Wondering how an ideal customer profile can be crucial in your path to becoming a business leader? If yes, then you have just landed at the right place, as this blog is all about ideal customer profile (ICP).
We discuss what ICP is? Why is important for marketing? Why it is important for sales? How to develop an ICP profile and lastly why an organization needs ICP?
Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
Ideal Customer Profile:
The ideal customer profile is defined by certain parameters such as behavioral, environmental, firmographics attributes, and other personal factors, such as likes and dislikes of potential prospects. These valuable insights about the prospects are derived through quantitative and qualitative analysis to build a reliable ICP. No doubt, all these data insights acts as a strategic tool to help business get into the client’s mind-sets.
Why is Ideal Customer Profile an Important Part of Marketing?
An ideal customer profile will not only help you in knowing who your valuable customers are. It will also help you turn your marketing team into a streamlined lead-generation machine. Moreover, if you are considering a B2B business, ICP is a must, as you need to target not just your customers but their accounts.
When a good ideal Customer Profile is created, it benefits the organization’s marketing in the following ways.
- Focusing Marketing Efforts in the Right Direction: ICP makes your marketing efforts laser focus, as business don’t have to cast a wide net to covert prospects, rather only work with prospects who are genuinely interested in your products.
- Better Conversion Rates: When marketing to ICPs, personalized messages strike a right chord. It enables a better conversion rate as the message aligns with the customer’s need.
- Improve the Process of Customer Acquisition: If you want to increase your customer base, you need an ICP to help your company identify potential prospects. Overall, your chances of acquiring customers will increase.
- Optimize Resources: Time and money are vital for any business to perform at optimal productivity. Businesses being aware about their ideal customer profile, simplify their resource allocation for marketing, thereby directing business resources towards the right channels.
Let’s move on understanding how ICP impacts sales.
Why Is an Ideal Customer Profile Critical Part of Sales?
The significance of an ideal customer profile is not limited to marketing, it has its significant share of contribution for Sales.
Once the ICP is defined, it can benefit sales in the following ways:
- Personalized Outreach: Salesperson have the responsibility to begin the process of engaging conversations with the clientele. But, it is only possible when the sales representative has adequate knowledge about the prospects. With ideal customer profile defined, the challenges are diminished and a sales representative with good communication skill will be able to initiate meaningful conversation with the prospects.
- Tailored Services: With ICP, services and products can be tailored as per the targeted client’s requirements. Therefore selling a products or services become simpler that meet the client’s need.
- Sales Training: The representative will deliver their best work when informed about ICP. The ideal customer profile is a work in progress as organizations have an expanding client base. Moreover, with the passing time, organizations also get the opportunity to learn in depth about their clientele. Henceforth, organize training sessions at regular intervals for the sales employees to be updated on the ideal customer profile.
As we have touched upon how ICP contributes to the sales and marketing work of organizations, it is high time that businesses also note that ICP seals the gap between the marketing and sales teams. For example, marketing has to create content that directly speaks to the ideal customers. That content can eventually be picked up by the sales team to refer to the prospective clientele.
Is There a Difference between Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile?
Businesses need to have a clear understanding that buyer persona and ideal customer profile are two different scenarios.
A buyer persona is defined by the psychological parameters of a current market, such as pain points, needs, goals, and motivators.
On the contrary, your ideal customer profile is your perfect idyllic customer who gets the value out of your products and services. As a B2B organization, you will have multiple buyer personas, but your ideal customer profile will only be one.
How do you Develop an Ideal Customer Profile for your Organization?
How do you develop an ideal customer profile for your organization?
Building an ideal customer profile is no rocket science; it takes five easy steps!
- Identify the super prospects
- Request an interview
- Analyze the data
- Make an ideal customer profile
- Polish your outcomes
Identify the Super Prospects:
How do we identify the super prospects? – It starts by curating a current list of customers and then analysing the data to understand the customer profiles that are getting the most out of the product.
The ideal customer, on an average, has basic traits:
- Industry fit: The industry your business belongs to makes at ideal fit for the customer.
- Profitable and financially able to purchase: In the b2b industry, your ideal customers usually have similar financial capacities.
- Ready for investment: There is a genuine need for your business offering, and the organization is certain your offering can solve its pain points.
- Goals that are scalable: Your customer has a plan of scale their business with the assistance of your products.
- Employees-company size: All ICP will fall under the same employee count bracket.
- Geographical fit: Your ICP is in a geographical area where you can sell.
Request for an Interview:
When it comes to understanding your ideal customers, it is best to ask what customers find most interesting about the product. Setting up an interview is the best way to approach the scenario. It can be a face-to-face interview or a Zoom meeting the organization decides.
The primary objective of the interview is to uncover the details about the following aspects.
- How did they find about your brand?
- How they continue with their buying process
- Reasons behind making a purchase
- How they have benefitted from the product
- When you have the answers to the above-mentioned questions, you can conclude how to reach out to more clients who have similar pain points
Analyze the Data.
After completing the first two steps, the resource collection work is done. Now, the resources have to analyse to understand what they mean. That will eventually help you create an ideal customer profile.
Analysing the data, look for recurring patterns or shared characteristics. Secondly, connect the dots of those recurring patterns or shared characteristics.
One easy way to derive the ideal customer profile is to use a super user’s sales data and incorporate it into CRM, it will simplify the analysis process. Opting to source an ideal customer profile from a reliable data solution provider is also a feasible way to carry on with the process. As small and medium-sized businesses might not hold the capacity to drive in-house data analysis. This opens a window to collaborate with the industry in particular, which can guide you better.
Profiling:
When the analysis is done, profiling needs to be done. The best way to continue the process is not to over complicate it. Keep the templates plain and simple so that they are easily accessible by different teams within the organization. At the same the information can be sourced easily by the tools that is used in the organization.
Here is a simple example of an ICP template (it sheds light on what data is needed to develop an ICP; the data fields vary from industry to industry. Lastly, the more the data fields, the better insight about the ideal customer profile.)
- Industry: B2B/SAAS
- Geography: USA
- Employee size: 50
- Budget: $10,000
- Buying Process: Reliance on referrals for buying decision
- Decision Makers: CEO, CRO
- Pain Points: Generating high-quality c-suite leads, automating outbound email campaigns, and increasing sales productivity.
- Business Goals: Grow their client base by 20% in the following three months/ long term- raise the bar for the next funding round and expand their sales team.
- Attributes: Majorly used social media profile: LinkedIn/ gaining a reputation as SAAS industry thought leader/ Uses AMB strategy.
Refine your Findings:
We have mentioned it once, and one cannot overstate the vitality of how crucial it is to keep updating the marketing and sales ICP. It enables your business to adapt better to the changes happening with in the industry and within the client base.
Tips for Updating your ICP:
- Look for feedback: Reach out to the person in the organization who works with customer feedback. As 90% of the organizations depend upon customer feedback to know their product better. Also, check out the organization review portals, such as G2 (if you are a SAAS or a technology company)
- Examine your website traffic: Take note of the website pages generating maximum traffic and leads. This will give you an idea of where your ideal customers are coming from, what particular products and services they are interested in, and where they are coming from to understand your client’s mind-set. Together all of these information will help you refine your marketing channels.
- Study your revenue data: Analysing the revenue data helps the organization understand which customers have the most significant lifetime value. Understand the investment patterns of the customers who drive the biggest profits. Again, work on finding patterns in the multiple types of revenue generated by your business to improve ICP.
- Gather information from closed and won deals: To study closed and won deals, here are the following questions you need to focus on.
- Are their similar patterns in the recent successful deals?
- Is the lead source the same for all the ideal customer profiles, or is it different?
- How is ICP entering your sales pipeline?
- Did you do anything specific or different that boosted your sales cycle and the chances of success?
Now that we have touched upon all the crucial points related to ideal customer profiles, only one fact remains to be discussed: Why do organizations need an ideal customer profile when there are multiple successful ways to know about the target who will be interested in your offerings.
Why do you Need an Ideal Customer Profile?
How people acquire products is changing, and the change is happening faster than people usually think. However, you may wonder if the change in acquiring products can relate to creating ideal customer profiles.
To put it briefly, Ideal Customer Profile presents the most valuable investor for your product and services. It is the opposite of reaching out to your addressable market, as creating an ideal customer profile makes room for hyper-personalizing conversations with ventures interested in your solution. So, segmenting the market to find the best-case accounts leads to enormous profits when you nurture them well.
Conclusion:
Every B2B organization has one goal: to arrive at a closed sales point. In today’s time, B2B investors, collators, and buyers are posed with a vast array of options to choose from. Additionally, organizations also have tight budgets and numerous stakeholders involved in sales before a deal gets closed. That’s why researching out to who is your ideal customer profile benefits the company who have to promote its products and services. When you close deals with clients who belong to your ideal customer profile, they value your solution and continuously drive value from it, leading to positive word of mouth, which drives new clients.
Want a robust sales funnel that converts all of your potential leads? Yes! – Define your Ideal Customer Profile today!
