Sales Funnel Development: How Much IAP Matters And Why It Can Shape Or Break Your Business?

Are you focusing your sales resources on the right companies? To be able to answer YES to the question above, you need to define who your Ideal Account Profile (IAP) is. This action is basic if you want to maximize the relevance of your marketing as well as the results of your sales efforts.

We can all agree that the key objective of every B2B company is revenue growth. Having this in mind, one would think organizations would capitalize on any available advantage to increase the percentage of deals that close. Thus, creating an Ideal Account Profile in the B2B world is just such an advantage. Moreover, it also provides a number of other benefits.

Account-based marketing program (ABM)

Account-based marketing (ABM) programs have shown to be wildly successful primarily because they focus on generating revenue from a carefully selected list of target accounts. In other words – they pick and reach out to companies that are a great fit for the solution they offer.

The call to action here is the following one: Instead of waiting for leads to come to your sales funnel, your sales and marketing teams should closely collaborate to select high-quality B2B leads and then turn your target accounts into customers and advocates for your brand.

Not having a carefully developed IAP can break your business?

Absolutely. Despite how much we stress the importance of developing Ideal Account Profile, still, many B2B companies the creation process more or less confusing. Also, they don’t define IAP properly, so it becomes limited in its use.

Businesses nowadays are in such a rush to get to the revenue point, forgetting that carefully developed ICP is a critical foundational element of the sales funnel development (and your golden ticket for a better start). Without an ICP, B2B companies struggle to align efforts to create a shared list of target accounts.

Basing your Customer Profile of a gut feeling leaves a lot of room for error in judgment. When using insights from open data to understand who your Ideal Account Profile is, it can definitely minimize the risk of missing many of the less obvious indicators of accounts that you and your team should ideally target when developing the B2B sales funnel.

Especially in the early days of running a business, turning away sales can be difficult. But no amount of cash can make up for selling to the wrong customers, right?

Let’s say you convince someone to purchase your product, but that company is not your ideal customer. As a result, they won’t get value or see benefits from using it – they are going to destroy your business.

The consequences

The consequences can be the following:

• First, creating an insane amount of support needs;
• Second, complaining and adding a lot of negativity to your company culture and sales and marketing teams;
• Third, bombarding you with feature requests;
• Last, trying to influence your product roadmap in a direction you shouldn’t take.

Inevitably, the wrong customers are going to agitate. And what is worst of all, they won’t do that quietly. They are probably going to write a blog post about their bad experience or tweet about you, or just tell anyone who will listen how terrible your product is. Do you want that? Is it worth it?

How IAP can shape your business?

By contrast, in high-growth companies, the IAP is integral to B2B marketing and sales strategy and its execution. A detailed ideal account profile is going to help you develop your sales funnel and maximize your sales efforts.

As an outcome, you will get satisfied customers that will stay with you for a long time, thus increasing the lifetime value (LTV). Furthermore, you can even upsell and cross-sell to them later on. They can serve as enthusiastic champions and ambassadors of your brand as well.

Defining your Ideal Account Profile will help you to:

• Firstly, focus your sales and marketing efforts on the companies that are most likely to buy from you (they have a real need of your solution);
• Secondly, sell to companies with the highest success potential of using your product or service;
• Thirdly, prevent draining time from your Customer Success team;
• Last, but not least, eliminate the risk of costing your company more than can be gained from the partnership itself.

After all, when developing an IAP, it all comes down to providing value. The account characteristics should indicate that they as clients would receive significant value from your product or service. In turn, they will provide significant value to your business as well.

The Starting Point

You don’t just fabricate an ideal account profile out of thin air. A good starting point would be if you just start by looking at your happiest customers. For example, ask them how they found your business, what made them choose your solution in this crowded B2B market. Or, why they continue to work with your company.

As with everything really worth having – finding your Ideal Account Profile takes plenty of work. There is no universal “IAP” definition out there. The set of defined criteria are constantly evolving, as different businesses stand to gain utility from your product or service at different intervals of time.

Want more tips?

BizzBee Solutions Outbound Growth Plan not only helps you find quality leads matching your ideal account profile. We even generate them from scratch by revealing their firmographic details, industry characteristics, company needs, and pain points, before reaching out directly to the decision-maker.

However, you don’t even need to do anything. Hence, sit back and focus on your other priorities within the company. Also, leave us to conduct out 3-months plan to unlock your growth potential.

Last, but not least, curious to know more? We are happy to give you a tour of our bulletproof Outbound Growth Strategy.

Final Words

To conclude, it is not just about finding customers. It is about finding the right ones for your business too.

Check it out: https://www.bizzbeesolutions.com/outbound-growth-strategy

This article was originally published on BizzBee Blog.