The Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is most commonly used by the sales team, to prospect and qualify leads. Knowing what an ideal customer looks like will help with segmentation strategy and lead scoring.
Marketers tend to talk in terms of personas (which are people), but a persona is not an ICP (which are businesses). Personas are found within an ICP. The word “Customer” is misleading here because it seemingly indicates a person, but Customer to a B2B business is a Business.
So, it’s important to define what your ICP is prior to defining your personas. Otherwise you may end up with far too many personas and a segmentation strategy that is complicated and unhelpful.
What is an ICP?
Why is it important?
How to build an ICP
How to leverage your ICP
What is an ICP?
An ICP is a description of which category or type of customers that would be best suited to purchase your solution and offer you the best value for that purchase. For the case of a B2B business, these are other businesses that have a problem and need your solution and those you believe will be easy to convert at high value.
It’s key to note that the ICP is generally built by the sales team, but the marketing team should have a big role in this process. Often times it may be a sales strategy leader working in tandem with a demand gen or general marketing leader. Marketing participation can give valuable insights into who you’re targeting and can give you front line access to customers to build your relationships.
Why is building an ICP important?
Building out your ICP keeps your sales team focused and eliminates wasted resources and time chasing after leads that will become dead ends.
It’s key to be specific about the ICP. They can represent several categories or groups of businesses but don’t say “Every vertical in the world, with over 20 employees, that can spend $100/month.” If you go too broad, you risk becoming unfocused and then where do you start? Start somewhere more narrow and expand as you go when you find success.
How do you create an ICP?
Creating an ICP should not be difficult. If you are finding it difficult to answer any of the questions below, you may need to take a look at your product/market fit and sales strategy. The most difficult step should be getting everyone’s buy-in and agreement. To begin the process, you will need to start gathering information and asking questions.
Take a look at your top customers.
Get the data and start seeing if there are commonalities. Group your highest value accounts, the accounts that have been with you the longest, and the ones best leveraging your product (e.g.: they find a lot of value from using your solution).
- What makes them your best customers?
- Are they in a specific vertical, clustered in the same geos?
- Are their businesses specific sizes?
Finding patterns may help point you in the right direction, and may also point out some gaps. Especially if you also look at any customers that are about to churn or have churned.
Talk to your customers.
You may also find a lot of value out of interviewing your customers. This is recommended, but not always possible. Working with a CS and sales team to identify the best relationships of customers who are willing to share honest information is key. Here are some questions to ask:
- How did they know they had a problem and how did they start searching for a solution?
- Did they look for referrals?
- What were their top pain points they were trying to solve?
- How did they find out about your solution?
- What was the buying process like?
- Who was the decision maker in the process?
- What are their goals and objectives now?
- Has the product helped them in ways that they didn’t expect?
Don’t forget to be respectful of their time. Have a goal for the questions you ask (aka don’t just ask questions to ask questions). Look for information you can use to build a better ICP.
Ask your sales and CS teams to describe their ideal customer.
Sit down with key sales and CS people who work with top accounts. They can help fill in any gaps you’ve missed from digging into your the data and may also provide insight to see if the existing strategy doesn’t match the data. A few things to try to understand:
- What verticals or industries are they in?
- How big is the business?
- How many employees do they have?
- How many offices, and where?
- What’s their (estimated) annual revenue?
- What type of technology do they currently use?
- What’s their (estimated) budget?
Organize your data and build your ICP profile(s).
After you review all of your data and discover what your top targets should be, it’s time to organize into a document that can be easily shared amongst your teams.
You should include:
- Industry/Verticals
- Business Size(s)
- Maturity
- Annual Revenue Ranges
- Employees
- Budget
- Business objectives
- Pain points
- Any other data you think that would be useful, including exceptions – occasionally there are a few fringe exceptions that could yield big deals.
How to leverage your ICP
It’s key that once you’ve built your ICP and have the top level approval from leadership, sales, and marketing to leverage it across the entire business (this also helps garner referrals from your employees).
- Put your ICP somewhere that’s easily accessible.
- Train your sales and marketing teams together, and build more general training sessions for the rest of the business. Don’t forget to ask for referrals if anyone has connections to businesses that fit the ICP.
Ensure that your teams understand how to best leverage the ICPs. A sales team should, of course, use them to qualify leads more effectively. A marketing team can create personas and a segmentation strategy to build better demand gen programs. Even a product team can use these to ensure the product roadmap solves a lot of the potential pain points an ICP may have.
Having an ICP is critical to ensuring your team is able to work efficiently. Just remember, over time, depending on where you are in the adoption cycle, your ICP will change. So continuously tweak and adjust as needed.
Header Photo by Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash