How customer profiling can boost sales

dubai - Make sure to grow the segments you want to grow and adapt your buying strategies accordingly

Bring me customers! It's something I hear a lot. With a world population of over seven billion, the first thing I need to know is who exactly do you want to attract to your business. No one, even the top strategic sales consultants, can make anyone do anything they don't want to do. This makes the business challenge one of attraction, not persuasion.
When you attract something or someone, they come to you with passion. They want you or whatever you are offering. They will create their own rational arguments for why your goods and services are the right fit for them. You don't need to do the hard sell or bombard them with communication.

Zara is one of the most successful global brands. Zara does not advertise, it focuses on getting the products that the customer wants, in store at the time that they want it, and at the price they are willing to pay. Zara doesn't convince its customers to buy, its customers want its fashion. What Zara does is customer profiling.

Zara knows who its customer is so well that it can predict accurately, exactly what they will want before that customer knows they want it. This precision has escalated the fast fashion brand to 51st position on the Forbes list of the World's Most Valuable Brands, as of May 2017.

Knowing your customer better than they know themselves is a strategy that will make your business leaner, cleaner and a lot more profitable. How you do this is through customer profiling.

Customer profiling is the way you analyse the customers you already have. It's important to do this, whatever the size of your business. If you don't know who buys from you, where do you go to connect to more customers?

When it comes to creating profiles of your customers, it's important to look past the most obvious segmentation like age, nationality and gender. Take a deeper look into the thought processes and emotions. Zara has pinpointed a customer who values catwalk trends and is willing to pay a certain price to be wearing it first. They outperform their competition by getting fashion into store at the fastest speed in the market.

Take a look at why your customers buy from you and drill down to the reasons why they are attracted to you. These reasons are emotional, not rational. Price is rational. The conscious mind uses logic to make sense of why they made the emotional decision. Use polls and surveys to do this exercise. Ask customers outright on what made them choose you and keep the conversation going until you get to your emotional answers. Quality is more important than quantity with this. You'll soon discover some repetition with the responses. Once you have these, you can start creating your segments, building in what else you know about the customer according to their preferences and lifestyle.

You will be able to group most customers down to three or four personalities. These are sometimes referred to as personas. The biggest group in your profile mix are those who are most attracted to you. These personas represent where you are getting it right.

Here is how you get your business leaner. Everything you offer and how you offer it need to appeal to your customer profiles. Apply the profile mix across everything that's customer-facing. Build it into your product mix, service offering and communication. Cut out everything else that you are currently doing and only focus on getting more of those customers that love what you do.

Be prepared to lose the clients that are not loyal. This is a tough concept to accept. Yes, get ready to say goodbye to those that don't love you. You are swapping them out for the more valuable customers that do. Continue to track through profiling to make sure you are growing the segments you want to grow and adapt your buying strategies accordingly. This process needs to be constant and thorough.

Over time, you will be able to grow your ability to attract the kind of customers you want. Concentrating on doing what you do best and only focusing on getting more customers that appreciate you will reduce wasted effort across the business. You will see big improvements across all your commercial metrics.

The writer is an ICF UAE chapter board executive and founder of Your Neuro Coach. Views expressed are her own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.