Use B2B Data to Build Customer Avatars

Customer avatars are an important tool for sales and marketing professionals. They help you, and your team get into the heads of your customers and focus your sales efforts on things that will appeal to the clients most likely to buy your product.

There are many sources of information you can use to build a customer avatar. The more information you have, the more accurate your avatar will be. Some resources you can use include surveying existing customers, website analytics, and speaking to people in your target market.

B2B data is a crucial factor you should take into account when building a customer avatar. This is because it shows information that you might not get when using the above options, therefore, ensuring your avatar is as accurate as possible.

What is a Customer Avatar and Why Should I Build One?

A customer avatar is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is a representation of a company that — should you find and target them — would see value in your product and be likely to buy it. Having an accurate customer avatar can increase your sales team’s productivity.

The b2b prospecting tool provided by Red Flag Alert  can help you build an accurate customer avatar. The detailed business data can help to break down customers into highly segmented groups and focus on those that have a deep need for your product.

Once you have built your avatar, you can focus your sales efforts on other businesses that share the same characteristics.

If your company has several products, it is important to build a customer avatar for each one. While one of your products may be a hit with highly profitable finance companies with 200 plus employees, another may be popular with small tech start-ups looking to scale: Red Flag Alert helps you identify all types of business.

What Should Go into a Good B2B Customer Avatar?

There are many factors that feed into an effective B2B avatar.

Company Profile

A good start is to look at features like the size of the company, its location, and the industry it is in. Financial data can also be highly insightful when building an avatar.

For example, what is their turnover? Do they have a large number of fixed assets? How much debt do they have? This is the type of information data can tell you. It can help you get a more accurate idea of the type of company that uses your product. Here are a few examples of how financial data can be helpful:

• If you are a company that leases IT equipment it may make sense to target growing businesses because it’s likely they’ll need more IT equipment.
• If you are an invoice discounting company, businesses with high fixed assets and poor liquidity may be viable targets.
• If you sell warehousing space, you could target retailers that hold a large amount of stock.

The options are limitless: great financial data like the type provided by Red Flag Alert can help determine what services businesses need, which is useful information when building a detailed avatar.

Challenges and Pain Points

Looking at the key challenges a business faces is critical when building an avatar. Determining if your business solves their key pain is an indicator that you should target them.

If your solution isn’t an important pain point for them, then it may make the sales process further down the road more difficult. 

Who Makes the Buying Decision?

It is also important to identify who is making the decision to buy your product.

These key decision makers may be individuals, committees, or they may be different people within the organisation.

It’s important to understand where the power lies and have a plan for accessing these key people. Often people that are the easiest to target don’t have the decision making power you need. Whoever you’re targeting, Red Flag Alert’s data of 20 million key decision makers in British business will help your outreach.

Don’t Forget to Build Negative Avatars

Data can also help create negative avatars that show the types of customer you want to avoid targeting.

If your ideal customers have a turnover of over £1 million, you can use a negative avatar to ensure you don’t focus your efforts on companies with a lower turnover.

Alternatively, you may notice that some of the customers that have problems paying you also have a certain amount of debt. If this is the case and you decide you don’t want to deal with this type of company, you can build it into your negative avatar.

An Accurate Customer Avatar Requires Data

Building a customer avatar is a good way to keep your sales strategy focused on the customers that are most likely to need your services. This can help your sales process become more efficient as you focus on high-quality leads.

The more detail you have in your customer avatar, the more useful it is. Red Flag Alert can provide the details that you are unlikely to find using other methods. Click here to start a free trial today.