Ideal Customer Profile: How to Create & Find the Right Prospects
An ideal customer profile describes the characteristics of a prospect/account that match your targeted industry or vertical, geography, employee size, revenue, technology and budget and so on.
Why it is important to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An ideal client profile will help you to shorten the buying process and also increase the conversion ratio. It enables you to reach out to the right prospects who are your ideal B2B customers. This will always help you to make more sales conversions. When you have an ICP, it will help you to bring in more marketing qualified prospects rather than just generating a huge quantity of generic leads that are simply lying around in your pipeline. Targeting a generic audience without any defined characteristics of an ideal B2B customer will not only drain your resources but also demoralizes your sales & marketing team. You will lose your valuable time too. On the other hand, with the help of a defined set of ideal customer characteristics, you will be able to save more time as well as gain more returns. So, an ideal customer profile plays an integral part in the B2B marketing and sales strategy execution.
Steps to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Export and Group the Data
Creating an ideal customer profile always begins with looking at the existing customers and prospects. So start by exporting your current customers and prospects from your internal system or CRM.
In order to find if a prospect is a best fit, we need to have a defined set of criteria. Look at all your exported data of prospects from your internal system or CRM and segment them into different groups. Grouping the data helps you to analyze which group has the highest win rates.
ICP criteria checklist
In order to prioritize your potential customers, to customize and make your marketing and sales efforts easy, segment your data using:
I. Company demographics such as Industry, Company Size, Location, Timezone, company headcount, Company Website, Company LinkedIn Profile.
II. Prospect information such as Title, Job title level, LinkedIn ID, city, state, region, zip, country.
If your data from the internal system or CRM has missing fields, then append the required information to your data.
If you have just the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects, do not worry. We have a solution that helps you to paste just the LinkedIn profiles into a grid and parse all the required prospect information for you.
LeadGrabber Pro is a B2B prospecting tool that helps you to find prospects that match your ideal customer profile and append prospect contact information. LeadGrabber directly transfers your appended B2B prospect lists to Salesforce.com, PCRecruiter (PCR), ACT!, Excel and Outlook. Also supports CSV format for automatic export of contacts to Bullhorn, Lotus Organizer, Jigsaw etc.
If you don’t have LinkedIn profiles but just the name and company of your prospects, LeadGrabber also has an option to append the company details in less than a minute per record. After you append the missing information, find out where your data is more concentrated and if it forms a pattern in terms of the above criteria. Each business is different and will have its own sweet spot.
Identify Ideal Customer Characteristics
After the fit is determined, it’s also important to take into account other attributes that provide value in the long run.
1. Look at accounts that spend the most, those accounts that always renew on time have need for your product/services in the long term and are customers that provide high value to your business.
2. If the ideal target prospect belongs to the right industry and geography that can benefit from your product.
3. If they have a particular problem that your product can solve.
4. If the ideal target prospect has a marketing budget and the decision making power to show buying signals.
5. If there is a unique solution that you solve which their current vendor or your competitors don’t solve.
If these kinds of data points are tracked in the CRM or other internal systems, then they can be used to identify ideal customers for your B2B business. In reality, tracking these data points and defining the ideal customer profile saves you time and allows you to focus on more promising prospects. This method allows you to quickly assess if a prospect has any real intent in buying what you’re selling. This can also help make sales reps more efficient, productive, and motivated. Without having an ICP in place, you could waste time talking to people who will never buy and none of us want to target prospects that doesn’t fit into our ICP.
Target better prospects using your Ideal Customer Profile
Now that you have defined your Ideal Customer Profile, you can use it to generate high quality sales leads. We recommend that you consider the characteristics of the current and future potential prospects to find out the emerging patterns. These strategies can guide you with all your marketing and sales efforts and create a winning situation for your organization.
