Mission Impossible? Finding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Distilling the information that makes up an ideal customer can sometimes feel like an impossible mission. If you are a #startup #founder trying to make sense of your ideal customers, it can be likened to you being Ethan Hunt in the ‘Mission Impossible’ series, trying to scale an impossible cliff with bare hands that are quickly losing their grip.

Businesses often face challenges in consistently identifying #customer needs, staying updated on those needs, and getting different departments to coordinate on their messaging to those needs. A simple, yet effective, solution to those problems is developing an Ideal Customer Profile.

An Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is the hypothetical perfect customer for your company. It is not the same as a buyer persona, which focuses on the characteristics of the people involved in decision making. Instead, an ICP describes the collection of company attributes such as specific industry niches, size, revenue, unique challenges or pain faced, maturity with respect to your product or service, budget, geography, and other firmographic data that would make up the most valuable customer for your company. Often the most mature companies look at their ICP beyond the usual suspects. These companies have been able to identify specific filters that are unique to their own world while identifying their ideal customer.

Organisations with a strong ICP have 68% higher win rates. Having an ICP allows you to better understand customer needs, customise and personalise marketing, discover opportunities to improve product-market fit, and keep your product, marketing, and sales teams in alignment with each other. By far its most important use, however, is to easily target and qualify leads by comparing them to the criteria of the profile. It is still surprising to note that many companies continue to struggle with their ICP. A study by MarketingSherpa found that 75% of companies were not using buyer personas to inform their marketing strategy.

Around 37% of social media users buy a product that they see a targeted ad for. It’s no secret that targeted marketing increases the amount of engagement you get – a McKinsey study found that companies that thrive at personalization earn 40% more money from personalised content than their competitors. Targeted messaging and marketing increases lead generation, but it also helps you get higher-quality leads.

Using your ICP to inform the personalisation of your messaging can help focus your marketing and avoid low-quality or unlikely-to-convert leads. Ideal Customer profiles can also improve account-based marketing, working as a template for finding ABM targets. It informs the direction personalisation should take, and provides data to use for personalised emails. But what continues to amaze me is this stat from a survey by Aberdeen Group – Only 28% of respondents reported having a well-defined customer profile that is consistently applied across their organisation.?

A Template to Build your ICP

There are many different approaches you can take to start building your ICP. In fact there are multiple templates and really useful blogs out there that can help aid in building an ICP Hypothesis. Here are some we definitely recommend:

• ?3 Step Guide: How to create your Ideal Customer Profile
• ?How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile for B2B Leads (ICP Guide)
• ?How to create an ICP with a template

We? recommended starting with an introspective approach. Most of the #founders and startup leaders we connect with to help in this initiative, often have most of the answers around the ICP questions. The challenge has almost always been the ability to translate this understanding into a clear comprehensible format for others in the company to use and leverage. By responding to simple questions around the ideal customer, we have seen founders bring out deep insights that transform their messaging and value. You can find a number of ICP templates online to suit your needs, but here is a basic template that I prefer to use.

This simple format uses four underlying factors to build? an initial ICP that you can test:?

1. The first is demographic and firmographic data. What are the features of the companies your product is aimed at? What kind of buyer personas would this product appeal to most?
2. We then look at psychographic inputs. What are the issues and pain points the customer is facing that your product will solve? In other words, what is the value your product will add for them? Going into detail on this will also provide context for your sales messaging. I call this section - "Value Themes"
3. What are the ongoing industry trends you will have to align yourself with or differentiate yourself from? What are future triggers that could inform your sales approaches? Another factor to consider is whether an inbound or outbound sales strategy will win you more success with the ICP, and whether your your product is better suited to a sales-led or product-led approach
4. ?What might be the business impact for the customer if the problem increases in intensity? What larger strategic challenges might come up due to the status quo, both for the customer and for your product? We are ideally looking to assess the anxiety your customer will face if no resolution to pain is found.

This template is useful because it isn’t limited to building the ICP – it also begins to explore sales and marketing messaging that might be the most effective. If you, as a founder, do not have answers to these questions, then it's a great opportunity for you to set out sales experiments to find out the same. More of this is covered in the “Testing your ICP” section of this article.

Gathering Data to Build ICP

In "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol," Ethan Hunt and his team gather intelligence on the villainous Hendricks, including his past behaviour, known associates, and even his physical abilities. Similarly, when creating a customer profile, businesses need to consider a variety of factors to get a complete picture of their target audience. The main categories of this data are:

• Firmographic data: Data that is collected at the organisation level. This usually only applies to B2B companies, and can include information like the size of the company and number of employees it has, its annual turnover, industry, and so on.
• Demographic data: Data that usually correlates to an individual, like age, location, job title, income, goals, and challenges. This information can also be useful in building a buyer persona, which should be used alongside your ICP.?
• Psychographic data: Information about a person’s values, motivation, and attitudes, and helps personalise marketing and #sales efforts. Buyer profiles also fall under this category, and are very useful in a #B2B context when used in tandem with an ICP

The best way to determine which data is useful to you is to collect data on pre-existing successful, high-value #sales and analyse it for patterns or trends. This will help you build a data-informed ICP rather than a purely hypothetical one. Dwelling deeper into your CRM for past customer data or even having an analysis done on win/loss cases from the last 12 months of your sales #pipeline, can throw up multiple insights on your ICP criteria. . Look for common factors that tie many, if not most, of your successful clients together. Do also include feedback from your delivery or execution teams to assess best customer fit. Your largest customer may NOT be equal to your best customer. Ease of delivering business should be given as much weightage as ease of procuring business.?

Testing your ICP

Here are some suggestions to help you test for ideal customer profile using outbound sales techniques:

1. Start with your current customers: What are the common characteristics of your most successful customers? What are their pain points? What are their goals? Once you have a good understanding of your current customers, you can start to develop your ideal customer profile.
2. Use outbound sales to reach new prospects: When you're reaching out to new prospects, be sure to focus on those who match your ideal customer profile. Use your outbound sales techniques to qualify leads and determine whether they're a good fit for your product or service.
3. Track your results: It's important to track your results so you can see which outbound sales techniques are most effective for reaching your ideal customer profile. This will help you optimise your outbound sales strategy and get better results. It will also feed into inputs and data that can help tweak your ICP.

Ongoing Analysis and Iteration?

In almost every Mission Impossible movie, Agent Hunt & his team face unexpected challenges and have to constantly adjust their plans based on new information.

As Mission Commander Swanbeck tells Agent Hunt, “This is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it's mission impossible. "Difficult" should be a walk in the park for you.”?

The same can be said of your journey with your ICP. After all the work you’ve put into founding a startup, building an ICP is not as hard as it might seem! Following some of the guidelines I’ve shared today should help you make better sense of your ICP.

Creating an ideal customer profile will allow you to focus your targeted marketing efforts, gain a better grasp on customer needs, qualify leads faster, and generally increase your success.Consistently revisiting your customer profiles based on feedback and new data will ensure that your sales & marketing efforts remain effective and relevant.?

Thankfully, this blog will not self-destruct in 5 seconds. Share, comment, repost this article if you found it valuable. I would love to hear what you think.

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