Customer Profiling
How does your Development department know which features will decide over the success of a new product?
How do Marketing and Sales know, where to promote and sell your offerings and with which arguments?
How does your Organization know, which improvements are important for your business?
There is one primary place to search for the answers to all these questions: Your (Target) Customers.
The Basis for every Strategy
Customer Profiling is the basis of a truly customer-oriented business that puts its customers in the focus of all its activities. It is a key step in the development of all strategies for your company and your offerings. Your marketing, sales, and product strategies shall be aligned to the needs of your target customers. Once you understand their needs, you can design products, focus the sales force, direct marketing communications, and align all other aspects of your organization to those customer requirements.
Quantitative Profiling
Vision Markets has developed a methodology to create quantitative profile characteristics of your target customer groups. Such characteristics can be compared to the also quantitatively characterized strengths and weaknesses of your company. Ultimately, when comparing the characteristics of each customer group with your own profile, you can rank your target customer group by the degree of concordance. This shows, which customer types you can serve best and where there is a gap to overcome.
Our Customer Profiling starts with a hypothesis about relevant target customer groups. In this article, you can find typical customer groups in Machine Vision, which we use by default. The hypothesis on their relevance can be derived from market analyses and your own sales figures depending on the time window in scope. Customers can be grouped by aspects like their business model, your position in their supply chain, region, industry, company size, turnover, etc..
The prioritization of the characterized customer groups for your business also needs to consider the results of a SWOT-analysis. Such SWOT analysis compiles the Strengths and Weaknesses of your company as well as the Opportunities and Threads deriving from your competition and the market environment. Furthermore, each customer type has its own addressable business potential, which also indicates its relevance.
Project Outline
1. Step: Preparation
Our quantitative customer profiling is most accurate when based on the following data to be compiled and analyzed for the preparation of step 2. Yet, the same methodology is applicable also with a reduced data set.
- Tabular overview of the turnover and profit contribution of
A-customers (i.e. customers which account for 80% of the turnover) and
B-customers (i.e. further customers which account for 90% of the turnover)
over the last 2 fiscal years plus the forecast for the current and next fiscal year. - Categorization of all A- and B-customers into
target customer groups and
economic regions - Optional: Customer voice surveys to get unbiased feedback about customers’ expectations and your capabilities to fulfill them.
Step 2: Workshop
The workshop (on-site or remote) is moderated by a Machine Vision market expert of the Vision Markets Network. He will guide the participants through our process of Customer Profiling. The ideal group of participants comprises key representatives from Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Technical Support, and Field Application Engineering. All should be able to contribute their first-hand experience with your customers.
This workshop delivers the following results:
- Clear definition and common understanding of your target customer groups
- Full transparency about customer requirements on your company
- Quantitative ranking of the customer requirements by relevance and per target customer group including visualization in radar charts.
- Quantitative rating of your company’s capabilities to fulfill each customer requirement
- Quantitative and chart-based gap-analysis of your capabilities and customer requirements for each target group
- Optional extension 1:
All quantitative rankings can be weighted by the current, forecasted, and strategically targeted turnover of each target customer group. This reveals which customer requirements are already met/not yet met to reach your business goals and which options you have. - Optional extension 2:
With corresponding preparation, we can also rate your competitors’ capabilities to meet your customers’ requirements. Thereby, you obtain full visibility on opportunities and threats in your market positioning.
Step 3: Documentation
Up to one week after the workshop, you will receive the full documentation of the results including the workbook with all data tables and charts. Beyond, we will provide you with our expert recommendations on how you can make yourself more attractive to your target customers and how you can differentiate from your competition.
Your Benefits from Working with Vision Markets
- Market Expertise – Each of our consultants comes with at least a decade of experience in the Machine Vision market. They contribute their first-hand experience in Sales, Marketing, and/or Product Management.
- Effectiveness – We contribute our market data and experience to your own expertise from your interactions with your customers. We jointly create most accurate analyses that lead to reliable conclusions and strategies.
- Efficiency – With dozens of workshops of this kind held by our consultants in Europe, North America, and China, we have all materials set up, we know which questions to ask, and how to structure the answers.
