6 Easy Steps to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

ICP or ideal customer profile is a great way to understand your customers or users. Here's a step by step guide on making ideal customer profile!

Matthew McQuinnMatthew McQuinn·

Easy Steps to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Many B2B companies, especially smaller and newer ones, don’t spend enough time determining who they will target and sell to. It’s all too easy to start with an overly simple demographic (e.g., CEOs of companies with fewer than 10 employees) but then never update it.

Every company can benefit from a deep understanding of who is most interested in and helped by their product. The more you know about these leads, the easier it is to market and sell to them.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is an in-depth description of your perfect client. In the B2B world, this refers to companies that would greatly benefit from your product or service. You wish every lead your sales team talks to matched your ICP exactly.

ICPs are usually created using in-house data you’ve generated but are also assembled using market data. The most important aspect of an ICP is that it is as accurate as possible.

ICPs generally include information from the following categories:

  • Firmographics - Especially relevant for B2B sales, this refers to company information such as the company's age, headcount, revenue, and more.
  • Demographics - While B2B companies generally put more emphasis on firmographics, don’t forget that you’re still trying to appeal to a particular person within that company. If you can market and communicate in an appealing way to a CTO (for example), you’ll be more likely to make a sale.
  • Psychographics - Often referred to as attitudes, values, and fears, this information is harder to get but incredibly valuable.
  • Technographic - The technical abilities of the company.
  • Geographic - They must be located in an area that you service.
  • Behavioral - What actions do these companies take?

 

Ideal customer profile vs. buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictional avatar of the perfect customer. Buyer personas refer to the individuals who work for your ICP (at least in a B2B environment).

For example, you’re selling data security to a B2B SaaS company. Let’s assume this company has a few hundred employees, meaning you could get your foot in the door a few different ways.

Your buyer personas could include the CEO, the CTO, an IT manager, or even just an IT employee who goes looking for a solution. In other words, you might have several buyer personas belonging to your ICP.

Functionally, they are so intertwined that it often makes sense to create them together. When talking about the companies you’re selling to, it’s logical that you’ll also discuss how to contact and sell to the individuals you might talk to there.

Benefits of creating an ideal customer profile

Companies with a well-defined ICP generate 30% more revenue from marketing than companies that don’t. Here’s why it’s worth investing the time and resources into creating yours:

  • Increase the results from your advertising spend because your targeting and messaging are spot on.
  • Convert more leads to sales.
  • Speed up your sales cycle as you’ll encounter less resistance to the sale.
  • Decrease churn and increase customer lifetime value.
  • Improve your marketing efforts with hyper-targeted campaigns.

In short, you’ll waste fewer resources and increase revenue because you’ll have the right leads in your pipeline.

6 Steps to create an effective ideal customer profile

Here are the main steps to follow when working on creating an ICP for your company:

1. Gather customer data

In a perfect world, you’ve been gathering data about your leads and customers as they come in contact with your company. 

This usually involves answering a few questions when your lead requests more information. Your sales process should then uncover more data during calls or upon signup. 

Many companies have this data readily available in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and it can be exported as a spreadsheet.

However, if you’re new or haven’t been gathering this data, it’s never too early to set up a framework for collecting this data. It could be as simple as a spreadsheet with column headers where you can start collecting information and spotting trends among leads who sign up.

2. Brainstorm your ideal customer

This is the real first step for a company without much lead data to work with. However, even if you have a bunch of data, working through these steps can still help you zero in on your ICP.

Use common sense to begin mapping out everything you can think of about your ICP.

For example, let’s say you sell an email marketing platform designed for small companies. You might start out your brainstorm like this:

  • Less than 20 employees and $2 million in revenue.
  • CEOs, digital marketing specialists, and marketing managers.
  • Less than 5 years old.
  • Want a simple solution to start sending emails. 
  • Currently don’t have an email marketing tool, or use another simple tool like Aweber, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp.
  • Currently generates less than 50 leads per day.

That’s just to start! You could easily have a brainstorming session that results in pages of details, especially as you start listing challenges, goals, fears, and more.

At this point, you’ll have to make some assumptions, and you’ll have to be okay with that. You’ll try to corroborate as much information as possible later, but this gives you a good starting point.

3. Research, research, research

This step can require dozens of hours of research to track down and collect as much information as possible.

Using our example of an email marketing service, you could start with Google searches like:

  • What percent of companies send emails? 
  • Are older or newer companies more likely to use email marketing?
  • Demographic data of email marketers
  • Average salary of email marketers
  • What is the average age of email marketers?

You can do the same with “marketing manager” or “digital marketing specialist” in place of “email marketers.” 

These questions are designed to help you uncover legitimate sources of data to fill in gaps or corroborate assumptions you’ve made about your ICP.

4. Go deep

When creating your ICP, some of the most useful information isn’t usually found through publicly available data.

This includes things like:

  • Biggest challenges
  • Pain points
  • The effect of the issue on the company (e.g., morale)
  • Current processes/habits
  • Goals

The best way to gather this data is to go straight to the source and interview current customers. You may want to offer a gift card to incentivize them to talk with you. 

Here are a few examples of questions that you can ask:

  1. What was the biggest challenge that our product solved for you?
  2. How did our product change/help your company?
  3. What processes changed for you after you began working with us?
  4. What frustrations led you to seek us out?
  5. What are your brand’s goals?

Don’t be afraid to keep poking at these by simply saying, “What else?” or “Tell me more about that.”

5. Create your ideal customer profile template

If you’re doing everything right, you’ll have mountains of data, interview answers, and even assumptions you’ve made.

It’s nice to have all this on hand, but you’ll also need to begin prioritizing. Your sales team doesn’t want a 10-page manuscript detailing everything about the people they talk to.

Simplify the data to the top 10-15 points in a single sheet your sales team can tape to the wall next to them.

Your marketing team will likely want as much detail as possible, but they’ll still want it in an organized and easy-to-read format.

6. Test and tweak

After sifting through your research, you’ll likely discover the need to create variants of your ICP and different buyer personas. 

Following our email marketing provider example, targeting a marketing specialist will likely be different than targeting a CEO. 

Because of this, it’s helpful (especially for a marketing team) to target these different variations and see which ones respond. This testing could include advertising, email marketing, social media posts, and more.

For example, let’s assume you have a list of 10,000 leads. You could write two copies of an email—one focused on talking to a CEO and one talking to someone in the marketing department. Send each email to 5,000 people.

Hopefully, a pattern will emerge after doing this for a while, and you can adjust your ICP accordingly. 

Furthermore, you can begin to segment your list based on the type of emails they respond to and send more of the same type to them in the future.

Use your ideal customer profile to generate targeted leads

One of the best (and quickest!) uses of an ICP is purchasing a targeted list of leads. Rather than spending money on advertising, you can get a ready-made list based on the information you’ve gathered about your ICP.

This way, you can be confident that everyone you call, email, or show ads to is already in the top 1% of potential leads for your company.

At Coldlytics, we can help you generate a list of perfect leads! Create a free account today and see how we can build a targeted list based on your ICP that grows your business.