Defining Your Ideal Customer During the GTM Design Phase
Jonathan Moss
Revenue + AI Executive & Operator | Board AI & GTM advisor | Optimizing GTM operating systems and building AI for Founders & GTM teams | Speaker & Podcast ??? Host | Revenue Architect |
Growth is the lifeblood of any business. Without acquiring new customers, your company will stagnate and decline. This makes the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy critically important. The GTM design phase sets the foundation for success by outlining how to efficiently acquire and retain high-value customers.
Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) stands out as one of the most pivotal GTM design steps. Your ICP informs everything from messaging and positioning to channel selection and campaign tactics. Taking the time upfront to intimately understand your ideal customers will pay dividends across the entire customer lifecycle.
In this post, we will explore best practices for optimizing the GTM design phase by creating a detailed ICP. You will learn:
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Crafting an Actionable Ideal Customer Profile
Your ideal customer profile is a semi-fictional representation of your best customer segment. The ICP should be specific enough to guide your go-to-market motions yet broad enough to represent a meaningful total addressable market (TAM).
Here are the key elements to include in your ideal customer profile:
Demographics
Psychographics
Buying Process
Pain Points
Objectives
Vividly detailing these elements brings your ICP to life. You want the ICP description to feel like a real person that you truly understand as a buyer. This empathetic understanding allows you to effectively tailor messaging and positioning.
Let’s look at some real-world examples of ideal customer profiles done well.
Real-World Examples of Compelling ICPs
HubSpot created an ICP representing a small business owner looking for marketing software:
This ICP contains vivid details about the profile’s background, mindset, behaviors, challenges, and goals. The description tells a story that HubSpot’s marketing team can intuitively grasp and use to guide campaign development.
Salesforce created an ICP for a chief revenue officer evaluating sales software:
Again, the storytelling brings this ICP to life. You can imagine who this person is, what keeps them up at night, and why they would buy Salesforce. This degree of buyer intimacy pays dividends.
Both examples contain the ideal level of detail. Now let’s look at data sources that can inform effective ICP development.
Leveraging Data to Build an Insightful ICP
Every ICP starts with assumptions about an attractive customer segment for your offering. To transform these hypothesized ICPs into well-informed profiles, incorporate data from the following sources:
Customer Research
Surveys, interviews, and focus groups with current buyer personas provide direct insights into their thought processes. Analyze trends in their responses to reveal inclinations.
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Buyer Psychology Studies
General market research into buyer psychology and trends by industry, role, geography, etc. can help you model your ICP’s attitudes.
Firmographics
Statistics describing your existing customer base - industry breakdowns, revenue ranges, etc. - can inform your ICP demographics.
Customer Analytics
buyer journey analytics expose how current customers research, evaluate, and buy your offering. Use this behavioral data to define your ICP’s buying process.
Sales Insights
Feedback from sales reps on why buyers purchase, what objections arose, what closes deals etc. provides qualitative insights into customer pain points and motivations.
Total Addressable Market Data
Market projections for your offering’s addressable buyer base helps ground your ICP size estimates.
Competitive Intelligence
Research competitor ICPs and messaging positioning to find white space opportunities where your ICP can stand apart.
These data sources enable you to back up your ICP with facts. The more insights you can gather, the better. Now let’s discuss how to actually apply your ICP.
Putting Your Ideal Customer Profile to Work
An insightful ICP serves as the North Star guiding your GTM strategy and tactics. With a solid understanding of your ideal buyer, you can:
Craft Resonant Positioning
What messages and positioning will most appeal to your ICP? Know their pain points and objectives to frame your offering as the perfect solution.
Identify The Right Channels
Determine the digital platforms, media outlets, events, etc. your ICP engages with in order to prioritize your outreach accordingly.
Personalize Sales Conversations
Equip sales reps with your ICP knowledge to tailor pitches and relate to prospects struggles.
Focus Product Development
Prioritize your roadmap around capabilities that serve high-value use cases for your ICP.
Develop Targeted Ads
Create tailored ad messaging and target profiles matching your ICP demographic, psychographic, and firmographic data.
Send Relevant Emails
Segment your email lists around ICP attributes to deliver personalized value focused on their needs in each send.
Build Thought Leadership
Craft content around your ICP’s interests and pain points to attract and engage your ideal buyers.
Win Advocates
Delight customers matching your ICP with tailored experiences to turn them into referrals and case studies.
Defining your ideal customer profile is the most foundational step in optimizing your GTM strategy and go-to-market motions. Taking the time upfront to build an insightful ICP with demographic, psychographic, buying process, pain point, and goal data empowers more effective execution across all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Use the real-world examples and data sources provided above to ensure your ICP description feels like a real person and rings true for your offering. Then keep this profile at the heart of your messaging, development, and marketing to grow sustainable business value.
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Growth @ Nooks | We're Hiring!
1 年Love that you are advocating to start the sales process with deep analysis of ICP. For many teams, defining the ICP is just a matter of using a few Apollo filters for industry, headcount, and funding and then clicking 'search.' The problem with this is that keyword based searches often leave out important companies or include the wrong ones. For example, if you put 'B2B' in Apollo, you won't get companies with B2B business models, you'll get companies with B2B in the name. Others have confusing categorization. John Deere is actually listed as a being in the 'machinery' industry but has 'agriculture' as a keyword. One could easily argue that the industry and keyword should be swapped. This is an area that we've had a lot of success integrating generative AI. Rather than using strict keyword based search, we use generative AI to explore topics that are related to your search word, even if you don't list all possibilities.
VP | GM | GTM Leader | Scaling Tech Organizations across EMEA
1 年Funnily enough, I would add leveraging advanced analytics and AI to refine customer personas, going beyond traditional demographics to include behavioural data and predictive modelling. Besides that, maybe using quantitative methods to validate the ICP, such as A/B testing different aspects of the GTM strategy with segments of the target market. Great post and video, Jonathan!
AI for Audience Insights | Full Stack Revenue Leader
1 年An underrated aspect of researching your ICP: talking directly to customers. Noting the specific language that your customers use to talk about what delights them, their pain points, etc is a way to craft a truly rich customer profile.
Revenue Operations | Fractional CRO | Fintech & eCommerce Executive | Growth Hacker | Non-Profit Board Member | Army Veteran
1 年Well said, Jon.
CMO @ Consilio | Fortune 500 Leadership | ex-Microsoft
1 年Great read, Jonathan! I often lean into really engaging customer pain points, I love how alongside those you bring in really understanding their goals.