Imagine there’s a file that was worked on by every founding member, considered the Holy Grail of your internal Google Drive, used by every team, and forever in edit mode, now guess the file, if you didn’t guess ‘ICP document’, then this blog is definitely for you.
(If you did guess it right, you should still read this because, who doesn’t like to learn something new everyday?)
An Ideal Customer Profile(ICP) is a description of the type of company that is most likely to benefit from your product or service, and who is also most likely to be willing to pay for it.
A well-defined ICP paves the way for sustained growth would be an understatement.
In simple terms,
Using the ICP document should be a keystone habit at work for all the relevant teams.
A well-defined ICP can be used by,
An ICP document should have the following:
For a well-rounded look at what an ideal organisation who could purchase and use your product, the following has to be defined clearly:
1. The size of the organisation and the size of the team that will be using your product or service. This will help you define a clear and tangible ROI for your product. The price of your product and the duration of the sales cycle should be taken into consideration. For example, if you sell a premium software solution or an implementation heavy product, you may want to target larger companies with more resources and sales cycles tend to be longer. On the other hand, if you sell a more affordable solution, you can consider SMBs.
Example:
Employee size: 1000 - 4999, 5000 - 10,000 & 10,000+
AND
Employees working in Engineering & IT business functions > 20% of the company.
2. The primary industry to focus your marketing and sales efforts: If your product or service is applicable for several industries, the following should be considered while defining which ones will serve as your primary industries:
Example Industries:
Tier 1: Financial Services, Insurance, Banking, Hospital and Healthcare
Tier 2: Internet, Information Technology & Consulting and Software development
Tier 3: Energy, Retail, E-commerce and Hospitality
3. The primary region. This is extremely important to account for as you would have to shift your marketing strategy to work for that region specifically. Different regions can respond differently to the same messaging due to cultural and workplace changes. For example, if you’re going to focus on North America, language, tone of voice has to be catered to their taste so all customer facing collaterals would have to be tailored to them.
Example Geographic:
P0 : US, UK, Canada & Australia
P1 : Germany, Netherlands, NORDICS, Singapore & South korea
P2 : India, Philippines, Brazil & Argentina.
4. The organisation’s tech stack.This is an interesting aspect to account for while defining key accounts, where you can segment accounts on the basis of the current tools an organisation uses. For example, if your product works closely with a CRM, then approaching accounts that currently have Hubspot CRM or Salesforce CRM.
Example:
For a company that is into customer data loss prevention on communication channels, it would make sense to target companies that use Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Zoho desk, ServiceNow, etc..
The rule of thumb while drafting your buyer persona is to be detailed and capture the challenges and motivations of these decision makers.
You can get started by speaking to at least 50 individuals, across countries, from relevant teams to understand who they are and then analyse the data to find visible patterns. You can bring all these patterns together to create personas that will act as proxies to develop the targeted campaigns and key account lists.
Don't just say that your ideal customer is a "senior marketing manager." Instead, say that your ideal customer is a "senior marketing manager at a mid-sized tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
Here are a list of fields to capture in your buyer persona:
Your ideal buyer is constantly changing, so you need to update your buyer persona regularly. This ensures that your marketing and sales efforts are always targeted at the right people.
*JTBD here refers to the actual day-to-day tasks and the needs and challenges that arise from it
Frequently, user personas aren’t included in ICP documents but having a highly-specific user persona as part of it keeps teams, like marketing and sales, regularly reminded of the actual users of the product since the decision makers are not always ones using it everyday.
The same fields as buyer persona would be applicable here but special focus on:
Once you’ve identified who the decision makers/buyers are, you can find the roles who would become the influencers of this buying decision.
Champions are people who can be advocates for your product internally. They’re frequently much closer to the users of the product than the buyers.
You can define influencers and champions with the same depth as buyers.
However, when it comes to influencers, it is helpful to map out what their concerns with this product or service might be so SDR and sales teams can be prepared for their interference in the later stages of the sales cycle or on demo calls. This is why influencers must also be part of the ICP document.
For example, for a marketing automation product, the Head of Marketing could be the buyer and the Director of Marketing Ops could be an influencer.
It could look something like this:
The final part is to how to maintain your ICP document such that it does not lose its value over time.
Here are the most important ways to maintain it:
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