Champify转发了
I’m BLOWN AWAY by how VAGUE and loosely defined the Ideal Customer Profile (ICPs) are for mature sales and marketing orgs. Here is a typical answer I hear, what’s wrong with it, and an example of what GREAT looks like: BACKGROUND In my role as CEO of Champify, I talk with hundreds of prospective and current customers. One of the first things we talk about is their ICP and what their understanding of a “great" target account looks like. I often hear an answer that sounds like this: ““We can kind of sell to anyone. As long as they are above X employees and are in Y industry.” When I dig deeper, it becomes clear they really don’t know what a great fit looks like. The problem here is that with a broad ICP, It’s nearly impossible to market, sell, prospect, qualify, or understand where to spend your time and $ efficiently as a GTM org. Here is a WORLD CLASS example of Chili Piper’s clearly defined ICP and how they prioritize accounts from both sales and marketing: MUST HAVES: *Using Salesforce or Hubspot CRM *In B2B *Has a “contact us” or “free trial” CTA on their site NICE TO HAVES THAT INFLUENCE THE POTENTIAL FIT: *More than 10 reps *High influx of leads *Mix of specialized roles (AE, AM, CSM) *Using a marketing automation solution (marketo, pardot, etc) *Using Sales Engagement tooling *In app optimization tooling EVEN MORE LIKELY TO BUY: *More than 100 FTEs *Has SDRs Notice how clearly defined this is -- using multiple technographics, line of business headcount, business model, and more. TAKEAWAY Vague ICPs are killing sales and marketing productivity. The best GTM teams figure out the most detailed variables and characteristics of their ideal targets and then build process to maximize time/effort with those accounts as possible. PS: Shoutout to Jon Itkin for the breakdown
I think its ok to have a broad customer profile ( BCP - made that up) and then a truely ideal customer profile. B/c lots of tools can sell to a huge market. Think CRM or accounting software or a CMS or zoominfo or something. But you should also have an idea of what your perfect customers and most successful customers look like and understand why.
Couldn't agree more. It's a reasonably simple thing to analyze and score, but after that point most companies do a surprisingly bad job at keeping outbound reps within their ICP parameters.
I have seen similar. Not only is there a broad customer definition but there is a lack of understanding of the purpose of an ICP. As an example, I read one of the comments on your post where someone stated that “lots of tools can sell to a huge market”. Yes, they can and do but that is not the point of defining an ideal customer profile(s). The purpose is to help focus your resources and efforts on the group of customers you can win more decidedly - against alternatives in the market -based on your differentiation. Focusing allows a more concerted effort resulting in a higher probability of success. If you are not focused, by definition you are unfocused. Then there are many people, who call themselves marketers, that do not understand the difference between an ICP and a Persona. But that post/comment might be left for another day.?
Great insights, Todd Busler! A well-defined ICP is like a compass for sales and marketing. It’s amazing how clarity can drive results. How do you think companies can start refining their ICPs to be more like Chili Piper's?
Chili piper disqualified the last company I was working at from buying because we didn’t meet their ICP criteria. Can you imagine??? A sales org TURNING PEOPLE AWAY??
The simpler your solution, the easier this is. The more mature your solution & market, the easier this is. Everyone should push for the specificity you've got here, but if you're at a startup / working with a complex enterprise product this will be a moving target. Until you're at scale, the process & dialog to review & align is at least as important as arriving at a set in stone ICP model.
Think companies really do not consider technographic aspects of their ICP enough.
Todd you're on a heater with your posts lately. keep it up
Love this. Just ran this exercise internally to narrow our outbound. Very good decision.
CEO @ Jump | 3x Dad | 2x Revenue Leader | 1x Founder
4 个月At Botify I went in thinking that anyone that cared about organic traffic (literally most online businesses) was someone I could sell to...dead wrong. It wasn't until we realized you had to have over ~50,000 URLs , an seo team of more than 2 people, cared about technical SEO etc... that we started to see our conversion rate tick up. Ton of wasted time.