Defining a Customer Profile for B2B in 2022

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the foundation upon which your entire sales outreach should be based.

There's a saying, which is: "If you have a product for everyone, you'll have a message that interests no one," and that couldn't be more true for B2B, where prospects are busy professionals dealing with 1,000s of offers and pitches a day.

Your prospect needs to see your email, sales pitch, or advertisement as if it was written solely for them. It needs pain points that are truly unique, offers that are well thought out and exciting, and solutions that truly add value to their business or product.

Today, we're going to look at ICPs, how to define them, and how to market your solution or offer to the customer they're based on.

The 7 Qualities of an ICP

Just because someone might fit the demand of your offering, doesn't always mean they're the right prospect right now. To fully define who your audience is, you need to establish 7 key traits:

1. Readiness: Is your customer aware of the problem you're solving and WANTS to solve it?
2. Willing: They have the means and desire to act upon this problem, including accommodating your solution to fix it.
3. Able: They can pay you and take action.
4. It will work: Their current infrastructure means that your solution will actually solve their problem. In other words, this is a one-problem one-solution scenario.
5. They can afford your service - An obvious one but you need to determine if the prospect is worthwhile from a financial standpoint for you.
6. Potential for growth: Following your partnership, there are opportunities to grow together, up and cross sell, or expand the original partnership.
7. Advocacy: When your solution solves they're problem, they'll be in a position to spread the word, write you a testimonial or otherwise help you expand.

A note on ICPs for B2B vs B2C

Remember, however, that in the case of B2B, your ICP isn't a person, it's a company, a team, or a selection of stakeholders. It's easy to go overboard and create an actual customer profile, which is fine for B2C, but not relevant for B2B at all.

If you're unaware of how to define your ICP in this case, here are some things to help narrow your search:

• What is the size of their company?
• Where are they based?
• What is their revenue/turnover?
• How many people are in your ideal team?

Gathering data on your customer

Data is simply research that you can use to inform your search for that perfect ICP. You can't just wing this because it's easy to think up an ideal customer from your standpoint, without making an informed decision on the actual market.

If you don't have the targeting and research capabilities that we do at ScaleUpSales, then a good place to start is with your existing customers. Think about the information you've gathered from them.

How did they use your solution? What were their needs? Did they appreciate your pricing structure? How big are they? Etc.

With a large enough customer base, you can start to define trends, habits, and characteristics that truly represent who your ICP can and should be.

Remember, you don't define your ICP in isolation

Your ICP should be informed by your offering, but your offering should be informed by the needs of the market. If you start to notice that you're accommodating more clients with a better or different offer than your original, or that customers are starting to approach you with needs that you can solve, but that don't fit your original ICP, it's a sign that your messaging and offer should change to fit the market demand.

This has been very much the case with ScaleUpSales, as we have seen clients come to us in recent months with much more nuanced problems that need a variation or change on our original offering.

This includes content marketing, CRO, research, website audits and much more. As long as you're not straying out of your competence zone, adapting your product to market will not just make your ICP stronger, it'll mean you can reach a far larger swathe of potential new customers.

This is also why it's important to constantly update your ICP, to figure out where they're coming from, why they're coming to you, and what you can do to better accommodate them.

Who knows? In several months or years, you might have an ICP that is vastly different from your first iterations and that's okay! In fact, it's great! Your product and offering are just as much a work in progress and the beauty of a good ICP is that when done right and constantly improved, it can dramatically change and alter your own business's potential for the better!