Case Study: Driving Sales Revenues By Targeting The Perfect Customer

Company: Viking Components, Inc. (dba Viking InterWorks)
Operations: Memory chips and modules manufacturer
Web site: http://www.vikingcomponents.com

Company Overview

“Viking InterWorks designs and manufactures a comprehensive range of DRAM, SRAM, Flash, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Chip Scale Packaging (CSP) and other memory solutions to enhance the speed, power and performance of all leading computing and communications platforms and devices. Viking InterWorks memory solutions are available directly from leading OEM partners or through authorized channel resellers worldwide.”

Business Roadblock

Although it is tempting to think of every sale as a good sale, experienced sales professionals know better. Bad customers can cost more in time, complaints, and credit checks than they ever generate in revenues. Fortunately, most bad customers can be quickly weeded out, but how do you separate and target quality customers that meet your company’s ideal profile?
Doug DiMaio, director of sales at Viking InterWorks, turns to Hoover’s. DiMaio uses Hoover’s to pre-qualify prospects and identify potential customers that match Viking’s best customer profiles.

Solution

“As director of sales everything comes to me before it goes to a different department,” DiMaio said. This means that before a salesperson contacts an account, or before a potential customer is processed by the credit department, DiMaio checks them out first.

DiMaio uses the information on the Hoover’s Fact Sheet to determine if the prospect is part of Viking’s target. He can look up the company’s customers, its products and operations, where it is located, and its key people (“who’s who in the zoo,” DiMaio said colorfully). He can determine if the prospect is in Viking’s marketplace and can get an idea of the company, the territory, and most importantly, Does this sale make sense? Do the prospect’s priorities or goals fit with Viking’s for future business?

By pre-qualifying potential customers, DiMaio can avoid sending inappropriate prospects to the credit department and thus ensure he is not putting work into developing an account that ultimately gets turned down.
According to DiMaio, “Since I’ve used this method I don’t get near the rejection rate. Once we have all the proper information and the paperwork that we require, my clients have got at least an 80% or 90% hit ratio.”
In order for DiMaio’s prequalification process to work, he has to compare these potential customers against an existing profile of “the perfect customer.” Viking has completed such profiles for each segment of its business. Of course, not all customers will match these profiles, but they do have to fit into the overall goals of the company. And by setting these standards, Viking ensures that it will come close to achieving these goals.
As DiMaio puts it: “I don’t need other customers who are going to be part of our bottom 400. I want to add customers who are going to be in our top 20.”

Once sales reps have identified these dream accounts, they use this profile when prospecting on Hoover’s to determine if leads match these traits. The profiling process can also be used to identify warning signs, allowing reps to avoid putting time and effort into pitching an inappropriate company.
DiMaio sums it up this way: “Everyone has always had that great customer. ‘Man, if I only had more customers like that! I would just be killing it.’ Well, describe what that customer is. And what they do, and you have that perfect customer.”

Bottom Line

“I am very much about getting to know the right customers,” DiMaio said. The people in sales spend too much time getting to know the wrong customers, dealing with the customers who are complaining or they are trying to open clients that are not on that path. They will go for low-hanging fruit and go for the quick deal, but it’s a customer that is going to use a lot of your time and effort and your sales personnel’s time and effort and your customer service time and effort for very little revenue.”

DiMaio speculated that without Hoover’s, he would spend a great deal more time and energy pre-qualifying prospects by going to their Web sites and reading through their marketing materials and company documents — with no guarantee despite hours of work that they would be approved. He summed up Hoover’s value succinctly:
“We use it, we uncover business, and that’s why I pay to have the subscription. It pays for itself in the first order, with a year’s subscription.”

Article source: AMA