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A FREE GUIDE

The ideal client profile

A working filter for founder-led sales teams. About an hour's work, with your own numbers in front of you. 

 Free · A 14-page PDF, sent to your inbox

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The list that never buys

There is one failure I have seen often enough to expect it. And it happens to teams who have done their work properly. They go back through their closed deals, find what their best customers have in common, and write a profile that runs to about a page. Then they build a list of companies matching it very closely. They work that list hard for a quarter yet they book very little new business.

The profile was accurate. Every company on it could have bought. However, none had any particular reason to buy that quarter, and nothing in the profile would have said which ones did.  

What is in it

  • The retrospective. Every closed deal from the last 18 to 24 months, won and lost, scored on margin, effort, retention and advocacy: 4 things you can look up rather than guess. Read the top 10 as a group and the patterns are rarely the ones anyone expected.

  • The 3 layers. Firmographics, roles, and the situation. The third predicts most and gets left out most, because a trigger has a shelf life of weeks and nobody enjoys writing a document that expires.

  • The filter. A small number of weighted criteria, each with a plain description of what a 5 looks like and what a 1 looks like, and a separate short list of disqualifiers that carry no weight because they are absolute.

  • The discipline of saying no, and what to do about the exceptions you will make anyway.

  • A one-page template to fill in.

Who is it for

Founders and revenue leaders in growth-stage B2B companies, where selling everything yourself has started to reach its limit. Revenue is still growing, however each deal costs more to win that the last, and 2 salespeople have been hired who do not produce what the founder produced.

It assumes you have a number of closed deals to review. If that data is messy or incomplete, the guide's position is to use it anyway. A profile built on 40 imperfect records beats one built on nobody's memory.