Month: September 2024

TLDR: Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) characterize the customer groups that best fit your services. ICPs aim to help businesses sign more profitable deals with shorter close times. Sales and marketing create ICPs by analyzing data from past customer engagements and deals, coalescing around a shared set of customer profiles to target. Marketing operations helps sales and marketing evaluate whether the data supports the personas created and guide them to refine the ICPs with each reporting cycle.

 

What is an ideal customer profile?

Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are sketches of the buyers who best fit your services.

ICPs are similar to buyer personas, though they tend to characterize groups of customers rather than individual buyers. In theory, these groups are the easiest to close deals from and the most productive for sales and marketing to focus on in their initiatives.

Accurate ICPs help revenue teams do more deals in larger sizes and with shorter times to close.

But when sales and marketing teams create ideal customer profiles in poor alignment with each other, guided by personal biases over data, they risk approaching the wrong prospects with disjointed campaigns and processes that don’t attract business.

In this guide, you’ll learn to explain to sales and marketing what it takes to create ICPs that work—a data-driven approach with 100% alignment.

 

ICP 101

How to get started with ideal customer profiles: Ideal customer profiles begin with data. By analyzing past customer engagements and deals, sales and marketing can identify the most common traits of customers interested in your products and services.

A team will use a variety of behavioral identifiers (e.g., types and topics of content engagement, webinars and events registered) and demographic identifiers (e.g. job title, region, company, industry) to craft ICPs along with sales data.

Sales and marketing use these insights to create personalized content, messaging, and processes to attract increased business from these groups.

Note: We also conducted an experiment that used ChatGPT to help us define our ideal ICP – and the results were pretty fascinating! Check it out here.

 

The goal of ideal customer profiles:

The goal of ICPs is to help businesses sign as many deals as quickly as possible and as profitable as possible.

Factoring in additional metrics like monthly recurring revenue, time to close, retention rates, and deal size can help sales and marketing succeed by focusing on the prospects most likely to engage positively with the business and return sustainable profits over time.

 

How to know if your ICPs are right:

There’s no magic recipe for crafting ideal customer profiles, but if sales and marketing are coming up with many disparate profiles, it suggests that your targeting efforts aren’t specific enough.

To get results, both teams should unite around a shared set of ICPs.

Without close alignment, sales and marketing might have completely different ideas about which customer groups to pursue. When marketing’s campaigns and messaging aren’t in sync with sales’ processes and understanding of the buyer journey, it’s unlikely that your efforts will strike a chord with any particular customer profile.

Between your sales reps and marketing colleagues, your revenue team might be a broad tent of past experience and expertise with different industries and customer segments.

Personal experience can lead your team to infer the best customer traits and groups to target, but data is the only reliable basis for your ICPs.

Past success stories and sector-specific knowledge can be helpful starting points for creating ICPs, but sales and marketing need to validate any assumptions by looking at past engagements and deals.

 

The overall theme with creating ICPs:

More alignment means more success.

Sales and Marketing should use the same bedrock of data to target shared customer groups with campaigns and processes that complement each other.

 

Continuous success

Ideally, ICPs lead sales and marketing to meet and exceed their targets:

• Marketing creates campaigns that generate better MQLs.
• Sales develops these MQLs into higher rates of opportunities, conversions, and accelerated conversations.

To validate that your ICPs are working, encourage your team to think of ICPs as projects of continuous refinement, where each new reporting cycle is an opportunity to reevaluate if the data justifies the personas that Sales and Marketing have created.

MOPs comes to the table as a valuable source of guidance.

By analyzing the composition of your database and where deals come from, MOPs can pinpoint the percentage of leads, opportunities, and closed sales that meet your teams’ profile criteria and advise on the most optimal ways to segment your customer base.

With the latest data, consulting sales and marketing at regular intervals can help answer a range of decisive questions including:

• How are particular ICPs performing at different sales cycle stages?
• What profile characteristics can you tweak?
• How might you account for ICPs in industries (e.g. government, education) that are significant seasonal buyers?
• Are there any metrics not currently accounted for that are emerging as influential?

Whatever your reporting cadence—weekly, biweekly, monthly—a continuous process of analysis and adaptation is how your ICPs stay relevant.

Sit down with sales and marketing regularly to go through the reports, and you can encourage a well-informed and agile process of decision-making, where teams can pivot fast in response to ICPs that aren’t yielding results.

 

The takeaway

ICPs are valuable for Sales and Marketing to identify and refine how they target customer segments, but executing them effectively requires 100% alignment between teams and continuous analysis of engagement and deal data.

By working closely with MOPs to arrive at data-driven decisions, Revenue teams can create campaigns and processes that win more lucrative deals with shorter close times.

For any guidance with creating and executing ICPs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Getting a new tool often seems like an attractive solution to a pain point, but without careful planning and an audit of the solutions in your stack and on the market, another tool to manage = another problem to solve.

Why bring in new tech?

When your team has a pain point or stress-inducing process to iron out, adding a new tool to your stack often seems an attractive solution. Perhaps leadership brings experience of using a certain tool to solve the problem at hand. They might know of comparable companies using a piece of tech and benchmark your stack against theirs. Or, they’re excited by the promise of results — ‘plug-and-play’ accessibility, increases to revenue and productivity that justify the investment.

How to assess new tech:

Beyond the hype, however, these flashes of inspiration alone aren’t solid enough reasons to adopt another new tool. As we write in the Martech Optimization White Paper, careful planning, evaluation, and an audit of what’s currently in your stack are crucial to identify the most sensible solution for your business. Without these, more tools can easily add complications, go to waste, or run counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you influence a more critical approach to tool adoption to maximize the return on your dollars and your time. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Assess new technology adoption

➡️ Understand the demands and challenges of a new tool

➡️ Evaluate your current tech stack and the options on the market

 

The real demands of new tools

Sometimes, leadership will advocate for a tool they’ve used in previous companies.

While the solution may have the correct capabilities to solve the problem at hand, selective experience with a tool can cause decision-makers to view it through rose-colored glasses.

If they only began to use the tool after the implementation or ramp-up period were completed, they’re likely unaware of the more challenging elements of getting off the ground. You need to ensure the solution that leadership advocates for has the correct capabilities to solve the need at hand.

Concerns to address before adoption

 
👉 Downplayed complications during sales process: During the sales cycle, the complications of running a tool are often downplayed. Vendors might portray a solution as “out of the box” with minor setup, or demo a version of the tool with features, integrations, and reporting already well-established. In reality, the baseline you see in demos won’t be there when you first configure the tool. Ramp-up periods can be prohibitive, and 6 to 12 months down the line, you might be miles off achieving the results you were promised.

👉 Stagnation in your tech stack: When the effort involved in managing a tool far outstrips expectations, and you haven’t planned to inherit the responsibility, that tool can sit in your stack gathering dust. Before leadership takes the plunge, advise them to wait until you’ve gathered feedback from current customers—get a real shot of truth about what it takes to onboard, implement, ramp up, maintain, and get results from the solution.

👉 Assessing impact and viability of new tools: Leadership needs to know if any shift in headcount occurs from using the tool, whether customers are using it to accomplish what you’re aiming for, and the renewal vs. churn rate past the initial contract. Before your CMO reaches a decision, they should be able to answer key internal questions: What are the hours involved with adopting this tool? Who’s responsible? Do we have the budget to give that person additional compensation or to hire someone new to run point? Given our investment, what kind of revenue and productivity lift can we expect?

Tools are vehicles for results – to get anywhere, you need a driver.

Getting a handle on the practicalities will help leadership identify if a tool is right for your needs or viable for your resources.

 

Evaluating your stack and the market

Mid-to-large organizations often lack a deep understanding of what’s in their tech stack.

When departments have the size and autonomy to buy their own tools, there might be significant overlap between the functionalities of tools owned by different teams.

If this is the case, leadership should explore the possibility of adopting a solution that your organization already uses.

Start by reviewing any documentation that outlines the tools in your workplace. If your organization already owns the functionality you’re after, speak with the tool owner and spend some time using the solution to get a sense of how appropriately it addresses your needs.

An important point for leadership: You might find a tool that facilitates what you’re looking for, but not in the most competitive or sophisticated way.

For any internal or external tool you assess, establish where it stands in the market

👉 Is this solution best-in-class or tertiary in its lane?
👉 Can this tool evolve with your business and perform long-term?

C-Suite’s are after the greatest possible ROI, and that comes by choosing the tool you’ll need five years from now.

To justify any technology investment, leadership needs a clear case for how it adds value.

Confidence in how a tool’s functionalities and integrations work is crucial to making that assessment.

If there’s a risk of integrations or data flows breaking down between updates, for instance, flag this to leadership. Any manual processes or convoluted workarounds a tool introduces compromise your ROI. Conversely, a tool that’s less adept at generating revenue might save the team significant amounts of time — productivity gains that prove ROI.

 

The bottom line

The martech boom shows no signs of slowing down, which means plenty of noise to cut through.

Approach tool adoption with these principles, and you’ll make every dollar and hour count.

 

✅ Be intentional with martech investment to work smarter and achieve more.

✅ Balance your current and long-term needs.

✅ Size up the options in your stack and on the market.

✅ Determine the ROI from adding a new tool into the mix.

✅Plan carefully for how you’ll use it.

For any guidance on evaluating your tech stack or the martech landscape, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

P.S. Want more ideas for improving your tech stack? Get a copy of our Martech Optimization White Paper