Your team writes one profile. The account holds the other.
The account has a profile too, and it points at you.
An Ideal Customer Profile says what a good account looks like. Sector, size, what they already run, what they spend. It is built from the accounts your team has been useful to, and it answers where a finite amount of attention goes.
The businesses on that list have the same document facing the other way. In most of them it is written down and it has a name. Supplier qualification. An approved supplier list. Vendor criteria. Procurement holds part of it. The people who would have to live with the result hold the rest.
That one decides. It belongs to the side paying the invoices, and a supplier usually meets it at the end, as a form to fill in, long after the shape of the approach was set.
Two profiles, and the one that settles it is the one your team does not write.
It is your reading of theirs.
Your team’s best account of what that business would require of a supplier, written down before anybody asks them.
Not what you would like them to want. What has to hold for their money to move.
Ideal in the name points at them. An account is not ideal because it is large or because it would close quickly. It is ideal when what it needs is real, consequential to it and current.
Your team will get parts of it wrong. That is the reason to write it. A line that is wrong can be shown to them and corrected. A line nobody wrote cannot.
It is the half of the match that was missing.
What has to hold before their money moves.
Somebody inside owns this, and the money for it does not have to reach the board. It survives next to what is already running. It disturbs nothing the business has already promised its own customers. Somebody there can answer for it a year later, when the person who argued for it has moved on.
Most of that is sitting behind the markers already on your list. Each marker is a shortcut to something on their side.
| What your profile says | What theirs would have to say |
|---|---|
| Companies of this size | Somebody here owns this, with money for it that does not have to reach the board |
| They run these tools | A change of this kind has survived here before, and whoever carried it is still here |
| They have just raised money, changed leadership, or met a new rule | Somebody here has promised an outcome to somebody else, with a date on it |
| This sector | Obligations arriving from our own customers and from rules we cannot negotiate |
| This job title | The person who would have to answer for it afterwards |
| The problem we solve | What breaks for our customers if nothing changes |
The right column is what the marker beside it is standing in for. None of it is established by the marker.
The marker is the shortcut. The requirement is what they would recognise.
Two accounts can look identical on your list and require different things.
Same sector, similar size, comparable equipment. One of them is well served by what it has. The other is working on something it has not named yet. Nothing your list measures is different between them.
What shows from outside is traces. A new site. A programme that now has to be delivered. A tender. A commitment made in public. A change in who is being hired. A rule arriving on a date.
A trace opens a question. It settles nothing.
What has won priority inside, what would have to give way, and who has the standing to carry it stay in the building until somebody there says otherwise.
An account may tell you some of it. It stays theirs to settle.
Nobody can write both lists and stay honest.
Advisa writes their side, beside the colleague who carries the account. Your team already holds yours. Putting the two together is your team’s work and your team’s judgement.
The separation is not politeness. Write a requirement while looking at what you sell and the requirement bends to fit. Then you have an argument for the offer wearing a buyer’s clothes, and an account can see that coming from a long way off.
Sometimes what comes out is an approach. Sometimes it is to wait for a change to take shape, to ask something narrower, or to stop carrying an attractive name as a live account.
Your customer profile narrows a market to a list. The buyer profile says what the businesses on it would require. A buyer case tests that against one named account, and marks what is established, what is a reading, and what only they can settle.
The profile was written without your offer in it. That is what makes it worth showing them.