When the commercial leadership of a mid-sized industrial company is asked who their ideal customer is, the answer almost always revolves around two variables: the sector to which the customer belongs and the approximate size of revenues or headcount. That definition, accepted as sufficient, is the silent origin of a larger problem: a pipeline full of opportunities that will never convert and a sales team exhausted in pursuing them.
McKinsey, in its 2024 work on growth in the industrial mid-market segment, documents that 90 per cent of manufacturers with revenues between fifty and five hundred million euros do not have a formal taxonomy of ideal customer beyond the two variables mentioned. The consequence is predictable. Resources are distributed according to the apparent volume of opportunity, not to the actual probability of closure or to the quality of the resulting contract.
A second figure qualifies the problem. Gartner has measured for several years the perceived complexity of the B2B buying process and, in its latest update, 77 per cent of buyers describe their last purchase as very complex or difficult. Buyer-side complexity generates delays, internal escalation, no-decision scenarios and fragmentation of criteria. When a supplier enters a poorly qualified opportunity, it inherits all that complexity without having been able to prevent it.
A good definition of ideal customer in industry is not a sector segmentation. It is a combination of variables that predict probability of closure, contract value and operational efficiency of delivery. The four that work best in mid-sized industrial companies are: technical maturity of the customer, configuration of the buying committee, fit of the product with the customer's existing architecture, and expected relationship pattern after the first order.
The technical maturity of the customer determines whether the commercial process unfolds in the language of engineering or the language of procurement. The configuration of the buying committee determines how many counterparts must be brought along and how long the cycle will take. Fit with the existing architecture determines whether the supplier enters as substitution, complement or rupture. The expected relationship pattern determines whether the account is transactional or expansive, which changes the economic calculus of the commercial effort.
Three consequences follow from a better profile definition. The sales team concentrates effort where return is greater and stops wasting time on opportunities that will close badly or not at all. Negotiation is conducted from a stronger technical position, which reduces the average discount. The marketing system produces content and references specifically aligned with the segments where the company has real advantage, instead of generating generic materials.
The standard objection from the executive committee is that sharpening the profile reduces the addressable market. The objection is mathematically correct and operationally wrong. Addressable market measured in gross quantity is irrelevant if the close rate, the average discount and the cost to serve destroy margin. What matters is the profitable addressable market, and that is always smaller than the gross figure.
Auditing the actual customer profile, rather than the declared one, is usually one of the most revealing exercises that can be conducted in an industrial company. The difference between who management says is its customer, and who is in fact responsible for 80 per cent of margin, tends to expose inherited resource allocations that no longer have justification.
The conclusion is practical and unglamorous. Before investing in capture, content, brand or new channels, it is wise to ensure the company knows, with empirical precision, whom it is trying to sell to. Without that precision, everything else dilutes.