How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

11 min readAug 14, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In my previous article, I introduced you to the concept of an Ideal Customer Profile, and explained a few of the reasons why it is crucial for your brand to have one in place before embarking on your sales and marketing efforts. Just as a refresher, an ICP is a predefined set of characteristics which indicate which prospects have a high likelihood of purchasing your product or service, and of them, which will be best suited to your brand to aid you in your targeting and outreach efforts to help you see the best results from them. Essentially, it’s the type of customer who would receive the maximum value from your product or service, and would be of maximum value to your brand. If you missed this article and would like to read through it, read it here, “How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”.

Simply put: when you target only the best customers, you close more deals or leads. Not to mention using an ICP can also help reduce churn. When you attract the right type of customer in the first place, they’re more likely to stick around after the sale.

To be effective in your account or customer selection process, you need to be able to combine your instincts with historical performance and data science to be able to develop your brand’s Ideal Customer Profile. I will take you through the basic process and questions you should ask, for each of the main categories of ICP development below.

How Can Developing An Ideal Customer Profile Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Step 1: Finding Your Niche

#2 Step 2: Focusing On Your Past And Existing Customers

#3 Step 3: Diving Into The Data

#4 Step 4: Define How Your Customers Will Find You

#5 Step 5: Test And Optimize Your ICP

#6 What To Do Once You Have An ICP

Let’s dive in…

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#1 Step 1: Finding Your Niche

A crucial component of creating an Ideal Customer Profile is honing in on a highly-specific target market. This should take place before you begin the actual ICP development process, as this allows you to know what your brand looks like before taking a look at what your customers should look like. Finding your niche can be a challenge because many startups, and even existing brands, focus on a large total addressable market (TAM). But when you sell to everyone, you’re really selling to no one. This is why carving out a niche in the market is particularly important. Honing in on a single niche will the lay the groundwork for more focused sales and marketing strategies.

To find what makes your brand stand out from the competition, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What Is Your Unique Value Proposition?

What are the features and benefits of your offer? What is the unique selling point that ensures that customers will want to pay for your offer? How does this offer differ from anything else out there?

2. What Are Your Customers’ Pain Points?

Hone in on the main problem you’re solving. Identify which major pain points your product or service addresses. Consider what key characteristics a customer has and is aware of that the pain points you identify, your product can solve.

3. How Do You Solve These?

Identify how your product or services solves these pain points, and what value your offer will be able to provide your customers.

4. What Makes You Different From Your Competitors?

As with your unique value proposition, what makes your offer stand out? You may want to look at how your competitors are positioning similar products to see how you can set yours apart from the rest.

Once you’ve given some thought to how you want to position your brand and its offers to your customers, you can begin the process of developing an Ideal Customer Profile.

#2 Step 2: Focusing On Your Past And Existing Customers

You need to be able to ask yourself the following basic questions about your past and existing customers, amongst others that may be more company or customer-specific, in order to begin drafting your ICP:

What types of customers or companies have given you sales success in the past?
What types of past prospects have been most profitable over time?
What industries or customer segments have you targeted in the past?
What problems do your offers solve for these companies or customers?
Why were these past clients the best fit for your brand?
What value did these clients deliver you?

The list of questions you can ask yourself about your past and existing customers is endless, but depending on the type of brand you are, and what information is of most value to your strategy, you will be able to come up with an ICP that is unique to your business, as what makes your clients unique to your brand will differ from that of other brands.

#3 Step 3: Diving Into The Data

No matter which approach you take in your ICP selection process, whether it be manual or predictive, data must always play a critical role.

The four most commonly looked at inputs, apart from your historic account data, are the following:

• Firmographics

• Technographics

• Intent Data

• Engagement Data

Data, over anything else should be the main fuel behind your account selection process, as an ICP based more on science than on art, gives you concrete, and reliable information to use to your brand’s advantage.

Firmographics

Which company or customer characteristics can best predict a successful sales process? Well, the chances are that you already have a good idea of which clients are the most likely to deliver the best results, but in order to ensure that your ideas and the data are aligned, and are not pointing in different directions, you could use the following firmographic dimensions, amongst others to build on your ICP:

B2B Companies:

The company size
The number of employees in that company
The company’s industry
The company’s growth stage
The number of stores, offices and locations of the company
Their estimated revenue
The people most likely involved in the decision making process

To find this data you can take a look at Annual Reports, LinkedIn, Third Party Data Vendors, and the net in general — if you dig deep enough, you’ll be able to find these answers, and a whole lot more.

B2C Companies:

Where are your best-fit customers located?
What is your target market’s age group?
Which gender does your product appeal to the most?
What household earning bracket are you looking to target?
Are you targeting families of certain sizes of individuals?
Are you targeting people with specific job titles or roles?
What other demographics or character traits do these customers have in common?

To find this information, you can browse social media, take a look at your Google Analytics or social platform analytics, and past customer reports and more to find what details your ideal customers have in common.

Technographics

Do you know what technologies your target customers or accounts are looking to currently invest in or use. By knowing if a company or client is using technologies such as Marketo, Salesforce, or SAP for example, in the B2B space, or if your customers are using certain apps or tech in the B2C space, it can tell you a lot about the type of solutions that these prospects are looking for, helping you to quickly identify if your solutions are going to appeal to them.

This Approach Allows You To Identify:

Complementary technologies to yours, that may indicate that these companies or customers are looking to use similar technologies in the future
Technologies that they are using that rules out your solution to these prospects
And more

The Following Data Sources Can Help You Find This Information:

Desk research such as looking at forums, job boards, social media, etc
Competitive intelligence firms
Web scraping technologies
And more

Click here to see how brands like Mute Six used their clients’s Ideal Customer Profiles to execute precisely targeted Facebook ad campaigns.

Intent Data

Well, let’s start with what intent data is. Intent data includes any behavioral data that suggests that a company or customer is actively seeking solutions like yours at this current time. For B2B, this can help you identify the companies that your website visitors are working for, as well as the decision makers that are in those companies’ buying teams to help you see what type of companies are looking for your solution. For B2C consumers, you can use analytics software to help you identify which consumers have the most engagement and interest in your brand and various products to help you determine intent.

Intent Data Might Include:

Which B2B or B2C visitors are coming to your website
What offerings they are focusing on
What topics these prospects are searching for on your site or on your social profile
If they actively participate in forums on your offering types
What content they download, etc

The list is endless, and depending on what type of software you use, you can definitely expand on the information you can collect that indicates intent. You can use some tech and software such as Google Analytics, social or website specific analytics, heat mapping tools like Hotjar, etc.

Engagement Data

When selecting the prospects that your brand is looking to target, it simply makes sense to consider those that are already in the works. Taking your current prospects into consideration, and evaluating their current level engagement with your brand and its offerings, it may help you to see which types of prospects need to be more focused on over others. Here are some of the often overlooked sources of data that you should be looking at in addition to your CRM data to help you monitor prospect engagement (you may realize that there is lot of effort and time wastage that has been overlooked as a result):

Facebook engagement
Twitter engagements
LinkedIn engagements
Pinterest saves
Content comments
Newsletter and email subscriber data
Website live chat data
Sales exec engagements
And more

Overall, Engagement data is an important part of your account selection methodology. But it’s unlikely to expose 100% of your high-potential accounts. You as a brand, will need to use a combination of all of these methods in order to begin to be able to prioritize your best-fit accounts that are most likely to drive revenue.

“It’s time to go where your buyers live: online.” — Jamie Shanks (CEO Of Sales For Life) @jamietshanks

#4 Step 4: Define How Your Customers Will Find You

While looking at the list you have compiled so far to define your Ideal Customer Profile, an important aspect is often overlooked in this process — figuring out how and where your customers will find your brand and offers. You may find this to be obvious and irrelevant, however, once you have identified your best-fit customers, you need to ensure that you get your brand’s message in front of them, as it does not help to identify your ideal customers as people who search for products on social media, but you continue advertising to them on search. In order to ensure that your customers are ideal for your brand, you need to be able to position yourself in front of the where they spend most of their time, and in a way that drives them to convert.

Depending on how much time and effort you are willing to put in, and which technologies you have available to you, you should be asking yourself the following questions, among others — these are to give you a basic idea of where you should start.

Where Do Your Customers Hang Out Online:

Are your existing or past customers searching on social, search or on the general web?
Are they involved in groups or forums?
Which social media network are they frequenting the most?
What content are they engaging with?
Do they engage with any of our competitors? And where?
Are you advertising to your customers where they spend most of their time?

Where Will Your Customers Find You Online:

How are prospects currently finding you?
What website or landing page will they visit?
How will you direct your prospects to this URL?
What search teams will they use to find your brand or offer?
What sort of content will they engage with?
Are you advertising in places that you will be found?

Most of this research requires manual labor, but there are tools available online to help you in most of these areas.

#5 Step 5: Test And Optimize Your ICP

When developing an Ideal Customer Profile it’s important to understand that it isn’t a static metric. Your ICP is fluid and can, and probably will, change over time. That being said, it’s important to test your ICP so you can refine and optimize it.

Here Is A Method To Test Your New ICP:

Set a timeframe for the ICP test-period: Determine how long you will test your ICP before evaluating its accuracy. A period of four to six months works well.
Set a goal to work towards: In order to measure the effectiveness of your ICP you should set a goal to work towards. Some example goals might be increasing MRR by a certain amount, generating a certain amount of new leads, or reducing churn by a specific percentage.
Monitor success towards that goal: After setting a goal, specify metrics you’ll use to track success towards that goal.
Analyze success and refine: At the end of the timeframe you established in point one, determine your progress towards meeting your goal. Then decide if you should take steps to refine the ICP before moving forward.

#6 What To Do Once You Have An ICP

After developing your ICP, you can begin to focus on developing other areas of your sales and marketing strategies.

Here Are Some Steps To Implement Your ICP:

Develop buyer personas: Develop personas for the key purchase decision-makers your sales and marketing teams will be targeting.
Align all teams: Ensure the ICP is clearly communicated across your sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams.
Find customers that align with the ICP: Use a prospect database to research and identify customers that match your ICP.
Develop and refine your sales and marketing strategies to align with the language your ideal customers are using, and create strategies on how you will reach your best-fit customers to drive them to engage and take action.
Continue to refine your ICP over time: Use the testing methodology outlined above to test and optimize your ICP over time.

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In my next article, “How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will take you through a few of the things that you should be aware of and avoid doing when developing your brand’s ICP. This is to aid you in avoiding the mistakes that have lead many brands down a rabbit hole that resulted in ICP chaos.

In this article, I will cover: