In every industry, the folks who know more about their targets tend to win. Sales is no different – those salespeople that are great at learning about their prospects and their companies are able to craft better solutions.
In the military, the process of building a target package or intelligence profile is often the difference between mission success and failure. Before committing troops to a mission, their leadership research targets, areas of operations, friendly forces, and what opposition the group is likely to encounter. This ensure that troops can avoid challenges and leverage resources that they may have passed over.
To learn how the best in the military transfer this process to sales teams, we sat down with Ben Shimol, a cybersecurity leader with Cider Security and former research and development team leader with the Israel Defense Forces. He explained how to profile our top prospets before meeting with them to ensure we’re showing up prepared.
Since we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it, and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: Ben says that profiling top prospects starts with aligning prospects with your ICP – your ideal customer profile. Ensure your top prospects align with those job titles, geographies and company types align with these elements before you invest the time in profiling these top prospects.
This ensures that you’re prioritizing your time on your profile builds and not wasting time.
R – Repeatable: To build a good profile package on your top prospects in a repeatable way, Ben says to start with exploring if that prospect and/or their company has had any previous contact with a salesperson in your company. That will be an easy conversation starter.
If there is no previous history, then pulling information from LinkedIn and other social media platforms can work to fill in details about this prospect’s preferences, work history, and goals. Specifically, knowing how much time the prospect has been with their company, whether they are technical or leadership-focused, and what type of equipment, software, or services they’re currently using that may align or compete with the one you’re selling.
This list of items should be built with the input of your leadership, team and delivery department into a prospect profile checklist that you can enter into your CRM or keep a record of so that you have a repeatable list of intelligence items to gather prior to conducting outreach.
I – Improvable: To improve your prospect profiling system, Ben says to keep track of those prospects you’ve taken the time to build deeper profiles on and haven’t made much progress with. Why aren’t they taking your calls? Why are those deals stalling? This may indicate a misalignment with your marketing message or with who you’re pursuing as an ideal prospect.
Ben says we can also improve by looking at the prospects we’re profiling who move rapidly through our sales process. Debrief the sales rep to discover what was unique about that prospect that set them apart from other prospects. That may create a change to your ideal client profile that will benefit every member of your sales team.
M – Measurable: Measuring a prospect profiling system starts at the beginning of the sales process, not at the end. Instead of waiting to see if your system creates more sales, Ben advises we measure if salespeople are gathering intelligence on prospects and leveraging it. If they’re only filling out three or four items in a list that’s a dozen items long and not getting results, that may be a problem with systems adherence than the system itself.
We can also measure and prioritize which intelligence items are more critical to moving a sale forward. Job titles, for instance, may have more weight on a prospect’s ability to make a buying decision than what tech stack they may currently have, for instance.
Intelligence profiles are critical to mission success on the battlefield and if used correctly, will make a massive difference on the battlefield of business as well.