Rikard Jonsson
Rikard Jonsson is Founder & CEO of Hey Sid and a five-time entrepreneur with a background in B2B SaaS, sales, and brand building. He believes B2B marketing is overcomplicated and writes about going back to basics: visibility, positioning, and consistent presence among the accounts that matter.
Customer Profile Guide for B2B Teams
Quick answer: A good customer profile for a 20-100 employee b to b company defines which accounts are worth pursuing, who inside those accounts matters, what buying triggers to watch, and which accounts to exclude. Build it from closed-won evidence, sales notes, CRM data, and compliance-safe targeting rules before you spend on campaigns.
Approach | Best for | Main risk | Use when |
Founder-led profile | Early clarity from sales calls | Too anecdotal | You have limited CRM history but strong customer access |
CRM-led profile | Finding patterns in closed-won accounts | Bad data can mislead | You have clean deal, source, sector, and sales-cycle records |
Sales workshop profile | Capturing field knowledge | Loud opinions can dominate | Sales knows the market better than the system does |
External consultancy | Speed and structure | Poor fit if treated as a one-off document | You need a working profile tied to campaigns and pipeline reporting |
Expected Results: What You'll Learn
By the end, you should be able to:
Define account fit: Separate attractive accounts from accounts that only look good on paper.
Map the buying group: Name the roles sales must reach before a deal can move.
Set exclusion rules: Stop wasting budget on accounts that will not buy.
Brief campaigns: Turn profile work into targeting, messaging, and reporting inputs.
Review performance: Connect activity to pipeline without pretending one report answers every question.
What is a customer profile for a 20-100 employee b2b company?
A customer profile is a practical description of the companies and people most likely to become valuable customers. For a 20-100 employee b to b company, it should be narrow enough to guide targeting and broad enough to support growth.
It is not the same as a buyer persona. A persona describes a person. A profile combines account fit, person fit, buying context, and disqualification rules. That matters because most consultative sales cycles involve several people, not one heroic decision-maker.
A useful profile answers five questions:
Which companies fit? Define size, sector, geography, tech environment, maturity, and business model.
Who matters inside them? Identify economic buyers, technical evaluators, users, blockers, and influencers.
Why would they buy now? Look for triggers such as regulation, growth, replacement cycles, funding, new sites, or leadership change.
What makes them expensive to win? Note procurement burden, weak pain, poor data access, or low strategic urgency.
How will marketing and sales act on it? Translate the profile into target lists, creative angles, outreach logic, and reporting fields.
For UK teams, the profile also needs a compliance lens. UK GDPR and PECR shape how you collect, store, track, and contact people. If you run programmes across the EEA, EU GDPR and ePrivacy consent requirements add another layer, especially before tracking tags fire.
Why a customer profile matters for lean b2b teams
A lean team cannot afford broad targeting. If your marketing team has one to three people and sales owns long consultative deals, every unclear rule becomes wasted spend, wasted content, and weak follow-up.
The usual symptom is reporting frustration. Across the 150+ B2B companies we work with, teams asking for better reporting usually mean one of three different things: performance broken out by channel, reports they can hand straight to their boss, and a clear line from activity to pipeline. Solving one does not solve the other two.
A strong customer profile gives each report a job. Channel reporting shows where attention came from. Leadership reporting explains why the programme deserves budget. Pipeline reporting shows which target accounts moved closer to a decision.
For a 20-100 employee company, this is not academic. A poor profile creates:
Sales disagreement: Reps chase accounts that marketing would never target.
Weak creative: Campaigns speak to broad sectors rather than live buying pain.
Bloated lists: Everyone who fits a revenue band gets included.
Slow learning: The team cannot tell whether the message, audience, or timing failed.
Compliance risk: Personal data, tracking, and outreach rules get treated as afterthoughts.
A good profile narrows the field. It tells your team where to spend, who to reach, what to say, and what not to chase.
The Profile Proof Score: a customer profile audit
The Profile Proof Score is a scored audit for testing whether your profile is ready for sales, marketing, and RevOps. Score each row from 0 to 3. A score of 0 means absent. A score of 3 means specific, evidenced, and usable in campaign execution.
Profile Proof criterion | 0 points | 1 point | 2 points | 3 points |
Account fit | Broad sector or size only | Basic firmographics | Firmographics plus maturity signals | Clear account rules tied to won deals and exclusions |
Buying group | One job title | Two or three titles | Roles grouped by influence | Committee mapped by role, pain, objections, and proof needed |
Trigger evidence | No trigger view | Generic timing assumptions | Named events linked to interest | Triggers tied to sales notes, CRM stages, or market change |
Disqualification rules | None | Obvious bad fits only | Some sales-led exclusions | Written rules for budget, urgency, geography, complexity, and ownership |
Message fit | Generic value claim | Sector message | Role-based pain and proof | Message by role, trigger, stage, and likely objection |
Reporting readiness | No fields | Basic source tracking | Account and channel reporting | Channel, board-ready, and pipeline reporting inputs defined separately |
Use the score this way:
0-7: Do not launch a focused account programme yet. Fix the evidence base first.
8-12: You have a working draft. Test it with sales before paid campaigns.
13-16: You can build lists, messages, and first campaign tests.
17-18: Your profile is ready for account-based execution and quarterly review.
The scoring matters because it separates confidence from preference. If the sales director loves a sector but the CRM shows long sales cycles, poor conversion, and weak urgency, the score forces the debate into evidence.
How to write a customer profile, step by step
Follow these steps in order. Skipping the early evidence work usually leads to a profile that sounds polished but fails in sales calls.
Choose the profile's commercial job: Decide whether the profile will guide outbound, paid media, ABM, partner marketing, expansion, or a board-level market focus. A profile built for expansion will not look the same as one built for new-logo acquisition. Write the job at the top of the document so every later decision has a standard.
Review your best closed-won accounts: Pull 10-30 strong customers if you have them. Look for patterns in company size, sector, geography, sales cycle, deal quality, implementation burden, retention risk, and expansion potential. Do not only pick famous logos. A smaller customer that buys fast, uses the product well, and expands can teach you more than a large but painful account.
Interview sales and customer-facing teams: Ask sales, RevOps, customer success, and delivery teams where deals move cleanly and where they stall. Use fixed questions: Which accounts understood the pain fastest? Which roles created urgency? Which objections appeared late? Which accounts looked attractive but drained time? Capture disagreement instead of smoothing it away.
Define firmographic and operating filters: Set clear account rules such as employee count, revenue band, geography, regulatory environment, installed systems, production model, or site structure. For UK-first targeting, confirm whether your target accounts are UK-only, UK plus US, or UK plus EEA. Pan-European programmes need separate consent and tracking checks.
Map the buying committee: List the people involved in awareness, evaluation, budget, technical approval, legal review, and day-to-day use. For each role, write the pain they feel, the proof they need, and the risk they fear. This is where person-based marketing becomes useful. For more on that model, read Person-Based Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Contact-Level Targeting in B2B.
Add triggers and timing signals: Identify events that make the problem urgent. Examples include new regulation, a factory expansion, cloud migration, product launch, new leadership, partner change, or procurement review. Treat a trigger as a reason to prioritise an account, not as proof that the account is ready to buy.
Write exclusion rules: Exclusions protect your budget. Name accounts that are too small, too early, too price-sensitive, too complex, outside your supported geography, or unlikely to have a sales-led buying process. This step is uncomfortable because it cuts volume. It is also where your profile becomes operational.
Turn the profile into a campaign brief: Convert the work into target account criteria, named roles, messages, proof points, consent rules, reporting fields, and sales follow-up steps. If the output cannot brief ads, outreach, content, and CRM reporting, it is not finished. For account selection and reach planning, the related guide on ICP targeting goes further into list building.
Pro tip: Treat the first version as a controlled test, not a permanent strategy. Review it after enough activity has reached the right accounts, usually over a 60-90 day window for account-based programmes.
Data and compliance requirements for UK and EEA teams
For UK teams, check UK GDPR, PECR, and ICO guidance before collecting, tracking, or contacting individuals. The rule of thumb is simple: define the business purpose, minimise personal data, keep records clean, and make sure consent rules are handled before marketing tags or outreach workflows run.
For EEA programmes, verify EU GDPR and ePrivacy consent requirements before tracking fires. This is especially relevant for website analytics, retargeting, and ad platform tags. A consent banner that appears after tracking has already started is not a safe operating model.
Use this checklist before activation:
CRM fields: Add account fit, role, buying stage, source, sector, country, and exclusion reason.
Consent records: Keep clear records for email, cookies, and tracking preferences.
Suppression lists: Remove customers, competitors, partners, excluded sectors, and opted-out contacts.
Geography rules: Separate UK targeting from EEA targeting where ad formats, tracking, or consent rules differ.
Sales notes: Standardise loss reasons, buying roles, objections, and next-step status.
Reporting fields: Keep channel reporting, leadership reporting, and pipeline reporting distinct.
A profile is only as useful as the data that supports it. Messy CRM records do not make the exercise worthless, but they do mean sales interviews and manual review need more weight.
Tools that help
Keep the tooling light at first. A profile project usually needs a CRM, sales notes, spreadsheet analysis, account research, consent management, and a clear workshop format. Do not buy a large platform just to answer questions your team has not agreed on yet.
For teams building a wider account-based motion, these resources are better next steps than another generic list of tools:
For account strategy: Read Hey Sid's guide to what account-based marketing is in B2B.
For website follow-up: See how B2B website personalization can adapt content once the profile is clear.
For person-level reach: Compare profile work with individual-based marketing in B2B.
If HubSpot is your CRM, Hey Sid's two-way HubSpot integration can write ad impressions, clicks, and engagement totals onto existing company records as Sid-prefixed properties. It can also import deals read-only each night and push companies from the CRM into ad audiences, while leaving the CRM as the source of truth.
Where Hey Sid fits
This article is published by Hey Sid. Hey Sid is not a DIY profiling worksheet or a generic CRM data tool. It is a person-targeted ad engine and done-for-you ABM platform for mid-sized B2B companies that already know the accounts they want to influence.
Hey Sid fits when your profile is clear enough to support named-account execution, but your team lacks the time to run ads, creative, outreach, content, and reporting across the same people. The Influence Loop connects Always On, Authority Builder, and Precision Connect so the same individuals see the company, build trust, and receive outreach over a 60-90 day window.
It is not the right fit for companies under 20 employees, teams with very small budgets under $25K/year, B2C businesses, high-velocity transactional b to b models, companies without a sales team, or organisations expecting direct click-to-close attribution. It also does not replace visitor identification tools or AI SDRs. It solves a recognition and influence problem before and around sales conversations.
Common mistakes to avoid
Copying a persona template: A persona without account rules will not help sales decide which companies deserve attention.
Using revenue bands alone: Revenue can hide poor urgency, weak fit, or a painful sales process.
Ignoring lost deals: Losses reveal exclusion rules, bad timing, and buying committee gaps.
Letting one loud voice decide: Sales judgment is vital, but it needs CRM evidence and customer proof.
Treating the profile as static: Review it when markets shift, sales cycles change, or new verticals emerge.
Mixing reporting jobs: Channel reports, board reports, and pipeline reports answer different questions.
Skipping consent checks: UK and EEA programmes need privacy review before tracking and outreach rules are set.
Conclusion and next steps
A strong profile is not a brand exercise. It is a sales and marketing control document. It tells your team which accounts fit, which people matter, why timing exists, what proof each role needs, and which accounts should be excluded before budget is spent.
Start with closed-won evidence, add sales judgment, score the draft with the Profile Proof Score, and turn the result into campaign briefs. Then connect the profile to reporting that separates channel performance, leadership-ready evidence, and pipeline movement.
If your next step is reach planning, read the related guide on ICP targeting. If your main challenge is reaching named people inside target accounts, the guides on person-based and individual-level targeting will give your team the next layer.
Ready to build a customer profile your sales team can use?
Hey Sid helps mid-sized B2B companies turn a defined profile into person-targeted advertising, thought leadership, outreach, and reporting across the same target individuals. If your team has a clear account list but limited execution capacity, a short call is the best next step.
FAQ
How long does it take to write a customer profile?
A focused first draft usually takes one to two weeks if your CRM, sales team, and customer evidence are accessible. The useful version takes longer because it needs testing. For account-based programmes, judge the profile over a 60-90 day window rather than a few early clicks or replies.
What is the cost of creating a customer profile?
The internal cost is mainly time from sales, marketing, RevOps, and leadership. External support is usually priced as a consulting or service engagement in USD, often tied to research, workshops, campaign planning, and execution. Avoid paying only for a static document if your team needs activation.
Can I create one without a CRM?
Yes, but the evidence base will be weaker. Use sales interviews, customer calls, win-loss notes, finance records, and delivery feedback. As soon as the profile is drafted, create a simple CRM structure so future deals improve the profile instead of living in scattered notes.
What is the difference between a customer profile and ICP targeting?
A customer profile defines the accounts, people, triggers, proof, and exclusions that describe fit. ICP targeting is the activation layer: building lists, reaching the right accounts, selecting channels, and measuring movement. The profile sets the rules. Targeting applies them.
How often should a b to b customer profile be reviewed?
Review it quarterly if you are running active campaigns, entering new markets, or seeing sales-cycle changes. Review it sooner after major product changes, regulatory shifts, or a new vertical test. The aim is not constant rewriting. It is keeping the profile close to market evidence.
Sources
Framework used: Profile Proof Score. First-party insight used: reporting requests split into channel performance, boss-ready reporting, and activity-to-pipeline clarity.
