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How to Create a Customer Profile — Key Methods, Examples, and Templates You Can Use

Contributing Author

14 min read

Nov 22, 2023

Finding the right product/market fit is the key to business success. It ensures your business idea isn’t based on an imaginary problem or need. One way to do it is by researching and building a detailed customer profile. Such a database will help you make the best decisions regarding your business strategy, marketing, and daily activities. 

In this article, I will talk about customer profile vs. buyer persona. I’ll explore how they differ and explain why it’s worth engaging in customer profiling. I’ll also show you how to create a customer profile and share a few customer profile templates that you’ll be able to use. 

Let’s start by defining customer profile.

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What is a customer profile? 

A customer profile is a document that describes your target customers’ main characteristics — their needs, pain points, interests, motivation, and shopping patterns. As customer profiles are often built through segmentation (such as a number of profiles created for various customer groups), they are also usually enriched with demographic data such as age range, gender, and location.

Customer profile vs. buyer persona — how do they differ? 

If you ever heard about buyer personas, it might seem confusing to tell the difference between them and customer profiling. After all, they both describe your target clients, right? So, before I describe how to create a customer profile, a few words on how these two vary.

If you ever seen an example of a persona that went something like “Hanna, 25 years old, recent Harvard graduate, originally from New York City, avid baseball fan,” then you know that we’re dealing with a fictional character. The idea here is to create a background that provides context and best aligns with your ideal customer. 

Meanwhile, customer profiles are only based on proven data (such as the information you can derive from your system and market research). They function as a concise yet comprehensive list of all that characterizes your key customer segments.

Another customer profile vs. buyer persona difference is that the former are mostly used at B2B companies as they are good for describing firmographics. Respectively, buyer personas are common at both B2B and B2C businesses since they focus on what drives individual buyers.

Buyer personas are often based on already existing customer profiles and function as a more granular look at your target clients.

When do you need customer profiling? 

There are a few telltale signs which might indicate that you need customer profiling. Let’s look at them now. 

You’re unsure of what drives your customers in their decision making

Are you able to answer the question: Why do customers buy from me? If you’re not, then it might be a sign that it’s worth building a customer profile. It will help you better understand what your customers' needs are and what challenges they face. Without having answers to these questions, you won’t know how to communicate the value of your product or service. 

Let’s imagine you offer a platform for outbound sales that combines prospecting with email outreach. You assumed that the prospecting feature is the most desirable to users. However, it turns out that the majority of your customers use your platform for email outreach, not prospecting. If you knew that, you could communicate the value of your product differently and attract more customers. 

You haven’t engaged in customer segmentation before

It’s hardly ever the case that a customer group is homogenous. Most of the time, multiple segments or even sub-segments display different characteristics. For example: 

• Customers have different job roles, like marketers vs. customer support specialists

• The size of their companies differ, like large vs. small companies 

• Their purchasing frequency varies, like some are loyal and shop frequently while others are occasional buyers.

Suppose you’re unaware of the different customer groups you sell to, as you’ve never engaged in customer segmentation. In that case, you have another good reason to give customer profiling a go! Building segments and sub-segments will provide you with a better opportunity to tailor your product or communication to the needs of a specific group. We all know that the “one size fits all” approach is long dead (sorry, Mr. Ford). 

Source: GaryFox.co

Your campaigns have low engagement rates 

Another sign that you might benefit from customer profiling? Seeing low engagement on your ads or organic campaigns. For instance, let’s assume you brought a new SaaS service to the market and put the work into promoting its Product Hunt launch. Your campaign might be getting a lot of views, but few people are actually clicking on the links that would take them to your site. Or, alternatively, you see a satisfactory number of click-throughs, but 90% of visitors bounce from your page.

There are plenty of potential reasons for this, spanning from simple things like a website error all the way through to (yes, you guessed it) a lack of customer-product alignment.
Creating your ideal customer profile will help you rest assured that you’re targeting the right people with the absolute best message.

Your customer acquisition costs exceed your customers’ lifetime value

You should engage in customer profiling if your customer lifetime value (CLV) is lower than 3x of what you invested in customer acquisition. So, to deem your efforts worthy, if you spent $2,000 on Facebook ads, the clients you gained from them should leave at least $6,000 at your business. 

By building a customer profile, you might discover how to better tailor your acquisition campaigns and understand the key motivators for growing client loyalty.

Now that I’ve mentioned the potential use cases, let’s look at what building a customer profile brings to the table.

Key benefits of creating an ideal customer profile 

Let’s start with the single-best advantage: 

Knowing exactly who you are to selling to

When you initially build a product, it’s so unbelievably tempting to sell it to as many customers as possible, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not realistic, unless you’re selling a first-need product that most of us can’t do without, like soap. And even in this case, there are so many different product types that it’s still hard to create one that would appeal to everyone. But let me tell you this: It’s OK. Not everyone is supposed to become your customer. Building an ideal customer profile will help you target the right customers. And this is what businesses should strive for. 

Increasing the number of sales-qualified leads

An average salesperson spends only 32.5% of their time selling. Your sales team’s time is precious, and you don’t want them to waste it on leads that aren’t the right fit, do you? Creating an ideal customer profile will help you in lead qualification. You will only pass to sales those leads that meet the right criteria. 

Source: LinkedIn

Knowing which sales channels to use to attract the best leads

Not all sales channels are created equal – some will represent a higher customer acquisition cost, others lower. The key is to focus on the channels that don’t cost you a fortune and have a high customer lifetime value. There is no point in spending tons of money on LinkedIn, for instance, if most of the customers leave after two months, is there? Building an ideal customer profile will help you identify the best-performing channels.

Creating better product roadmaps

When you engage in customer profiling, you collect a lot of information on your clients’ needs and opinions. This can help you with your product roadmap, which functions as a single source of truth on your product vision, priorities, and short- and long-term goals. How so? Let me give you an example.

Let’s assume you’re gathering insights from customers and seeing one repetitive suggestion — “You should make ordering easier by adding other payment methods.” Including such an idea into your roadmap could mean integrating with new third-party providers or introducing a feature such as “pay in-store.” The result? The challenges listed in your customer profile would be addressed, and you might see better customer retention or return purchase rates! 

Building customer loyalty

Finally, if everyone at your company has access to (and understands) your ideal customer profile, they can build long-lasting customer relationships. Your Customer Success team will have a point of reference when brainstorming customer experience improvements, your Customer Support will understand and resolve issues quicker, and the list of benefits could go on and on!

Now, you’ve reached the best part of this piece:  

How to build a customer profile — 4 key elements explained

Below, I am sharing all the actions you need to take in your customer profiling journey.

1. Identify the problem your business is aiming to tackle

The very first step you should take before drafting up your client profile is understanding what it is that you’re bringing into customers’ lives. For this purpose, I recommend conducting a brainstorming session with representatives of all your teams — Customer Success, Product, Marketing, Operations, and Sales. Ask yourselves: 

• What problem is our business aiming to address?

• How are we different from other solutions on the market?

• How are we planning to get there?

1. Gather internal insights 

Ready for some good news? If you been in business for a while, chances are you have a lot of customer data (which might hold invaluable insights). To get the most out of it, I recommend the following:

• Engage in customer segmentation. As mentioned previously, it’s the process of dividing your customers into groups who share common characteristics, such as demographics (in B2C), firmographics (in B2B), behavioral patterns, and (perhaps, most importantly) revenue. If you create a segment for clients who spend the most at your business, also known as High-Value Customers, you can build a dedicated customer profile for them. As a result, you’ll know better how to make the most of their buying potential instead of spending time on segments with high churn and low upsell/cross-sell rates. 

• Talk to your customers. Perhaps obvious, but crazy effective! It’s the single best way to supplement and update the data you already have in your system. I recommend contacting a customer segment via live chat software, sending a survey, or calling a few customers and asking questions. 

• Run your customer insights by client-facing teams. Your Customer Success and Customer Support team members will be able to shed more light on the opinions.

1. Gather external insights 

Another step in the customer profiling process is searching for some external insights. This includes: 

• Conducting market and competition research. Start by identifying your competition. To defeat them, you need to know who you are fighting against. You might realize that there are hundreds of companies that you compete with. In this case, try to focus on those withofferings closely resembling yours. Spot differences and similarities. While conducting market research, it’s also worth checking how people perceive your brand and your competition. The best way to do it quickly is by using social listening tools. 

To get a general overview of the market you’re operating in and to be up to date with the newest trends, it’s worth regularly checking industry reports. One of the sources you can look into is Statista. 

• Look at reviews for both your tool and competing solutions. Dive into customer reviews. If you sell a SaaS solution you can use Capterra, G2Crowd, or Serchen to verify what users say about you and the competing solutions. It’s a great source of knowledge as not only do the users mention what they like about each product, but they also talk about their dislikes. This provides great insights for improvement! Alternatively, you can see what people say about you and other brands on social media. While negative comments might be hurtful, they also come in handy in making your product better. 

Source: Capterra

1. Create your customer profile

Finally, after gathering internal and external insights, you can organize them into a template. Creating a visual will help you easily share it with other team members and make adjustments if necessary. We will include a few customer profile templates in the next section. 

1. Continuously refine your customer profile

The last step to building your ideal customer profile is ensuring it stays up to date. It will require continuous revisions, as the number of customer insights will increase over time. Or, at least, this is what you should aim for. 

Also, your assumptions might change. For instance, at first, you might think marketers are your main users, and then after adding new features, the number of customer support specialists end up overtaking marketers. Such shifts should be noted in your customer profile. 

Customer profile — what your template should include

Most commonly, customer profile templates include the following data:

• Age, as it tells you which tone of voice to use, where your clients hang out the most, etc.

• Location, to know what time zones and language to create your marketing collateral in.

• Job title, which lets you understand the pain points, needs, and decision making power of your clients.

• Income or funding, which helps you to decide on pricing (and, in the case of subscription-based businesses, understand how likely they are to stay with you long-term).

• Goals and challenges, which will help convince buyers that your product is the right solution for their needs.

Two customer profile examples to draw inspiration from

In this section, I’d like to share and discuss two customer profile templates you can use. You might have seen them online as they’re one of the few examples that genuinely represent customer profiles and not buyer personas. As mentioned earlier, the latter is often mixed up with client profiles (Google “customer profile,” go to Images, and see for yourself).

What I’m going to do with the examples below is provide you with some commentary and ideas on how you can adjust them to your business goals. 

All right, let’s get to it!

#1 The Five Abilities

This customer profile example lets you create the client profile based on five criteria: need, time, success, budget, and winners. You rank customers on the basis of their fit. You give them zero points if there is no alignment (for example, if your product needs time to deploy and they don’t have it), one point for a “workable fit,” and two points for an ideal match between your services and the ideal customer.

Source: The Five Abilities 

Naturally, these are just five criteria chosen by the author to illustrate their example. Some other abilities you could use in a template like this include location, age, beliefs, or social media channels.  

• To give you a more relatable customer profile example, let’s imagine you are running an online fashion store for women. You offer dresses from independent designers only. Here are some criteria you can use in your abilities-based customer profile:
  Need: Does your target client truly need a dress? Is it a nice-to-have item or an occasion wear?

• Time: When do they need to receive it?

• Location: Are they based in an area you deliver to?

• Beliefs: Are they willing to pay more for unique clothing?
  Social media channels: Do they hang out on social media channels where you can share videos/images of your products?

Ultimately, the criteria you select are entirely up to your business!

#2 Fit Small Business

Remember how I mentioned customer segmentation earlier in this piece? The customer profile template below is a perfect example! 

As you can see, the company has created three segments (Morning Commuters, Seasonal Celebrators, and One-time Wedding organizers). They vary on factors like communication channels, age, and priorities. 

Source: Fit Small Business

Let’s imagine you are running a hair salon. If you were to put them into a table like the one above, it could look like this:

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Customer profiling as a key to business growth 

After reading this piece, I’m sure you’ll agree that customer profiling is invaluable for businesses. Looking at your clients through a magnifying glass and creating an ideal customer profile brings many benefits, such as:

• Understanding who you’re selling to.

• Knowing which acquisition channels bring the highest number of sales-qualified leads.

• Boosting customer loyalty.

• Aligning your product roadmap with customer and market needs.

As explained in detail above, there are a few steps to building an ideal customer profile: identifying what problems you solve, conducting external and internal research, creating a customer profile, and updating it continuously.

Ready to put your learnings into action? Good luck with your customer profiling endeavors, and let us know how it goes 😎!

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