10 Easy Steps to Creating a Customer Profile

Creating a customer profile is a fundamental step in understanding your target audience and fostering a strong relationship with them. By following some simple steps, you can craft a comprehensive and valuable customer persona that might become an invaluable tool for your business.

Start by collecting relevant data such as demographics, buying behaviors, and preferences through surveys, interviews, or analytics tools. Consequently, analyze this information to identify patterns and trends, which can help refine your marketing strategies and tailor your product offerings. Once you have a clear picture of your customer’s characteristics, segment the data into distinct categories.

Now, combine these segments and draw a cohesive customer persona that reflects their motivations, habits, and aspirations. Maintain this customer-centric approach when evaluating your services and offerings, ensuring your business remains aligned with your audience’s expectations and needs. Remember, refining your customer profile is an ongoing process that reaps long-term benefits and paves the way to building meaningful connections with your customers.

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If you don’t create customer profiles, you risk marketing to a nondescript audience, which can lead to wasted time and closed-lost deals.

Defining your ideal customers will help you identify the attributes and purchasing behaviors of the customers whose business you’ve already won.

Not sure what it can actually look like? Let’s take a look at a sample below.

Customer Profile Sample

Download the Free Customer Profile Templates

You can create a customer profile just like this one using our free customer profile templates.

That way, you don’t have to create them from scratch — simply fill in the blanks and use the data from your service software or surveys to create a complete consumer profile.

Finding the Ideal Customer Profile For Your Business

The best part about customer profiles is that you create them from the pool of customers that you already have.

Rather than coming up with ideal and imaginary attributes like you would for a buyer persona, you would survey your current customers and find out the types of consumers who are more likely to buy from you.

While a buyer persona provides a fictionalized individual who acts as a representation of your customers, a customer profile is rooted in the data and factual information of your customer base.

Everything you need to know about a group of customers is captured within this one description. For this reason, a customer profile comes first, and then you build a buyer persona from it.

Once you’ve defined these qualities of your target audience, you can segment your customer base into different customer profiles.

Why is customer profiling important?

When building a business, developing a go-to-market strategy, or giving your sales team direction, it’s important to have a clear description of your current customers in place.

That way, you know who’s more likely to buy your product in the future based on who has bought it in the past.

It also helps you identify the one buyer who’ll actually purchase a product from you, which is more valuable than targeting everyone everywhere.

Trying to build something that solves 100% of the problems for 100% of the market is referred to as “boiling the ocean.” You’re “boiling the ocean” when your customer profile is too broad.

The irony is that by targeting a broad audience, you end up solving only a few problems for only a few people. You’ll end up spreading your product offering too thin and diluting your value across a large number of customers.

Customer Profiling Benefits

Creating customer profiles is critical if you want to grow your business.

Its benefits are impactful across your entire company, starting from your sales team down to your service organization.

Customer profiling helps you do the following:

It allows you to identify better-fit prospects.

By knowing whom benefits from your products the most, your organization can find better prospects and increase close rates.

If you’re part of the service team, this might not mean much to you, but remember: a better-fit prospect is a happier customer down the line.

A customer who doesn’t really benefit from your product is more likely to submit an unhappy ticket to your service desk.

It lowers customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the amount of money you spend on marketing and sales campaigns to attract a single customer.

By knowing your customer, you can better target your campaigns and increase click-through-rates and form submissions.

To summarize: The more specific your customer, the less you’ll spend and the more successful your campaign will be.

It empowers you to serve customers better.

Knowing your customers is key to serving them better.

By documenting their pain points, attributes, and characteristics, you can deliver a superior customer service experience before they ever request help.

You can predict issues before they arise, provide effective self-help resources, and better align with their needs if they reach out to your service team.

It reduces customer churn.

Customer churn happens when you lose customers over a predefined period of time.

By creating strong customer profiles from the start, you can attract and serve customers who actually want to use your product or service — reducing customer churn in both the short and the long term.

Now that you know the benefits of customer profiling, which data should you gather for your customer profiles?

Let’s take a look.

Customer Profile Data

A refined customer profile can help your company build more impactful features.

It can also help you find and attract more people that are likely to buy your product, develop a stronger relationship with your customers, and put you on a better trajectory for market dominance.

For these reasons, it’s a good idea to include different types of data in your customer profiles.

Here’s the data you should gather for your profiling process.

Demographic

Demographics are the concrete characteristics of a customer and can be used to understand consumer behavior, albeit broadly.

Demographics include the following traits (and more):

• Age
• Sex
• Job Title
• Income
• Education Level
• Family Status

If you’re in the B2B space, you may also consider attributes such as company size, industry, and other attributes for the organization.

Psychographic

Demographics alone aren’t enough to understand how, when, and why people make purchasing decisions, and that’s where psychographics come in.

These factors relate to the attitudes and psychological make-up of a customer and may include:

• Lifestyle
• Goals
• Pains
• Habits
• Values
• Interests

Psychographics are helpful to understand the buying journey and even the customer journey after they’ve already made a purchase from you.

Whether it’s for understanding the triggering events that lead them to purchase or crafting value-based messaging to attract prospects, psychographics are extremely useful things to consider.

Behavioral

While psychographics relate to psychological attributes, behavioral segments take a look at how that’s manifested into action.

You may consider segmenting by:

• Engagement
• Readiness to Buy
• Purchasing History
• Product Usage
• Satisfaction
• Loyalty or Account Age
• Attention Required

Segments based on behavioral traits are some of the most valuable in customer support. It can help service teams find insights relating to customer interaction and how these trends manifest into recurring revenue and satisfaction rate.

And once those things are measured, they can be improved.

Geographic

Geographical factors are relevant when location can affect how customers interact with a brand or receive their products.

Here are popular ways to segment based on geography:

Gaining insights based on geography can help your organization think through logistics, support implementation, and marketing.

Once you have this data, you can profile customers based on specific types, or “segments.”

Segments can help you unearth trends in satisfaction, churn, and lifetime value that can in turn help you understand more about your ideal customer profiles.

1. Use customer profile templates.

You can shorten the customer profiling process by downloading and using pre-made templates.

You won’t have to come up with different sections for your customer profiles. Instead, you’ll have them pre-written for you. The only thing you have to do is fill in the blanks.

We go into more detail about what you’ll find in these templates later down in the post. But if you simply can’t wait (we don’t blame you), download them now and follow along as we cover the rest of the steps.

Featured Resource: Customer Profile Templates

Download Your Free Templates Here

2. Choose your customer profiling software.

Once you start creating customer profiles, you’ll need several types of software.

Remember, you need to collect data from your current customer base to create effective and accurate profiles.

Let’s go over the tools you’ll need.

CRM

If you don’t have one already, you should start using a CRM to keep track of contact data.

This software will give you all the basic information you need about your customers, such as their name, business name, location, business type, and more.

This type of basic information is foundational for customer profiling.

Hot tip: You can get started with the HubSpot CRM platform for free and start tracking contact data right now.

Customer Feedback Software

The next most important piece of software you need is a survey tool that will help you collect additional data about your customers — data you won’t necessarily have stored in your CRM.

After choosing a survey tool, you should get familiar with running questionnaires and designing questions that get you the answers you need.

Hot tip: HubSpot’s customer feedback software can help you set up effective surveys, and the results will be stored right within the CRM.

Analytics Software

While analytics software may seem like something only a marketing team needs, it’s critical for your customer profiling efforts.

It will help you understand the content your prospects most respond to, and it will unearth the types of customers who are visiting certain product pages on your website.

These are just two examples of the important data points you can get from an analytics tool.

Hot tip: HubSpot’s analytics software keeps all of your customer interaction and engagement data in one convenient interface. And it’s connected to your CRM, too.

3. Dig into demographics.

You’ve got the customer profile templates and the software you need to start account profiling.

To define your customer profile, it’s best to start by examining external demographics, then dive deeper into needs, and finally look at your company’s offering.

Here are some external attributes you can use to define your customer profile:

• What market does your product best serve? (e.g. Software for Healthcare)
• What specific vertical do they operate in? (e.g. Patient Management System for Health Systems)
• What is their annual revenue? (e.g. +$10mm)
• How many employees do they have? (e.g. 150 employees or more)
• Where are these companies located? (e.g. located in the United States)

4. Collect customer feedback.

After laying out the demographics, it’s time to dive deeper. That’s where gathering customer feedback comes in.

When building your profile, it’s easy to just rely on the basic demographic data you get from your CRM. But, it’s hard to get to know your customers if you don’t spend time with them.

You need to meet your customers if you want to have a clear picture of what they’re like. This makes customer surveys and interviews one of the best resources to use when building a customer profile.

Customer interviews allow your team to speak with users face-to-face. They can read their reactions to questions in real-time and foster human relationships with your customers.

This helps them uncover valuable information that raw data simply can’t show.

If you’re unable to reach a specific group of customers, consider setting up a phone or video call. While it’s not as engaging as an in-person interaction, it’s still an effective way of reaching your target audience.

If your customers are willing to schedule a call with you, you know they’re loyal users and are worth the time investment. The more attention you pay to these customers, the more you’ll have in the future.

5. Review your customer journey map.

As you begin examining your customer profile data, you should contextualize it using your customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a document that outlines every touchpoint a customer must pass through to achieve a goal with your company.

While these take time to complete, they paint a detailed picture of who’s buying your products and interacting with your brand.

But, you don’t need to complete a customer journey map to create a customer profile. Simply thinking about the customer’s journey will help you understand who you’re trying to reach.

By understanding their needs, challenges, and goals, you’ll develop a stronger sense of what your customers want from your business.

You can even take this one step further by interviewing customers about each stop on your map.

When creating HubSpot’s customer journey map, we asked users how they felt about specific points in the customer experience. Then, we charted these stories on the map so we could see how customer perception changed.

This gave us a good idea of what our customers liked and didn’t like about our products.

6. Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.

With so much data in hand, it’s easy to get lost. If you find yourself overwhelmed, bring back the focus to the problem your business is trying to solve.

Identify the type of people who face this challenge. Take a close look at your current users and their behavior.

The common denominator between these approaches is people. It doesn’t matter if you only have a few customers or are well on your way to 10,000.

You need to understand who your customers are (or will be), how they’re using your product or service, and why they’re using it.

7. Examine contextual details.

Once you’ve defined the external factors that describe your customer profile, it’s critical to dig deeper into the contextual details.

For example, if I’m running a SaaS company, I’d want to understand the following things about my customer:

• How big is their team?
• What are the biggest challenges they face?
• What technology are they using?
• What are their goals for the next three months?
• What are their goals for the year?
• How do they assess problems?
• What does a perfect world look like for them?
• What impact does the specific problem have on their team?
• How are they trying to solve the problem today?

Based on these external factors and contextual details, you should now have a strong grasp on your potential customers’ general make-up and goals.

The final step to complete your customer profile is to look internally to see how you can help them based on all of this information.

Below are some key questions to answer when completing your customer profile:

• What value can you provide these customers? (Save them money or time, grow revenue, etc.)
• Can you solve their key pain points?
• What are the features that differentiate you from competitors or a homegrown process?
• How does your solution fit into their short- and long-term goals?

8. Understand your industry.

One major contextual detail you should consider is where your brand falls in comparison to others in the industry.

You should know how your customers perceive your brand and which companies you’re competing with for their attention. This should give a good idea of the type of customers you want to attract and retain.

Understanding your industry also helps you define brand identity. If you’re going to stand out, you need to find a way to differentiate your product and services.

But, you also don’t want to advertise changes that your customers will react negatively to.

If you know which marketing strategies your customers already respond to, you can mirror your competitor’s successful techniques for introducing and educating customers about a new product or feature.

9. Build personas.

Remember that you’re serving people with actual personalities, feelings, and needs.

Once you’ve identified the attributes for your customer profile, the next step is to identify the individuals within the company that you want to reach.

This will be helpful when trying to establish a relationship with the account, as well as understand who the decision makers and influencers are.

Here are some key things to uncover about the people in your customer profile:

• Title(s)
• Age range
• Education level
• Income level
• How will they use your product/service?
• On what marketing channels can you reach them?
• What are the key responsibilities for their role?
• What role do they play in the decision-making process?

If you need a tool to help you build, visualize, and share your personas, try HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool.

10. Analyze and iterate on customer personas.

A customer profile is a key lever for growing your business.

This definition will act as a guide when informing what products or features to build, what channels to use in a marketing campaign, and much more.

Without it, you run the risk of offering a product or service that doesn’t meet any potential customers’ specific needs. Or you end up marketing to prospects in a way that doesn’t resonate with their understanding of the problem.

Your goal should be to operate in step with your customer profile to inform everything from feature development all the way to go-to-market strategy.

As you’re building your customer profile, make sure to gather the external factors, qualify the contextual details, and develop a deep understanding of how your business adds value to each customer type.

But remember: You don’t have to start from scratch. You can use templates to compile your consumer profiles.

Customer Profile Templates

We’ve created customer profile templates you can use to walk you through these steps. You can download them here.

Inside this kit, you’ll find:

• Short Customer Profile Template (Word / Google Docs): This one-page template helps you lay out all the basic information about your customer in a convenient bullet-point format. It gives you space to list your customer’s demographics, pain points, talking points, retention tactics, and preferred products and services.
• Long Customer Profile Template (Word / Google Docs): This two-page template gives you more space to define your customer profile. It’s ideal for B2B account profiles. You can list external attributes such as the customer’s industry and internal attributes such as the specific buyer persona you’re targeting.
• Colorful Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This template is ideal for B2C industries where customers interact face-to-face with your staff members. You have space to list user behaviors, joyful interactions, frustrating interactions, and customer communication notes.
• Corporate Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This template allows you to list a professional overview for your ideal customer, as well as challenges, benefits, and restraints. We recommend this template for more corporate environments due to its color palette.

• Simple Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This customer profile template allows you to list your ideal customer’s background, decision-making process, product preferences, wants, goals, and behaviors in easy-to-scan boxes.

• Modern Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): In this template, you have space to list your target customer’s company goals, team challenges, points of satisfaction, and retention tips. We recommend this template for B2B companies, because you’ll be profiling an entire company.
• Buyer’s Journey Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This template is unique because it gives you space to outline your ideal customer’s discovery story — that is, how they found you and what their research process was like. You can also list their goals and pain points.
• Segmented Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): If you’d like to create different segments as you profile your customers, then this is the template for you. It allows you to list critical information such as goals, benefits, and product constraints in a chart with different customer groups.

At a loss for what your customer profile can look like?

Below, we list alternative consumer profile examples, with methods that you can use to list your ideal consumer’s attributes.

Customer Profile Examples

If you’re not sure where to get started, take a look at these top customer profile examples for getting both a granular and overarching overview of your customers.

1. Scorecard

This customer profile uses a scoring system to determine if a prospect is a right fit for the business. It assesses the prospect using the BANT framework and gives them a score for each criteria ranging from zero to two.

If the total score meets a preset benchmark, the company will reach out to this customer with a sales pitch.

2. Segmentation

In a segmented customer profile, each customer type is broken down by demographics, core values, and preferred communication channels.

It includes a short summary describing how the marketing team should advertise to these individuals.

With this information readily available, your marketing team can work alongside customer service to create effective campaigns that resonate with each segment of your customer base.

3. Basic Information

Download this Template

This customer profile, available in our free customer profile templates, cuts right to the point.

It lists out all of the fundamental information we need to know about this customer type. This includes background data, demographics, and pain points.

This is a great format to use if you’re looking to build out a basic customer profile. While the information is surface-level, it’s enough to give you an accurate description of your target audience.

Download a free, editable copy of this customer profile example.

4. Buyer Persona

As previously mentioned, the buyer persona usually comes after you have some idea of your customer profile.

Nonetheless, many buyer persona builders can get you thinking critically about your ideal customer by asking valuable qualitative questions.

Use HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool as a starting point for mapping and profiling your customers.

5. Demographics, Psychographics, and Behaviors

By outlining your customers’ demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in one document, you can get a high-level overview of your most profitable customers without delving too in-depth.

Write your answers in bullet points or in a paragraph format, and you’ll be able to make better sense of your customers’ purchasing behaviors.

Customer Profiling Will Improve Your Service Experience

By creating thorough customer profiles, you can target better customers in your sales and marketing campaigns, reducing customer churn and resulting in happier customers later down the line.

The more detailed your profile, the more value you can extract from it, making your marketing, sales, and service experiences more effective and valuable for your customers.