas, try HubSpot'sMake My Personatool.

8.分析和迭代客户角色。

A customer profile is a key lever for growing your business. This definition will act as a guide when informing what products or features to build, what channels to use in a marketing campaign, and much more.

没有它，您就有提供无法满足任何潜在客户特定需求的产品或服务的风险。或者，您最终以与他们对问题的理解产生共鸣的方式向潜在客户进行营销。您的目标应该是与您的客户个人资料一起运行，以通知功能开发到所有内容go-to-market strategy.

As you're building your customer profile, make sure to gather the external factors, qualify the contextual details, and develop a deep understanding of how your business adds value to each customer type.

Customer Profile Examples

If you're not sure where to get started, take a look at these top customer profile examples for getting both a granular and overarching overview of your customers.

1. Scorecard

该客户资料使用评分系统来确定潜在客户是否适合企业。它使用bant框架并给他们每个标准的分数，范围从零到两个。如果总分数符合预设基准，则该公司将通过销售推销与该客户联系。bob全站app

2. Segmentation

In a segmented customer profile, each customer type is broken down by demographics, core values, and preferred communication channels. It includes a short summary describing how the marketing team should advertise to these individuals. With this information readily available, your marketing team can work alongside customer service to create effective campaigns that resonate with each segment of your customer base.

3. Basic Information

Download this Template

This customer profile, available in our免费的客户资料模板，直接切入点。它列出了我们需要了解的有关此客户类型的所有基本信息。这包括背景数据，人口统计和疼痛点。

如果您想建立基本的客户资料，这是一种很好的格式。尽管信息是表面级别的，但足以让您对目标受众进行准确的描述。

下载此客户个人资料示例的免费，可编辑的副本.

4. Buyer Persona

如前所述，买方角色通常是在您对客户资料有所了解之后。但是，许多买家角色建筑商可以通过提出宝贵的定性问题来批判性地考虑理想的客户。使用HubSpot的Make My Personatool as a starting point for mapping and profiling your customers.

5. Demographics, Psychographics, and Behaviors

通过在一个文档中概述客户的人口统计，心理和行为，您可以在不深入研究的情况下获得最有利可图的客户的高级概述。在项目符号或段落格式中写下答案，您将能够更好地了解客户的购买行为。

现在，您已经看到了一些客户资料的示例，是时候开始使用您的了。查看下一节，以获取我们创建的客户资料模板。

客户资料模板

我们创建了客户资料模板，您可以用来引导您完成这些步骤。您可以下载它们here.

下载您的免费templates now.

Customer Profiling Will Improve Your Service Experience

By creating thorough customer profiles, you can target better customers in your sales and marketing campaigns, reducing customer churn and resulting in happier customers later down the line. The more detailed your profile, the more value you can extract from it, making your marketing, sales, and service experiences more effective and valuable for your customers.

编者注：该帖子最初于2018年12月发表，并已更新以进行全面性。