How to create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

Success is a process that comes with consistency and accuracy. Being able to accurately define your customer profile becomes one of the most crucial steps while implementing a successful sales strategy. And for doing so, you need to identify and be attentive to your ICP or Ideal Customer Profile.

Ideal Customer Profile, widely known as ICP can be defined as the process of describing your ideal customers. Once you define and determine your ideal customers, you can then further direct your efforts toward the creation of a marketing campaign that delivers a strong message while resonating with their needs.

Maintaining an ICP benefits you and your company the most deriving from your products and services. These ICPs are most likely to continue buying from you and keep on using your product and making it an important stepping stone for the growth of your business.

An ideal customer profile will precisely let you know who you really want to target and why by assisting you with recognising significant qualities that your most regular buyers offer (or will share). Your ICP ought to generally be upheld with precise information and company firmographics, for example, technographic information, financing or IPO status, organisation size, income, industry and area.

Understanding this data before you start sales prospecting and moving leads through the lead qualification process is basic - it will assist you with arriving at better conclusions and decisions about which leads are worth pushing ahead in the sales cycle.

The buyer’s journey is constantly evolving and changing, and it’s changing quicker than at any time in recent history. In Jeff Bezos’ 2021 shareholder letter, Bezos stated that “customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less … and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes.”

Some sales leaders can also predict the speed of purchases that are about to happen in B2B marketplaces which will eventually be reflected in the B2B sales cycle as well.

Yet, how does the rising pace of sales cycles connect with creating an ICP? Consider it along these lines: If purchasers are pursuing choices quicker i.e. they are making their decisions faster, you, as a sales rep, should be very much in the know about what your item can mean for the prospect's main concern before you connect. In case, you can't offer worth to a prospect right away, you will get stuck at the entrance forever, thus, making the process of defining your ICPs crucial.

Your ICP brings out and outlines the highest level information of your clients or customers and the user personas who will be the ones directly involved within your ICP.

Upon determining who your ideal customer is, you can consistently tailor your entire effort towards creating a marketing campaign that is oriented with the most resonating message in accordance with their needs.

This stage might not seem like but is extraordinarily crucial for you to understand the deepest needs and requirements of your customers in order to sincerely connect with them to make seamless sales.

At times, ICPS are often confused and considered the same as user personas, however, they are not the one and same. Although both of them play a vital role in establishing your strategies, your user personas are created on the basis of ICP.

For instance, being a B2B service provider, you will consider your ideal customer to be a business that co-exists within a certain geographical area for ease of operation. Although is highly advantageous and simple enough, only a handful of organisations define their ideal customer, because once you determine your ICP, you can drive it towards your significant marketing advantages.

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So, how does an ICP aligns with sales and marketing?

Composing an ICP is an essential activity that requires an alignment in sales, marketing and leadership.

An ICP can illuminate your whole sales and marketing strategies and technique, from content creation to publicising and promoting your sales outreach, by simply addressing these queries:

1. What sort of message resonates with your best clients and customers? – By repeating and adapting scalable strategies focus on reaching, sustaining and nurturing the right prospects with the right message to increase your effectiveness.
2. What excludes/disqualifies them from purchasing? –By reducing the product awareness and promotion time, shorten your sales cycles from the stage of your buyer's journey. Qualified prospects may as of now be involving your rival or are in search of services like yours.
3. How would you communicate your worth? – Better-fit prospects and remarkable opportunities transform into better-fit customers who have lower churn rates.
4. What is the impact of expanded closed-won deals and bargains? – Those entering the pipeline are bound to have the financial plan, interest, and ability required for your product to have value.

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Why ICPs are absolutely necessary?

The vast majority when begin building sales channels do such simply by making a lot of advertisements and presentations and landing pages with sales copy they believe customers will want to hear. However, the problem is, this strategy isn't useful at all, and here's why:

Have you at any point ever started a business without planning a proper course of action? In the event that you have, perhaps things went acceptable for some time yet you ran into issues when new customers stopped coming. You were unable to sort out some way to draw in new ones.

Some of the time we think we know who our ideal client is, yet when we record it on paper, we understand it's not distinct.?Hence, we need to characterise a single client to interest them with a message that resonates.

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The following are a couple of additional advantages you will see and reap from creating an ICP:

? Your sales will flourish. Whenever you characterise and determine precisely who you're focusing on, your promotion dollars will be coordinated to the ideal individuals. You will quit squandering cash on individuals who are not your potential prospects, and you'll grow your conversion rates across your pipe which itself will likewise lessen your unit advertisement costs.

? You will automate more processes. Focusing all your efforts on one kind of client will permit you to work on your business and automate a greater portion of your lead generation. This will assist you with growing all the more without any problem.

? You will perform better for your clients. Knowing who your client is will assist you with tracking down better approaches to address their issues. This, thus, will make repeating business and references.

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Now that you know what is an ICP and how it benefits your business, you are basically prepared for creating one of your own. Creating your own personalised ICP is a piece of cake, and here’s how you can follow:

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Step #1: Compile and compose a list of your current customers

Conduct surveys of your current and present clients and customers and feature your best 5 who might want you to replicate if you would be able to.

However if you're in startup mode and don't have numerous clients yet, contemplate the client you might want to draw in. It would be really helpful to focus on clients who have cash and are developing.

To make such a list, you can ask yourself a few questions that feature your best clients such as:

? Who is my most profitable client?

? Which clients do I like and enjoy working with and for?

? Which clients gave me the most repeating business?

? Who has remained with me the longest?

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Based upon the time and resources that you've assigned to characterising your ICP, associating and connecting with your ongoing clients by means of email, a Zoom interview, or an overview, is one more incredible method for seeing precisely why they bought your product. Current clients can assist you with deciding how you can target accounts that could have a similar problem area, as they did.

In these meetings, reviews, surveys and so on, you truly need to get a sense of what you couldn't exactly quite gather and assemble from organisation information. Abstract inquiries like: "For what reason did you choose to buy our solution?" can be useful in grasping the needs and understanding your clients on a more profound level.

The following are a couple of sample questions you can ask in these meetings to more readily grasp individuals and the thinking behind their buying choices:

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? For what reason did you choose to buy our solution?

? Who was the ultimate decision-maker while settling on your purchase decision?

? What problem areas would you say you were hoping to tackle when you originally bought our solution?

? How has our product assisted you with addressing those problem areas?

? How would you utilise our product over the course of the day?

? What according to you is our most important component or usefulness?

? Why have you continued using our product?

? Where did you initially find out about our product?

? Where do you go for such information now?

?Combined with the organisational information you've previously assembled, these particular customer insights will assist you with a better comprehension of whom you ought to target moving ahead.

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Step #2: Analyze their similarities based on the data

Carefully analyse the list you have assembled of your top customer. Here you will conceptualise and do additional brainstorming and research on and about your clients.

Characterise as many attributes as you can for every client and search for shared characteristics between them. What is going right? As you notice these patterns, you will fabricate a comprehension of your ideal customer.

The most effective way to comprehend whom you ought to target is by investigating whom you're now winning with: your ongoing clients.

To start with, arrange or compile a list of your current customers and search over it to distinguish the biggest deals and the organisations you've sold that have gotten the most out of your product.

For SaaS organisations, an extraordinary method for surveying how much worth you're offering to your customers is working with your product group to distinguish your most active clients. One more key marker to search for is clients you've effectively upsold or potentially extended your agreement with.

Whenever you've reduced your client list to those getting the most value from your item, now is the ideal time to go trend spotting. Make and add a reduced list of current clients to a list so you can easily identify and spot likenesses between them.

When you have your list of clients prepared, spotting similarities seems simpler. The following are a couple of queries to pose to yourself as you're going across your list:

? Industry: Do your clients share a similar industry?

? Employee Size: What's your clients' average employee size?

? HQ Location: Where are your clients located?

? Founded Date: When were these organisations established?

? Funding Status: Do these organisations share a common financing or funding background foundation?

? Total Funding: Do these organisations have similar total funding amounts?

? Valuation: Do your clients share a typical valuation?

? Investors: Do your clients share similar or any common investors?

? Organisational Status: Are your clients for-profit, or non-profit?

? M&A Status: Have your clients been obtained, or procured by different organisations?

? Initial public offering Status: Are your clients generally all public companies or privately owned businesses?

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Did you come across any similarities yet? Preferably, you're beginning to see a couple of attributes that your current clients share. The more shared traits you can find, the simpler it will be to make your ideal client profile.

For now, write down the common traits that you are coming across in an accounting sheet or on some other document. It's essential to follow how the situation is playing out so you can return to this sheet as you make your ICP. Whenever you've assembled all the data you can from all the gathered information, now is the ideal time to settle the score more unambiguous by going directly to the source and asking your clients straightforwardly.

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Step #3: Create your ICP

Presently, now is the ideal time to assemble all that you've learned and create your personalised ICP. Keep in mind, that your ICP ought to archive the likenesses you've spotted while analysing your top clients, or the individuals who are getting the most worth out of your products.

There are a number of extraordinary ICP layouts and templates out there that can assist you with getting sorted out the information you've organised, and there's absolutely no pressure or any compelling reason to overcomplicate it. You might make your own ideal client profile layout utilising a simple spreadsheet or table and the questions stated previously.

Here are a few of the most widely recognised and common attributes you ought to remember for your ICP.

Key ICP Key Attributes

? Income/ Revenue

? Number of representatives/Employees

? Number of clients

? Financial planning and Budget

? Industry

? Geography

? Buying process

? External problem areas or pain points

? Inner pain points

The Takeaway

Try not to simply set up your ICPs only to disregard them. You ought to be rethinking your ICPs consistently.

Industry shifts and your organisation's development can affect who acquires the most worth from your contribution. While using your ICPs, you could observe that organizations that are theoretically a solid match aren't in actuality and have to adjust and compensate to make up for that. In addition, you could have to make new ICPs as you venture into new business sectors.

Thus, it's essential to layout and establish an interaction for guaranteeing that your ICPs keep on mirroring the clients that are the best fit for your organisation.