The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

You must understand whom you want to serve before how you will serve or sell.

An Ideal Customer Profile and the Buyer/Customer Persona can inform your entire sales and marketing strategy by answering critical questions, from content creation to advertising to sales outreach. 

The critical benefits:

• It helps to identify the messaging that resonates with your best customers. Increase the effectiveness by focusing your efforts on repeatable and scalable strategies that reach and nurture the right prospects with the right message.
• It gives you the factors to disqualify them from buying. It shortens the sales cycles by reducing time in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey. 
• It helps you communicate your value proposition. Better qualified prospects create opportunities that turn into better-fit customers who have a lower churn rate.
• It increases closed-won deals – those entering the sales process will have a known budget, interest, and motivation needed for your product.

ICP is not the same as the buyer persona

Many confuse ICP with a buyer persona. They are not the same; the ICP is the B2B customer you best services with ease and excellence. Inside every ideal customer profile, you need to understand and engage; these different people make the buying decision as a decision-making unit inside the ICP.

Your ICP is a well-researched, detailed description of the type of company and not the individual buyer or end-user. Buyer persona is a detailed analysis of the individual buyer who buys from you. There will be different buyer personas within your target customer company with different buying patterns and needs. Your ICP focuses on relevant characteristics of your target accounts — be it vertical or domain, the number of people and departments in that company, the geographies they serve, or the customer groups they serve.

B2B Ideal Customer Profile ICP to Buyer persona 

An ICP combines firmographics and behavioural characteristics and segments them by demographics, classifications, life cycles, and psychographics to define your most valuable customers. By creating your best accounts and ideal customer profile, sales and marketing teams then develop measurable strategies to convert top buyers.

The ideal customer criteria set the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of your best-fit accounts and customers and their qualifying.

B2C Ideal Customer Persona or CP or similar the B2B BP

Customer profiling (CP) reviews the trends of your top 20% of customers and the customer you want to attract. Age, location, sex, role, attitude, income, job title, educational level, and aligned with lifestyle, interest, or values.

Do your research and ask your ideal prospects key questions like, their expectation in the buying process, their motivation, and triggers, and how often they buy? Understand what makes an ideal customer spend with their hard earnt cash?

Survey existing customers: what triggered them to attention, consideration and buy? Understand what were their critical issues and the problems faced, so that you can better define your value proposition or Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?

If existing customers, ask simple questions like: what do you like when working with us? What do you not like? And what could we do better?

Your research into an ideal customer profile ICP, BP, CP should be extensive. The ICP is finding out where they are, what industry they're in, who their competitors are, and who the decision-makers. The BP and CP uncovers the personal characteristic, triggers, and drivers.

Remember, whether B2B or B2C, the human makes the buying decision so relate to your customers on a human level. Put yourself in their customers' shoes; the better you understand them, the easier it is to engage them. 

Other sources of customer insights

Goggle analytics, social media, competitor analysis

The Sales Funnels (Cycle)

B2B vs B2C Sales Funnel Defined

The sales funnel is a critical visualisation tool for sales and marketing to understand the customer journey and build demand for a product or service. They are also referred to as a conversion funnel because of the conversion rate analysis between each stage.

A wasteful 79% of marketing lead never convert into sales, and 68% of companies surveyed by Salesforce say they have not identified a sales funnel.

A traditional sales funnel is shaped like a linear inverted pyramid, wider at the top and narrows towards the bottom, with more prospective customers moving from the top to reach the bottom of the sales funnel signifies a better conversion rate. I see the sales funnel as a spiral and where people can move back and forth. In B2C your loyal will depend on your experience which changes. In B2B the unit of decision-makers may be at different stages in the funnel and will revert, if necessary, however the challenge is that there must be agreement on a decision.

The Stages of the Sales Funnel

Top: Awareness Stage
Prospective customers first learn about problems, search for information or solutions, and discover your product.

Middle: Consideration Stage
Sales and marketers qualify leads and nurture prospects. Prospects are looking for comparative solutions and may involve others in the consideration.

Bottom: Purchase Stage
Qualified leads become customers following a demo or try before your buy, review check, tender or presentations from the shortlisted supplier.

1. The Awareness Stage

The Buyer Perspective

At this stage, potential customers have diagnosed a problem and are conducting preliminary research about available solutions in the marketplace.

As the broadest section of the funnel, the purpose is to improve your brand's visibility and demonstrate expertise in value-centric resources. The focus is visibility and domain authority or subject matter expertise.

The Seller Perspective

Access to sales intelligence will inherently categorise business expertise in solving specific pain points and help establish segment authority. Understanding:

• Total Addressable Market (TAM): The entire spectrum of prospective buyers who could potentially use a product. TAM is then narrowed with ICP:
• Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): An ICP is a categorical description of a potential buyer that would benefit significantly from your offering. ICP represents the prospective buyers that are likely to hold the highest Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
• Buyer Personas: Accounts and Companies buy; ultimately, people decide. Understand how to engage various stakeholders, users, influencers, decision-makers, and the gatekeepers involved in the purchasing process and their agendas.

2. The Interest Stage

The Buyer Perspective:

At this stage, the prospect is actively looking for solutions to improve their business outcomes. Understand how an active opportunity is measured through third-party or external intent data. The relevant topics a company is researching online, and the consumption of content related to specific topics related to your product or service.

Conversely, first party or internal data reflects activity directly in response to internal sales and marketing efforts. How well company campaigns are engaged with, and anonymous traffic from specific company websites captured from conversions from downloading an eBook and signing up for a webinar.

Seller Perspective:

The buyer is already aware and actively looking for a solution in the marketplace. Success at this stage requires go-to-market teams to decipher which channels and messaging turns prospects into customers.

Understanding these conversion points is imperative to determine how and when salespeople should and should not intervene.

Here seller must understand the data that qualified the lead and through an education process to buy.

Social Media Data is another source of buyer intent behaviour. Has your prospect followed you on social channels? What content are they engaging with, and how can you use that information to tailor content that matches their interests?

Nurturing Prospects Through the Funnel

Focus on the 95-5 nurture principle. 95% of potential buyers are not ready right now, but 5% will be. Encourage long-term actions that will give them top-of-mind presence with the 95%. However, you may focus on the 5% as proof of ROI that reaches the sales funnel's bottom. Remember, the 5% today used to be part of the 95% who were not ready. A long-term strategy wins the day.

3. The Consideration Stage

The Buyer Perspective

Leads have converted into sales qualified opportunities and are now viewed as prospective customers. They have a clear understanding of their problem, and investigated the solutions that could solve it, for their know budget.

Seller Perspective

Data is imperative to progressing through the consideration stage. More homework is required at the consideration stage to understanding the challenges the various personas within a sales opportunity face, conveying the tangible business value a solution can offer to alleviate those specific challenges and achieve desired results.

The better prepared with relevant data having identified a relevant opportunity enables the seller to guide the buyer through the buying process.

4.The Decision Stage

Buyer Perspective

In the final stage of the funnel, qualified prospects know everything there is to know about their pain point, the best solution for the problem, and are ready to select the provider. 

Seller Perspective

The bottom of the funnel is when Sellers must reaffirm trust and reinforce that their solution will solve the problem better than competitors in the marketplace and evidence ROI.

(Adapted from Stages of a Sales Funnel: Two Perspectives https://blog.zoominfo.com/data-driven-sales-funnel)

The Benefits of the Sales Funnel

• Sales funnels help businesses:
• Speed up the sales process
• Build stronger relationships with leads
• Provide a personalised approach
• Generate more sales
• Helps in lead prioritisation
• Allows you to disregard leads that are not the best fit. 
• Engage and nurture leads based on their position in the sales funnel.
• Able to forecast sales pipeline for the next month, quarter or year.
• The sales funnel makes the entire sales process more transparent and measurable.

The strategies of B2B and B2C marketing are entirely different, as are the motivations of the B2B buyer personas and the B2C customer persona. The better you understand your buyers and customers motivations, the better you can match their expectations.

The Process of Selling to B2C Consumers

1. Positioning a product so consumers can quickly locate a solution when a need arises, convenience and location are important factors, such as windshield wipers located at a service station or a coffeeshop in the train station.

2. Feeding appropriate information to help consumers make a favourable purchase decision such as customer trusted reviews and social proof.

3. Excelling in customer support to address post-purchase remorse and doubts, such as transparent return policy.

Understanding Customer Journey and Touchpoints 

Sales is about how companies relate to customers and markets and companies that focus on customer experience must understand the touchpoints or the individual transactions through which customers interact with the business.

• Identify the nature of the journey’s customers like to take, from the customer's point of view.
• Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the customer journey.
• Anticipate the customer's needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.
• Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.
• Set priorities for the most critical gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.
• Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.

(Adapted from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do)

B2C 5 Stages of the Buyer Decision

1. Need or problem recognition
2. Information Search
3. Evaluate Alternatives
4. Purchase decision
5. Post Purchase Behaviour (buyer's remorse)

Once you have a sales process, continue to monitor the metrics, analyse, learn, and optimise your process as you engage with more prospects and close more deals.

Customers change, markets evolve, and competitors switch tactics; you need to know to be adaptable.

Why Customer Acquisition?

It is defined as the process of attracting, converting, and retaining a given customer. In other words, it is getting someone to choose your brand over another. An acquisition strategy is a critical new business growth strategy.

The Benefits of Customer Acquisition

The benefits of customer acquisition are enormous. The business with the highest return on investment (ROI) is not necessarily a business with the most revenue. Instead, it is the business with the best customer acquisition strategy. Investors like acquisition (new logos in b2b space)

Customer acquisition is beneficial to your business because it's the fastest way to grow your business and reach your revenue goals. A good customer base sends the signal that your product is working, your product is meeting the needs of people, and they're willing to pay you for it. Their pay not only keeps your doors open, but it opens other opportunities for your business, like new or improved products, new services, partnerships, and the list goes on. Customers are the lifeline of your business, and without a strategy in place to acquire more, there's no guarantee how long the business will last.

As the business establishes the momentum, customer retention becomes more critical for sustained growth and customer lifetime value metrics. 

Sales Marketplaces 

The global B2B e-commerce market valued $6.64 trillion in 2020 and is forecast to expand to $25.65 trillion in 2028, more than six times the size of its B2C equivalent.

B2B marketplaces start where the B2C marketplaces stand now. B2B marketplaces tend to be SaaS-enabled and provide an expansive infrastructure (from payments to logistics). By providing all the processes that both sides need in one place, they eliminate the chaotic paper, pen, and phone approach that many businesses still rely on for their procurement.

And this is ultimately the critical difference between B2C and B2B.

B2B Marketplace makes it easy for buyers to compare features and benefits, not just price; however, B2B often has higher retention and average order size.

Know Your Customers Better on Social Media

It all starts here. If you don't know who your customers are, it will be hard to find them. Social media is an excellent place to start looking for your market.

Calculate Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) helps you calculate the revenue your business can expect from a customer over the lifetime of the relationship. CLV measures how long it takes a company to recoup the investment required to acquire a new customer through sales and marketing. Knowing CLV will help a business know when they're overspending on their customer acquisition.

B2B is Going Direct to Consumer (think Tesla)

The pandemic has meant more B2B is going or consider D2C. Emerging D2C brands have a quick sales cycle because the ROI is immediate. However, the most successful clients are not focused on ROI today. Instead, they look at the customer lifetime value, which has the net effect of lengthening the sales cycle. These companies are willing to pay a premium to acquire the right customers because they know they will come back if they deliver an excellent customer experience. Wait a minute that means B2B is becoming B2C!

Choose Appropriate Marketing Channels for your business.

Today, there are so many avenues to market your business. Regardless of the size of your business, there are one or more that make sense to use to help market your business to acquire customers. Just because you start with a channel does not mean you will continue in it. As your buyers and customer behaviours are changing, so must you.

Let Analytics Be Your Driver

Your business goal will dictate what and how you measure results and why analytics is important.

84% of customers said customer service is one of the key factors helping them decide whether to purchase from a company or not.

 92% of consumers stop purchasing from a company after 3 poor customer experiences.

74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content poor personalisation.

 88% of online shopping orders were abandoned.

Over time tracking metrics will give you and your potential investor's insight into how well your product is performing. Avoid generic vanity metrics; every industry, product and market are unique; you must be intentional about measuring progress and identify what you need to measure. Then build tracking tools and feedback loops into your product and action your findings.

Create Feedback Loops in the Sales Funnel 

The decision stage is when organisations must take the time to synthesise data amassed at the preceding stages of the funnel to recognise trends that can influence future performance. By connecting insights from closed won and closed lost sales, you can identify similar accounts to go after and learn what led to a closed loss decision.

How to Demonstrate Customer Engagement

Even if your user growth has not exploded, you can still demonstrate traction. When the users you do have and demonstrate that they love your product. Show that your customer come back to your product with the number of repeat use or that your low churn means that they are hesitant to leave. Survey customers with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to quantify their loyalty.

• Customer journey analytics (how many prospects are you losing at each stage (AIDA)
• Customer experience analytics (CSAT)
• Customer engagement analytics (visitors, like clicks)
• Customer lifetime analytics (CLTV = (Avg retention rate * Avg # of purchases) * Avg deal total)
• Customer loyalty and retention analytics (NPS)
• Voice of customer analytics

6 Strategic Pillars Scalable Sales Success

Scaling a sales team and operation is a challenge; these six pillars will help build the solid foundation:

1. Develop a transparent, repeatable sales process: Building a consistent sales process is the most critical thing you can do to set your team up for lasting success. Provide a clear roadmap for every salesperson by specifying activities to focus on at every stage of the sales process.
2. Implement activity-based selling: Don't focus on goals; focus on the sellers' activities to achieve those goals, the metrics.
3. Adopt technology that scales: Critical is a CRM system that is easy to use.
4. Optimise with regular tracking and forecasting: Use the CRM to keep an eye on your sales activities. Use qualitative and quantitative data. You can often see where your process is breaking down and adjust it accordingly by tracking and forecasting.
5. Make proactive decisions: Use the key performance indicators generated by your sales process and your CRM to predict and address any issues on the horizon. That's how you navigate the journey of scaling up fast.
6. Make the tough decisions: If you're constantly tracking metrics, you'll start to notice patterns in the data. Trust those patterns, and when you get data that points to a problem, investigate, and qualify. (Adapted from https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/scale-sales-team-fast)

References

84% of customers said customer service is one of the key factors helping them decide whether to purchase from a company or not. https://www.oberlo.com/blog/customer-service-statistics

92% of consumers stop purchasing from a company after 3 poor customer experiences. https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2771217/Content/2018%20Customer%20Service%20Expectations%20Gladly.pdf

74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content poor personalisation. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/

88% of online shopping orders were abandoned. 
https://www.statista.com/statistics/457078/category-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/#:~:text=Shopping%20cart%20abandonment%20rate%20worldwide%202020%2C%20by%20industry
&text=In%20March%202020%2C%2088.05%20percent,an%2096.88%20percent%20abandonment%20rate.

Survey customers with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to quantify their loyalty http://www.netpromoter.com/why-net-promoter/know

https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/scale-sales-team-fast

Resources ICP

A worksheet that works through a customer/buyer persona 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LAib18P8YppgBfZtayuv2SqYLevMo6A_vDoOYoIrXU/edit#gid=83715802

For B2C and B2B https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/

For B2B, the most extensive ref to create ICP https://www.mykpono.com/ideal-customer-profile-icp-how-to-create-a-comprehensive-customer-profile/

https://blog.zoominfo.com/ideal-customer-profile/

https://www.propellercrm.com/blog/ideal-customer-profile-icp

Firmographics https://instapage.com/blog/firmographic-segmentation