4 Steps to Create Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
ICP is all about identifying, sourcing, and prioritizing your best prospects. It's the finite resources for a business as it provides a set of prospects who will deliver the best return, and lest your team know the needed resources to keep them feeling supported, valued, and part of your community. Once you know your ICP well, you'll be aware of how to solve their pain point now and in the future.
A strong ICP = High-quality Sales Leads
In simple words, ICP(Ideal Customer Profile) is a combination of firmographic and behavioral characteristics that define an organization's most valuable customers. Creating a strategic ICP involve alignment of sales, marketing, and accounts teams, this lets you develop measurable strategies from personalized content creation to advertising to sales outreach for these top buyers.
Why ICP?
Helps you to reach and nurture the right prospects with the right message by providing you a clear picture of what type of messaging resonates with your best customers.
Gives you a heads up by providing the factors that may disqualify them from buying.
Offers increased closed-won deals by conferring the ideal strategy to communicate your value proposition.
Here are the four simple steps to create your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Find the Data - Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis to start looking into your current customer base also dig opportunity data from your CRM and add key information as needed. Uncover their common characteristics such as company revenue, employee counts, location, industry, or job titles, make it as detailed or general as your team needs, and then look for patterns.
Identify your Best Customers - Listing out all your customers doesn't lead you anywhere, you need to list out only the best customers accounts or the most profitable accounts that meet the highest net promote score, highest annual contract value, highest retention rate, and highest potential for growth. Also consider the customer lifetime value, customer advocacy, and product/service usages.
Find the Similarities - After listing out your best customers ask few important questions before getting started such as: Are they in a similar industry? Do they have a common geographic location? What's the employee count at these accounts? Are all organizations are in the same stage of life? Use your segmentation tools to segregate each set of customers and make the foundation of your ICP, by now you will be having a set of best future customers.
Prioritize and Implement - Final step is to identify the ones that really matter based on the results of your evaluation such as the best fit, good fit, and bad fit. Once you have identified ICP don't waste your time drifting around aimlessly in the ocean of prospecting possibilities, gear up and prioritize and align your resources and strategies in approaching these customers with best-buying solutions.
Always revisit your ICP data to reevaluate the fit ratings over time and to reassess resource allocation and strategies.
Check out our previous article about How Predictive Sales Analytics Drives Actionable Insights & Boost your ROIs