Sample frameDay 195·Sales · Targeting

Good morning. Your best customers had something in common before you ever met them. It's written down nowhere.

Sales.

The Ideal Customer Profile

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

What did the five customers you've made the most money from have in common before you'd spoken a word to any of them — and would that list, if you'd written it down two years ago, have kept you away from the three accounts that ate a quarter and closed at a discount?

The idea

The most valuable decision in selling is which prospects you refuse, and it's the one almost nobody writes down. Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman built a sales-training business on that unglamorous idea and set it out in Strategic Selling in 1985, written with Tad Tuleja. Their Ideal Customer Profile is a written description of the customers you already serve best, built from two kinds of characteristic — the measurable ones visible from outside, like size, sector, structure, geography and how they do the job today, and the harder ones about how the organisation behaves, meaning what it values, how it decides, how it treats suppliers. You build it looking backwards at your own accounts rather than forwards at a market you'd like to have, then score new prospects against it before anyone invests a week. A profile assembled from ambition describes the customers you want instead of the ones you win, which makes it a mood board with a scoring column attached. The evidence has to come from accounts that already exist, including the painful ones, and it has to be capable of excluding somebody — which is the test most profiles quietly fail.

The framework

01
Build it backwards from accounts you already have.
Take your five best customers by margin, renewal and how little they hurt, and your three worst by the same three measures. Then list, for each of them, only what you could have known before the first conversation: size, sector, ownership, growth rate, technology, how they were handling the problem previously, what had just changed for them. Patterns arrive faster than you'd expect, and the ones that matter are usually duller than the ones you'd have predicted — sometimes the whole difference is whether they'd already tried a cheaper alternative and abandoned it.
02
Half the profile is behaviour, not description.
Firmographics carry you part of the way and then stop explaining anything, because two companies of the same size in the same sector will hand you completely different deals. The rest sits in behaviour: how fast they decide, whether they'll buy from a small supplier, whether vendors are treated as partners or as a procurement exercise, whether anyone senior has publicly staked something on this problem. Those are harder to see from outside but not invisible — they show up in job advertisements, in who they've bought from before, and in whether the role you'd sell to even exists yet.
03
Does yours actually decline anyone?
Score prospects against four characteristics with something crude — three points down to zero — and write down the threshold below which nobody gets a proposal. Write it this morning, because a threshold set after the tempting deal walks in will be set to let it through. Then draft the sentence itself: what you actually say to the first willing buyer who scores four out of twelve, who you point them towards instead, and how you leave the door open for later. Most teams never write that sentence, which is exactly why the first refusal never happens.
04
A living document, re-read every quarter.
Your profile describes the market as it was the last time you looked, and it goes stale in both directions: a segment you dismissed two years ago might be the one renewing now, and the segment that built the business might be consolidating into three buyers. Re-run it each quarter against what actually closed and what actually churned, and change the characteristics when the evidence changes rather than when a large logo makes you hopeful. Keep the old versions — watching your own profile drift is a decent record of what you've learned about who you're for.

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