Profiling your Apple customers

In our previous Apple blog post we talked about what selling an Apple solution meant, and we encouraged you to get involved in the conversation with any specific challenges that you face when selling an Apple solution, we said that before you sell anything to your customer there were a few things that had to happen.

One of those things is how to profile your customer.

This week let’s take a look at why it’s important to profile your customer and what that means to you as well as them.

Profiling your customer has huge advantages…

… but the main one is that if you know your customer profile you can ask your customer the right questions, which will help you provide the right solution.

Before we look at the solution side of things here are a few reasons why we believe it’s important to profile your customers. You will…

– have a stronger relationship with your customers
– have more trust between you and your customer
– find it easier to uncover opportunities
– know more about what your customer wants and needs – increase your reputation

– sell more.

So those are the benefits. Here is an example of some of the questions that you can ask your customers. All of which will lead you to the right solution.

Current technical situation

• What are you currently using?
• Who is currently using it?
• What’s working for you now?

History (Organisational background)

• What industry are you in?
• What is the size of your organisation?
• What is it you do?
• Who is your customer?

Aims

• What are you trying to achieve with this purchase? • What does success look like?
• What is the vision of this technology?

Issues

• What problem is this purchase trying to fix?
• What isn’t working for you at the moment?
• What will get in the way of this being a success?

Needs of the business
• What overarching business need does this address?

Share how it felt and what the results were like with this community…

• Is this purchase intended to reduce waste, reduce cost, increase efficiency, etc..?
• Who is ultimately the decision maker?

Asking more questions is going to give you a whole load of information that you’ve never had before about that customer.
This maybe something that you are already doing, if not then we strongly encourage you to give it a go. If you do be sure to share how it felt and what the results were like with this community.

Asking more questions is going to give you a whole load of information that you’ve never had before about that customer. How to break that down and link it to a solution is something we are going to cover in our next blog.

Until then happy profiling.