Intentional CRM: Define Your Look-Alikes

Identify Your Broader Prospect Profile

This exercise is designed to help you derive helpful attributes that the Top 10 prospects you identified may have in common, and to identify potential channels and avenues to find these "Look-alike" prospects.

As a reminder: You're identifying your "Look-alikes" in order to use that information to target broader marketing you may want to do. Marketing which might include advertising, email blasts, social media, or asking your network and your Top 10 for introductions to other people.

A note before you begin: The questions listed under each section are suggestions to help spark your thinking — not a checklist to work through. Use whichever ones resonate and journal freely in your own direction.

Logistical Attributes

Reviewing your Intentional CRM Top 10 prospects, what are some logistical attributes that seem to re-occur?

Do they tend to be at a certain job title/level/functional role?
Do they work at certain size or stage companies, i.e. early stage start-ups, large corporate entities, non-profits, agency vs. in-house, etc.?
Do they work with remote teams or in-person?
Do they represent certain industries or verticals?
Where are they geographically?

Psychographic Attributes

Reviewing your Intentional CRM Top 10 prospects, what are some psychographic attributes that seem to re-occur? This is useful information when you get past initial outreach to deeper discussions about working together.

Do any of them share any commonalities in how they like to communicate?
Do they share commonalities on how they build consensus or seek and leverage team input?
Where do they fall on the Micro-Manager to Mysterious-Manager1 spectrum?
What are the top capabilities they have recommended or turned to you for (even if you have other skills and offerings)?

Adjacencies

Reviewing your Intentional CRM Top 10 prospects, what are some adjacencies you would be intrigued to explore?

What are interesting industries that are either adjacent to or a sub-category of the industries where you have experience?
Could you capitalize on your skills and expertise to either branch out or narrow down to offer new services?
Are there any aspects of the work you do that you could carve out and craft a "gateway offering2" out of, perhaps making it quicker and easier to work with you the first time?

Your Outreach Realities

What kinds of outreach do you prefer doing? Journal here about what your outreach realities are.

You prefer warm intros via email (so you need a 1st degree contact)
You want to seek Look-Alikes via LinkedIn and do a DM outreach (probably requires LinkedIn Premium)
You have budget to do some targeted advertising (you may need help creating and running an effective campaign, and deciding where you should be advertising)
You want to create a full customer outreach email drip campaign (may require an email marketing tool and/or consultative assistance to craft such a campaign)
You are interested in leveraging social media and/or influencers
You are excited to find a few IRL events where your Look-Alike crowd may congregate
You want to build a list of partners who reach your Look-Alike audience, e.g. podcasts, newsletters, etc., with whom you can exchange promotion

Notes

1 Mysterious Managers are not always great at being 100% clear on their goals or giving specific guidance, especially early on. They are much more willing to be free-form and see what comes out of the work.

2 Gateway offerings often have very specific boundaries — in time, pricing and deliverables — and at a level that reduces the friction to saying "yes." The hope is that working with you once will be a gateway to calling on you to do even more. The potential pitfalls? Managing your boundaries and their expectations.