Client Profiling

Client profiling can be a useful tool for evaluating who your clients are now and who you’d like them to be into the future. The resulting gap is essentially your target client. So how do you spot them?


Who is the perfect client? To understand that, it helps to profile your current clients.

Why are they your customer?  What is their attitude towards what you have to offer; is there little awareness of what you can do for their business, or does your relationship afford them a strategic and competitive advantage?

For IT Service Providers, an interesting exercise is to try and determine their Operational Maturity Level with regards to technology. It helps to introduce your service offering in line with their needs and ideas about how technology supports their business.

Consider OML as a scale – at one end sit immature processes; minimal monitoring, constant fire-fighting, aging infrastructure and frequent user complaints about systems. At the other end, mature processes; efficient resource allocation, innovation and improvement programmes, Service Level Agreements and an optimised relationship between business needs and the IT that supports them.

Where are they located? Have you established a methodology for attracting clients in locations that would suit you best? Is it largely irrelevant or could geographical concentrations of clients greatly assist scheduling your service delivery?

Who is the key decision maker? Are the majority of your current clients’ decisions made by the Owner or Director? Does the appointed General Manager call the shots? Is a C-Suite presiding over signing your purchase orders or is it that the Financial Controller happens to be the one pulling purse strings? Which of these decision makers is the best at facilitating your relationship?

What industry are they in? Do you already play to an existing vertical that you are strong in; perhaps you’re not even aware that you do! What's the average seat size of your client base? 

Profiling the existing client base helps to uncover trends and could provide insights into how to position yourself; which trade shows and networking events should you be prospecting, where do other like-minded businesses hang out?  How many seats constitutes a good client for your business?

How profitable are these companies to your business? How easy is it to deal with them and extract money out of them at bill paying time? Are there any traits common across industry verticals or OML, or do you find profitability and behaviour patterns to be random?

Client profiling does a few of things. Firstly, such an analysis of your current client base forces you to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of the market you are selling to. 

It also involves taking some time out to look at each client in more detail and perhaps uncover insights you hadn’t noticed about them before.  It requires an examination of the existing information you have about these clients and such an examination can highlight flaws or holes in your current system. Is the information you are looking at accurate? How can you validate this?

Once you have a clear picture of your existing client base – your current state – you can start setting some goals around what you’d like the future state of your client base to look like. How do you envisage your client profile in 3 – 5 years, what are the gaps you need to fill to get there?