Step 2 of 6 · IMPACT Prospect
How to find your most profitable customer.
Most companies that sell to other businesses have sat through some version of this meeting. Marketing brings a report showing more leads than last quarter, and the head of sales says most of them weren't worth a call: companies too small to afford you, people with no say over the purchase, someone collecting quotes for a job that was always going to the lowest bidder. Both sides are telling the truth, and the meeting ends with a promise to tighten up the targeting. What rarely comes up is that your best salesperson can tell within a few minutes of a first call whether a lead is worth chasing, and that judgment has never been written down anywhere marketing could use it.
This step is about writing it down and checking it against the numbers. Your most profitable customer is the buyer who wants your IMPACT Offering most, pays the best margin for it, is easy to reach, is underserved by your competitors and stays with you the longest. In ProfitPaths® we call that buyer your IMPACT Prospect, and we find it the same way the IMPACT Offering page found the offering, by scoring each type of buyer on the six IMPACT lenses. This page shows you how to do that with your own customer data, and how to describe the result so clearly that marketing and sales end up aiming at the same company.
IMPACT Prospect comes second because a buyer only makes sense in relation to what you're selling them, and every step after it (the magnets, the pages, the channels and the budget) depends on knowing who you're trying to reach.
Three kinds of buyer for the same offering
The same agreement can be worth fourteen times more to one buyer than another.
On the IMPACT Offering page, a commercial HVAC contractor found that maintenance agreements were the offering to build its marketing around, but its marketing was still aimed, in effect, at anyone with a commercial building. When it groups its maintenance customers by who signed, three kinds of buyer show up. The $12,000 agreement from the IMPACT Offering page is the price for one building, so a buyer with several buildings is a much bigger customer than that figure suggests. Step through the three views to watch the gap open up.
Illustrative example These are the HVAC contractor's three kinds of maintenance customer, so replace them with your own buyer types.
Showing revenue a year. Judged by the size of the contract, the public bids look like the second-best buyer.
revenue per customer, per year
Judged by the size of the contract, the public bids look like the second-best buyer.
A school district’s contract is bigger than what an owner-occupied business pays, and a property management firm brings in about three times the smallest, which is roughly where most companies stop looking.
The numbers behind the bars
Revenue a year, times gross margin, times years as a customer, minus what it costs to win one. Follow-on work (like the installations that maintenance customers buy later) isn't counted here, so the real gap can be wider. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere.
Schools and public buildings look attractive from the outside, because the contracts are a decent size, the buyers are easy to find and the bids are published for anyone to answer. But public bids are designed to drive the price down, and the contract goes back out to bid every few years, so the contractor wins the work at a thin margin and then has to win it all over again. Property management firms cost the most to win, and they pay a better margin because they want one contractor they can trust across every building, which is why the contractor's marketing should be aimed at them.
Before you score anything
Start with the customers you already have, ranked by lifetime profit.
The fastest way into this is to rank your existing customers by the gross profit they've earned you over the whole relationship, rather than by revenue, and study the top of the list. Most companies find a pattern in their best customers that nobody had written down, because the sales team had been recognizing it by instinct for years.
This is also the answer when your best customers came through referrals and nobody can say what they have in common. The people who referred them have already done the matching you're trying to describe, so it's worth asking a few of them why they thought of you.
An afternoon with your CRM and your best salespeople
- Rank your customers by lifetime gross profit, after what it cost to win them wherever you know it.
- For the customers at the top, note the kind of company, who signed and what they bought first, and what was happening in their business when they first called.
- Note how each one found you, and if most came through referrals, ask the referrers why they thought of you.
- Ask your best salespeople what they notice in a first call with buyers like these, and what makes them lose interest in a lead.
- Group what you find into buyer types your sales team already uses, such as industry, company size, job title or ownership type, so the scoring compares groups and not individual accounts.
The IMPACT test, run on your buyers
Score each type of buyer on the same six lenses you used for your offering.
Score from one (weak) to five (strong), comparing your buyer types against each other. Here's what each lens asks about a buyer, what answers it, and where that information usually lives in a company.
Score your own buyer types
Click the dots to score each lens, and the total points to the buyer your marketing should aim at.
Use real figures wherever you have them, and your best estimate where you don't. If a buyer type fails a hard limit (they're outside the area you can serve, you can't meet their buying process, or a regulation or contract stops you selling to them), tick the box and it's left out.
Example These are the contractor's scores for its three kinds of maintenance customer, so replace them with your own buyer types.
Your likely IMPACT Prospect
Property management firms 25 of 30
This is the buyer to aim your marketing at, until you're winning them predictably and the next buyer type deserves attention.
Nothing you enter here is saved or sent anywhere.
When customers buy once and never return, look at who they are before you try to keep them.
The usual response to poor repeat business is a retention program, such as a loyalty discount, a check-in email sequence or a customer success hire. Those help when good customers are drifting away, but when a large share of your customers buy once and disappear, the cause is often upstream, because your marketing is attracting buyers who only ever had a one-time need or who shop on price every time they buy. Sort your one-time buyers by type first. If they cluster in one or two buyer types, that belongs in your Tenure scores and your targeting, and a retention campaign aimed at those buyers will mostly be spent on people who were never going to stay.
Describe the buyer
Write the description so sales would recognize the buyer in the first five minutes of a call.
"Mid-sized companies that value quality" fails that test, because every company believes it values quality. A useful description names four things: the kind of company, the person you talk to, the situation that makes them ready to buy, and the signs that they're a poor fit.
Example The contractor's IMPACT Prospect, written so sales can use it
- The company
- Firms managing two or more commercial buildings within our service area
- The person you talk to
- Property managers and facilities directors
- What makes them ready
- HVAC equipment more than ten years old, and no single service contract covering all their properties
- Poor fit
- Tenants who don't control the building's systems, and any buyer who requires a public bid
What the industry calls an ideal customer profile usually stops at the first half of a description like that. The IMPACT version adds margin and tenure, and it names who you don't want, which matters more than it looks.
Copy, pricing signals and targeting that turn away poor-fit buyers will lower your lead count and raise the quality of what's left. In our own advertising, putting the starting price in the ad cut clicks from buyers who could never afford it, which saved money and improved the leads that came through. The contractor's public-bid customers were the easiest to find and the least profitable, which is why its written description names any buyer who requires a public bid as a poor fit.
When sales says the leads are junk
Settle the argument with a written definition, because the two teams are aiming at different targets.
This argument usually starts two steps above where people look for it, because marketing is measured on how many leads it produces, sales is measured on closed deals, and nobody has written down who a good lead is, so each side is judging the same leads against a different picture in their heads.
New ad copy or a longer form won't settle it, because the disagreement is about the target, and we often see the same thing in client accounts where lead volume looked healthy until someone checked which segments the leads came from. In our experience both sides usually turn out to be partly right, because some leads were genuinely poor fits and some good fits went cold because they didn't look like the deals the team was used to closing.
One working session, with both teams and last quarter's leads
- Agree on the written description of your IMPACT Prospect, including the poor-fit signs.
- Go through a sample of last quarter's leads together, and mark each one as a fit, a poor fit or unclear.
- Trace the poor fits back to the campaign, keyword, list or referral source that produced them.
- Agree on how leads will be judged from now on, with marketing measured on fit leads and sales marking every new lead the same way in the CRM. Once fit is marked, it can also become what your ad platforms optimize for, which the Channel Selection step covers.
Is your marketing aimed at that buyer?
Look at your marketing the way your best buyer would see it.
Once you've named your IMPACT Prospect, open your home page, your most recent ads and your case studies, and ask whether a property manager with five buildings (or whoever your buyer is) would see themselves there.
Then look at where the budget goes by buyer type, because a company can agree on the right buyer in a meeting and keep paying to reach everyone else for months afterwards. If most of your spend reaches people who look like your other buyer types, that gap is what the Prospect Magnets and Channel Selection steps close.
- Your home page: would that buyer recognize their situation in the first screen?
- Your ads: are they targeted at that buyer's job titles, searches or industry?
- Your case studies: do they feature customers who look like that buyer?
- Your budget: how much of it reaches that buyer, and how much reaches everyone else?
What doesn't work
Five ways companies aim at the wrong buyer.
- 1Aiming at everyone who could buy.
"Anyone with a commercial building" describes a whole market, so the copy can’t speak to a property manager’s budget problem or a facilities director’s downtime.
- 2Choosing by deal size alone.
Big contracts with thin margins and short tenure, like the contractor's public bids, can look like the best buyers and turn out to be the worst.
- 3Copying a competitor's customer list.
If every competitor is chasing the same buyers, the Competition lens is telling you to look somewhere else.
- 4Writing personas nobody uses.
A slide with a stock photo and an invented name won't help sales qualify a lead, while a short description with clear signs of fit and poor fit will.
- 5Judging buyers by lead volume.
The segment that sends the most leads is often the one that's cheapest to reach, which can be a long way from the one that's most profitable to serve.
At every size
The method is the same at any size, but where the buyer knowledge lives changes.
If you run a smaller business
You probably know your best customers by name. Write down the five you'd most like to clone and what they have in common, and you'll have most of your IMPACT Prospect in an afternoon. Then aim every dollar of a limited budget at people who look like them, and resist taking on work from buyers who don't, even when a quiet month makes it tempting.
If you lead marketing at a larger company
The knowledge is spread out, because finance has profit by account, the CRM has deal history, and your best salespeople carry patterns in their heads that they've never written down. Get all three into one conversation, rank accounts by lifetime gross profit, and agree on a written description before anyone changes a campaign. That shared description is also what ends the "the leads are junk" argument, because marketing and sales are finally measuring against the same definition.
Questions we hear about this step
- How Do You Calculate the Profitability of a Customer?To calculate the profitability of a customer, multiply their average yearly revenue by your gross margin and the years they stay, then subtract what it cost to win them, and run it for each type of customer to see which buyers are worth the most.Read the answer →
- How Do You Generate High-Quality Leads?You generate high-quality leads by deciding in writing which buyer is worth the most to you, aiming every channel, offer and page at that buyer, and filtering out poor fits on purpose, even if lead volume drops.Read the answer →
- How Do You Segment B2B Customers?To segment B2B customers, group your existing customers by traits sales already recognizes, such as industry, size and buying process, then rank each group by lifetime gross profit after the cost to win, and aim marketing at the top one.Read the answer →
- Are LinkedIn Ads Worth It?LinkedIn Ads are worth it when they reach high-value buyers you can’t reach well through search, at a cost per customer below what each customer is worth, so judge them on cost and value per customer, not cost per click or per lead.Read the answer →
More on finding your most profitable customers
Guides that go deeper on defining, finding and keeping your most profitable buyers.
They're in progress and will be linked here as they're published.
B2B Lead Generation: More of the Right Leads
For when you know who you want and need a steadier flow of them.
- Ideal Customer Profile: how to build one that sales uses, and how it relates to your IMPACT Prospect. coming soon
- Buyer Personas: when personas help, and when a short fit description does the job better. coming soon
- Unit Economics: working out what each customer is worth after the cost of winning and serving them. coming soon
- LTV to CAC Ratio: comparing a customer's lifetime value with what it cost to win them. coming soon
- Customer Retention Strategies: keeping the buyers who score highest on Tenure. coming soon
- Net Revenue Retention: measuring whether existing customers grow or shrink over time. coming soon
- Account-Based Marketing: marketing to a named list of high-value accounts instead of a broad audience. coming soon
- ABM Strategy and Tactics: how to run account-based marketing in practice. coming soon
- Intent Data: spotting which accounts are researching a purchase right now. coming soon
- How to Improve Lead Quality: fixing the "leads are junk" problem at its source. coming soon
- Customer Marketing and Advocacy: turning your best customers into referrals. coming soon