Understanding and prioritizing our prospecting efforts through the use of an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can improve prospecting efficiency and effectiveness tremendously.
Unfortunately, many salespeople and organizations fail to utilize this foundational tool when developing their prospecting strategies. The resulting outcome is salespeople treating all customers as equal opportunities and investing equal amounts of time, energy, and resources into developing those new-business relationships.
This diminishes our return on investment, costs us opportunities, and wastes our valuable resources.
We can improve our efforts greatly by using a set of predetermined criteria defining the preferred and optimal characteristics of our ideal customer. This will help us identify prospects with the greatest ROI, who benefit most from our product/service, and who we should pay the most attention.
Let’s make something very clear, all relationships matter, all customers matter. Whether they’re your highest volume customer or lowest, they all deserve a great customer experience.
With that being said, the reality is, you only have so much time in a day and if you want to deliver the best results for your company, customers, and self, you need to prioritize and focus on the right opportunities.
Benefits of an Ideal Customer Profile
Let’s take a look at a few key benefits of using an ICP.
- Prioritizing prospecting efforts. Matching prospects to an Ideal Customer Profile will help you understand which accounts are the best fit for your product/service and who present the highest overall value to the company. Once identified, these accounts can be placed as a top priority in your prospecting efforts.
- Better allocate resources. Placing your ideal customers at the top of your prospecting list helps to appropriately allocate resources into the right customer acquisition efforts. Understanding where your best opportunities are will help ensure that time and money is spent in the right places.
- Yield Higher returns on investment. When you’re investing resources into opportunities that present the best overall value for the company, you can achieve greater returns on those investments. You’ll also experience higher conversions as you’re investing in prospects who would benefit most from your product/service.
- Increase win rates. Identifying the best customer fits for your product/service and qualifying those opportunities based on the challenges you solve will increase the probability that your prospecting efforts convert into new business.
- Better overall customer experience. Less is more. When your business is spread thin servicing problem customers with a low ROI, the overall customer experience for everyone suffers. Instead, invest time into customers that provide “win/win” relationships and who are a good fit for your company.
Framework for Creating an ICP
Determining what characteristics and criteria to include in your Ideal Customer Profile will be specific to you and your company. You’ll need to determine what your ideal customer would look like and the characteristics they would have.
To help get you started, I’ve listed several criteria common (and uncommon) amongst Ideal Customer Profiles. When creating your ICP, answer the below criteria with the ideal (best) customer responses to each. What would your ideal (perfect) customer look like for each of these?
- Industry – What industry is your service best suited to serve? what industry would your ideal customer serve?
- What’s their solution? – What problems does your prospect solve for their customers? What are the ideal solutions you support your customers with?
- Geography – What’s the ideal service area for your company? Where would you prefer customers to be located?
- Company Size – What size company are you looking to work with? does this represent the typical size company that signals the desired volume?
- Annual Revenue – What’s the ideal opportunity that you’re looking for? What’s the annual revenue that your ideal customer hits each year?
- Pain Points – What are the top pain points you solve? What challenges do you best help customers with? Where are you best suited to make an impact? Your ideal customer would be experiencing these.
- The urgency for Solution – What’s their level of awareness/urgency to the problems/challenges you solve? Where would you prefer customers to be within the buying process?
- Business Goals – What goals do you best help companies achieve? Where would you be most valued? What goals does your ideal customer have?
- Payment Terms – How does your ideal customer pay?
- Service Agreement – What’s the ideal service agreement that provides a win/win solution while optimizing your customer experience?
There are many, many more possible criteria to use when developing your Ideal Customer Profile. The key is to determine what your ideal customer looks like and what’s most important for you.
Utilizing Your Ideal Customer Profile
You’ll want to use your Ideal Customer Profile upfront at the beginning of the sales process to help qualify the opportunity.
Ideally, you would prioritize your prospecting list/pipeline by quickly matching the prospect to your Ideal Customer Profile. When you see a prospect matching up to your ICP, move them to the top of your priority list and invest more in developing the relationship. If a prospect isn’t aligned to your ICP, move them down on the list.
The great thing about an ICP is that you’re entering into prospecting with a good understanding of what you’re looking for in your ideal customer, so you know what questions to ask based on the answers you’ve determined in your ICP.
As a final thought, using an Ideal Customer Profile improves the quality of your outreach and your business acumen. The quality of your conversations will improve as you understand your prospects, their business, and their challenges. You know what you’re looking for, what a win/win looks like, and how to best provide value to your prospects.
Hope this helps and thanks for reading! your support means the world to me. Have a great day!