If your company sells products or services to other companies, there is more to customer profiling than identifying the people who make the decision to buy from you. To be sure that you can continue selling to their companies in the long term, it is also important to know the people within their organizations who actually use what you sell. Those end-users are often called “internal customers.”

“This group of customers is the most often overlooked and neglected of the customer types,” writes HR consultant Chuck Hebert in a recent post on the Management 4-1-1 blog. He adds, “Internal customers are any group (or person) who relies on you to complete a task or function in order for them to get their job done.”

Hebert points out that although his own company typically sells to VPs of HR, CFOs, and COOs, his internal customers are typically recruiters, hiring managers, or other HR professionals, and he has to be sure to meet their needs.

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Here’s some advice I can offer on identifying your internal customers and making sure you are meeting their needs:

• Offer training about how to use what you sell. Free seminars and workshops can connect you directly with internal customers within your client firms.

• Use product satisfaction surveys to connect with internal customers. They can open lines of communication to the people who actually use your products and provide useful information too.

• Have your salespeople identify and talk with internal users. While members of your sales team need to focus on convincing decision-makers to buy from you, they can also ask to speak with end-users at companies where they are trying to close sales.

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