Successful small business owners and marketing managers share a common understanding — you can’t reach your target customers if you don’t know who they are! That’s why they build ideal customer profiles, also known as buyer personas. But this can be a challenging, time-consuming process. That’s where a customer profile template comes in.
In this article, we’ll discuss why such templates are so important. We’ll also share with you a helpful customer profile template built on the monday.com Work OS to get you up and running immediately.
What is a customer profile template?
Customer profiles — or ideal customer profiles, ICPs, marketing personas, buyer personas, or customer personas — are detailed descriptions of the typical people who would purchase your products or services.
Customer profile templates are editable, customizable documents that include headers and fields to organize and analyze this type of information.
Customer profile templates provide a framework for marketing persona development. They help you stay on track and work more efficiently while creating these crucial assets and drawing from the expertise and experience of leaders who’ve come before you. They allow sales and marketing teams to design ICPs more efficiently, as they’ll be able to pull up the document and plug the necessary information in right away, rather than starting from a blank page.
Businesses may have multiple customer profiles — particularly if they have multiple service offerings or product lines, and therefore have different types of customers purchasing each — all of which should include:
- Customer data like age range, gender, location, and household income
- Client psychographics such as interests and hobbies
- Goals and motivations of your customer base
- Any challenges or pain points your current customers face relevant to your product or service
Here’s what a typical template could look like:
Why use a customer profile template?
ICPs are an important starting point for designing a marketing strategy, but creating a customer profile can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Templates make the whole ordeal a lot more efficient because they provide a solid starting point with predefined headers and fields to enter information relevant to your company and customers.
That obviously makes customer profiling a lot faster — which is especially helpful if you’re designing multiple — but it also provides an element of consistency and uniformity across your ICPs. That way, when new hires or marketing contractors need to access the profiles you’ve designed, they’ll be able to easily interpret and understand the points you’re making.
In the long term, using a consistent customer profile template can also improve your lead generation because you will have a better idea of how to serve each of your customers based on their profiles.
If you’ve never designed a customer profile before, a template allows you to draw from the experience and expertise of other industry leaders who’ve put their own learnings into the template so that you can start from a stable, proven foundation.Of course, it’s worth mentioning that not everyone is an experienced graphic designer, so you may have found yourself creating documents that look and feel as if they were made in MS Paint! If you’re less-than-gifted when it comes to design work, using templates is a good idea as they can help you present your information neatly and efficiently.
What are some examples of customer profile templates?
Are you looking to create your own template? Check out these customer profile examples for a little bit of inspiration.
Simple customer profile template
Though the general rule with customer profiles is “the more information, the better” — you certainly don’t have to create multi-page documents that describe every single habit and characteristic your ideal customer might exhibit.
This customer profile template is a great example of how a simple ICP can still offer actionable insights. As you’ll notice, it includes the most crucial customer information, such as:
- Demographic information
- Their decision-making process
- The products you offer that apply to their needs
- Goals and desires
- Typical behaviors and tendencies
Hierarchical customer profile template
A great way for your sales team to score leads and prioritize outreach is to compare them against a hierarchy of fitness. That is, you create several customer profiles that indicate different levels of fit for your company, with the most complete fit being your ideal customer profile.
This customer profile template example follows that approach. It includes a “no fit” profile — also known as a negative persona — where you can detail behaviors, characteristics, or demographics that determine when a potential customer isn’t a great fit for your company.
Visual customer profile template
This customer profile template is another one that takes a very simple approach and lays out the required information in an effective visual format. Your sales and customer service teams may find it helpful to include a stock image or caricature of your ideal customer to help them visualize who they’re talking to — this can be particularly helpful for employees who only engage with customers over the phone.
At the bottom of the template, you have the opportunity to write a brief description of your customer. Narrative approaches like this make information easier to digest, so your ICPs become more relatable.
monday.com’s customer profile template
We’ve covered some pretty helpful ideal customer profile template examples, but you may have noticed that they all share a common problem — they’re static, disconnected documents. To help you level up your ICP creation and make the whole process more collaborative, we’ve built you an effective template on monday workdocs.
monday workdocs is our very own online word editor with advanced collaborative features and a beautiful visual design. Here’s why you’ll love creating customer profiles in workdocs. You can:
- Pull information directly in from your existing monday.com boards
- Include helpful graphs from the monday.com reporting suite
- Assign tasks to colleagues to collect the necessary information
- Share ICPs with your entire team and with contractors outside of your company
Plus, because workdocs is part of the monday.com Work OS, you’ll gain access to a ton of other super valuable tools and features. For example, monday sales CRM makes capturing and storing customer information easy. You can build a dedicated customer outreach board to manage customer interviews, an important part of buyer persona creation. Personas guide the decision-making process of many teams when creating project roadmaps. A buyer persona template can help your team reach cross-functional alignment and uncover insights about potential customers.
Customer profile template tips & tricks
If you’ve never created a customer profile before, read these tips and tricks before you start and put your best foot forward — if you’re well seasoned, here’s a few ways to get back to basics!
1. Leverage real-life customer stories
The best way to get a great understanding of common customer experiences is to jump on the phone — or video call — with your existing clients. Use your email marketing platform to send out a bulk email to your current customer base, ask if anyone would be willing to answer a few questions, and be sure to include an enticing offer or perk.
2. Consider building negative personas
Negative personas — a description of the type of customer you don’t want to attract — can be a useful tool for comparing with your regular customer profile template, allowing those responsible for your sales efforts to understand important behavioral attributes and identify when they’re speaking with an ideal client more readily.
3. Talk to your team
While customer interviews are rich sources of data, keep in mind that you may also find some value in talking to your customer success and sales team members. They’re speaking with your customers all day, every day, and have a strong understanding of the common challenges they face and processes they go through to purchase.
4. Focus on common pain points
One of the main things you’ll use your customer profiles for is to inform marketing and sales tactics, which generally aim to appeal to common challenges and pain points your prospects face. When speaking with your customers and sales agents as part of the customer profiling process, make sure to dig deep into pain points. Ask:
- When does the pain point arise?
- What are they doing about it now?
- What is the impact of that issue?
- What solutions exist?
Read also: Everything you need to know about effective Customer relationship management
FAQs about customer profile templates
How do you write a customer profile?
Follow these steps to write an effective customer profile:
- Arrange to interview existing customers about the challenges, goals, and demographic makeup.
- Speak with your sales and service reps to gain internal insights.
- Collect the information.
- Make a copy of your customer profile template.
- Identify the most common information across all discussions, and add this data under the relevant header.
What should I include in a client profile?
Customer profiles should include the following information, at a minimum:
- Customer demographics such as age range
- Common challenges and pain points
- Customer goals and desires
- Typical behaviors and characteristics
- Potential product/service fit
How do I create a customer profile in Excel?
In your Excel spreadsheet, add the following titles in the top row:
- Demographics
- Pain points
- Goals
- Behaviors and characteristics
- Product/service fit
Then, fill in the appropriate information based on the customer interviews you’ve conducted. However, if you’re looking for a simpler solution that will save you time and ensure you include all the important information you need, consider using monday.com’s template.
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