A successful sales strategy consists of connecting with the right customers and generating revenue from them.

Targeting the right accounts saves time, money, and effort to attract and convert them.

Companies that are a great fit for your solutions are crucial to your business and should be prioritized – but how?

An Ideal Customer Profile outlines customers that will be a long time fit and deliver ROI.

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a description of companies that you want to target as they are most likely to benefit from using your products/services.

An ICP is made up of behavioral aspects and firmographics like:

• Company Size
• Revenue
• Industry
• Technologies used
• Geography
• Pain points

An ICP and Buyer Persona are two different things. While an ICP tells you who your customer should be, a buyer persona is a person you’ll deal with within your ICP.

E.g.- A B2B company in EMEA may be your Ideal Customer and the person to target within that company, like the CMO or VP of Marketing will be your buyer persona.

You need to have an ICP ready before you figure out the buyer persona.

Why creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important?

When targeting is specific, the chances of having closed wons increase. A scalable demand generation strategy is about finding a customer that will fit your ideal bill and converting those.

Having an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) helps the sales and marketing teams to align the core value proposition and provides insight to your product teams to build and test new products and features.

Additionally,

Your messaging will align to reach and nurture these customers. With an ICP framework, you can design and personalize campaigns to address their pain points and position your USPs.

Sales cycles shorten because you reach out to prospects who tick the boxes for your ICP, improving the quality of leads.

Your churn rate is lower as best-fit prospects turned into opportunities and then customers. This also leads to an increase in the customer lifetime value.

How to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

• Your data will give you insights for building your ICP. Make sure your CRM data is enriched and appended to the value it represents. Relevant data fields such as company revenue, employee headcount, industry, location, or job titles should be appended to build an effective ICP.

Enrich your existing data using SMARTe’s Enrich.

• Look for your best customers based on how profitable the deal was, the deal size, how many renewals they had with you, upsells made to them, and even how satisfied they have been with your products/services.

• Similarities in these existing best accounts will give you an idea of what industry your ICP should be from, what demographics and technographics they share, their location, and even the stage their company is in.

• Look for companies with pain points you intend to solve. An ideal customer would already be looking for solutions like yours or may already be using your competitor.

• Document your ICP with details like firmographics and behavioral insights. We have created a ICP Board for you to fill in and have your Ideal Customer Profile handy for your sales and marketing teams.

Use SMARTe’s Discover to find the essentials (company revenue, employee size, industry, location, job titles) to get your ICP ready and valid emails and direct dials you need for outreach.

• Your Ideal Customer Profile needs to be updated frequently as buyer behavior changes. Decision makers switch jobs and may join a company that fits your ICP better.

SMARTe provides job change notifications to track your prospects/champions’ job changes.

Having an Ideal Customer Profile improves the efficiency as you reach out to a well-defined target audience and have a high response rate in return. Document your ICP using this worksheet.

Building an ICP requires data-driven insights, create a SMARTe account to get the data you need while enriching your existing data.

Want to learn more about how SMARTe can help Identify potential buyers in your market? Schedule a free demo with our team

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