CMO & CCO: Ideal Customer Profiles

Ideal Customer Profiles can be your key to sales velocity, retention, recurring revenue, and CAGR (compound average growth rate). Have you also considered ICPs as your key to cost containment and EPS (earnings per share) growth?

Selling to the right type of customers makes everything better. Is your ICP truly ideal? Check-in with your Chief Operating Officer and VP-Customer Service:

• What are their biggest costs caused by customers? (refunds, escalations, complaints, inquiries, etc.)
• What types of customers are causing those costs? (what profile is NOT ideal)

When you check-in with these leaders who deliver the value that you promise, you'll discover how your ICP must be fine-tuned or overhauled.

Your Business Development managers may not have considered the bigger picture of success: brand integrity.

• Marketing and Sales earnestly establish value propositions: what your brand promises customers will receive and what they'll pay (money, time, etc.).
• You're dependent on the rest of your company to deliver your brand promise.
• Remedial costs to serve and brand switching are signs of gaps in your brand integrity: what you promised doesn't match reality. This is waste! Instead of layoffs, austerity, shrinkflation, etc., how about minimizing this waste?

Championing brand integrity is the ideal purpose of Chief Customer Officers. Who else is minding the gap? As a start, CMOs and CCOs and COOs can work together to give guidance to Business Development for Ideal Customer Profiles.

Contrary to traditional ICP guidelines, the brand integrity key is to segment your customers by natural patterns. These are apparent in Customer Service chat and audio logs: what is your customer trying to get done and why, and what is their consequence for gaps? I've found there are 2-4 overall natural patterns. Use these to create expectations personas. Then, evaluate these natural groups' revenue potential and cost to serve. This identifies what I call core-growth customers.

Core-growth customers as your ICPs are ideal:

• Their expectations match your firm's strengths
• Positive word-of-mouth, recommendations, and repurchase are organic
• Cost to serve is minimized (Customer Success, Customer Service, Loyalty programs, CX programs, and lots of tech and staffing that go with these)
• Employee experience improves (less external negativity, less dysfunction)
• Investors gain more (higher EPS and CAGR that's organically sustained)

Have you experimented with this approach?

Related articles:

1. CMO & CCO: Minding the Gap
2. CX Annuities Solve CX ROI & Tenure Dilemmas
3. 23 Customer Experience Practices to Stop in 2023

Author Lynn Hunsaker is Chief Customer Officer at ClearAction Continuum, providing?e-learning as remarkably powerful and efficient consulting. You can build competencies for achieving what's described in this article through the Experience Value Exchange, CX+EX+PX Strategy Masterminds Symposiums, and other resources at?ClearAction.com. You're welcome to join the Value Exchange today!

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