Developing an Ideal Customer Profile

Pam Mantaring

Hi all,

We are looking to build our Ideal Customer Profile - to help our revenue and product teams to align priorities and strategies to execute on.

From a Customer Success point of view:

• What has been valuable to you in having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
• What customer data and metrics have you looked at when defining this profile?
• Do you assess/score your new customer against this Ideal Customer Profile to support onboarding and journey mapping?
• What key qualitative information is useful to define in the ICP ?

If you have any resources or tips and tricks on facilitating the the process on this I would greatly appreciate it.

Cheers,

Pam

Mike Gospe

Hi Pam,

Here are my answers to your questions:

Q: What has been valuable in having an ICP?
A: This allows a company test how accurate it's value proposition is. When you write down the ICP, post it on a slide that gets passed around the company, you can clearly see if/how well your products are mapping to the assumptions you made about the market and your ideal customer. When this is not written down, you only have guesswork and random opinions. Also, the exercise of documenting the ICP makes your company focus on target markets rather than going after "everybody". Bottom line: I've found the ICP to be an excellent tool used to align company leadership on market priorities.

Q: What customer data/metric?
A; This aligns to your demand gen pipeline. (See next question)

Q: Do you score your new customer against the ICP to support onboarding and journey mapping?
A: No. I look at it the other way around. The customer is your 'reality".  You want to score your understanding of the customer and you do this by exploring their buyer's journey and the touch points they have with you along the way.  I  high score means you understand their journey well, and you've produced enough of the right content to nurture them through their process. If a customer scores low, that would tell me that they found you by accident. Still a valid customer, but your understanding of the journey offers room for improvement and tighter alignment.

Q: What key qualitative info is useful to define the ICP?
A: You need to craft a buyer persona. I laid this out in my book, The Marketing High Ground, and a persona best practices course on Udemy.
I also find it extremely helpful to interview customers. Here's one of my articles on how to interview C-suite customers.

I have a variety of materials and best practices I use in ICP workshops. Happy to share more. Feel free to contact me at [email protected]

Hope this is helpful! 

Good luck!

Mike

Lauren Mecca

Great move, @Pam Mantaring - so much momentum can build from aligning around ICP. 

1. Naming who's NOT in the ICP has been just as valuable. It's been powerful to report to the executive team what % of the current customer base and pipeline are within the ICP. Seek transparency around the intentions for non-ICP customers and leads. And I love seeing the vocabulary about the ICP spread across functions - if each function is describing the customer in the same way, this is a strong sign of alignment. 
2. Retention and churn results. Churn reasons. Who's currently maintaining high health scores and best business outcomes. Estimate the market size of the segment - you don't want your ICP to be a small audience. 
3. Yes - one way I've "scored" each client coming in is by asking the sales rep state likelihood to renew in CRM
4. Psychographic and behavioral insight have helped me become much more precise in my ICP. At one company we identified a certain SMB org chat that was our ICP - sales started qualifying leads differently based on org structure, marketing started teaching the market "here's how you should structure your teams!"

Lauren Mecca

sorry for the dupe!

gurd3v

Hi Pam, 

Great question - will do my best to answer in order of your questions:

• What has been valuable to you in having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
  • Clear direction of who your ideal customer is allows for focus, both from a product innovation and sales/marketing standpoint. If the team rallies around the ideal profile, it allows product to dive deep into the problems that profile of customer experiences. 
• What customer data and metrics have you looked at when defining this profile?
  • Time to Close (Sales deal)
  • Time to Value (Time to Activation)
  • Lifetime Value
  • Churn Rate
• Do you assess/score your new customer against this Ideal Customer Profile to support onboarding and journey mapping?
  • We don't, but arguably should...
• What key qualitative information is useful to define in the ICP ?
  • Not sure if this directly answers your question, but depending on the stage of the business, having a wide ICP can be beneficial up to a point where you inevitably reach a fork in a road and need to decide whether or not developing product features vertically (more surface coverage) is more advantageous than developing product features more horizontally (deeper into a segment)

Anita Toth

Great question @Pam Mantaring.

Some things to consider:

1) Generally, there are 3-5 ICPs you'll discover in the process of uncovering your ICPs. This is a good thing!

2) Here's are some qualitative pieces to add to your ICP:

• industry
• size of the company
• role in the company
• stage of business (startup, growing, mature)

These are critical but most often overlooked or not included at all when creating ICPs:

Quantitative elements:

• Willingness to pay (WTP)
• CAC
• LTV

Very helpful for sales and CS: 

• most valued product features
• least valued product features

Hope this info helps. I know didn't directly answer your questions but the other respondents have done a great job already. I thought I'd add in these details that I use when developing ICPs with my clients.