Ideal customer profile: как ускорить команду продаж и закрывать больше сделок
Рынок SaaS растет на 12% в год. При этом конкуренция тоже растет. Как минимум 20 тысяч новых сервисов и приложений каждый месяц выходят на Product Hunt. Нужно расти очень быстро, чтобы сохранить свою долю рынка и выживать в борьбе с другими бизнесами.
В этом году мы поставили цель в 10 раз увеличить outbound продажи. Для этого провели аудит и полностью перестроили процессы в команде продаж. Мы начали строить новые процессы, чтобы выйти в новый сегмент и увеличить средний чек подписки минимум в 4 раза.
В числе других изменений, мы внедрили в работу ICP — ideal customer profile или описание идеального клиента. Ideal customer profile помог нам сфокусировать команду на определенном сегменте и прокачать продажи, чтобы достичь цели.
В продажах с его помощью мы:
Не надо продавать всем, нужно сфокусироваться на целевых клиентах. Ideal customer profile помогает это сделать. Мы работаем с определенными сегментами с нужными характеристиками, вместо того чтобы бомбить всех подряд. В результате закрываем больше сделок с большим средним чеком.
Что такое ICP и чем отличается от байер-персон
ICP (ideal customer profile, профиль идеального клиента) — это описание компании, которая может получить наибольшую выгоду от продукта.
ICP включает, например, такие характеристики:
Совет:
Необязательно учитывать все пункты: достаточно тех, которые влияют на то, купят продукт или нет.
Чем Ideal customer profile отличается от buyer-персон?
Ideal customer profile и портреты buyer-персон хорошо работают в связке: внутри одного профиля идеального клиента может быть несколько buyer-персон, через которых можно продать сервис или дополнительные услуги.
| ICP | Buyer-персона |
 |  |
| Описание компании, которая может получить наибольшую выгоду от вашего продукта. | Описание человека, который занимает определенную позицию в компании, принимает решение или влияет на решение о покупке продукта, и его задач. |
| Показывает, С КЕМ нужно общаться и помогает узнать, кто для вас целевые лиды. | Показывает, КАК общаться с клиентами и продавать им. |
Профили buyer-персон мы составили раньше — в прошлом году. Для своих задач мы совместили классический фреймворк и теорию работ.
Основатель Carrot quest Дима Сергеев и продакт-маркетолог Оля Каптиева подробно рассказали об этом опыте в статье.
Портреты buyer-персон помогли нам упорядочить информацию о клиентах и облегчили планирование в продукте и контенте. Но знаний о buyer-персонах было недостаточно, чтобы находить подходящих людей при исходящих продажах.
Зачем строить Ideal customer profile
Профиль идеального клиента помогает сфокусироваться. С ним мы лучше знаем потенциальных клиентов, которым отлично подходит продукт, и можем:
Команды маркетинга и продаж фокусируются на качественных лидах и тратят меньше времени на тех, кто с меньшей вероятностью совершит покупку.
ICP позволяет не тратить деньги на привлечение людей, которые ничего не купят. Продажи растут без увеличения затрат на рекламу при условии, что налажена обратная связь из продаж в маркетинг.
Команды продукта и поддержки концентрируются на целевых клиентах и делают продукт и поддержку для них. Это повышает лояльность клиентов, которую можно измерить с помощью NPS.
Интуитивно мы и раньше понимали, кто наши идеальные клиенты, в основном ориентировались на трафик и задачи. Мы это подтвердили и зафиксировали в профилях идеальных клиентов, чтобы легче и быстрее расширять команду продаж.
The Ideal Customer Profile Framework
Targeting the right accounts is absolutely critical for success with account-based marketing (ABM). That’s why the best ABM programs start by creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Without an ICP, ABM becomes nearly impossible.
This blog will cover:
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
Before diving into how to create an ICP, it’s best to define our terms. Simply put, your ICP outlines qualities, both quantitative and qualitative, so you can more easily identify your best-fit potential customers in your target market. With an ICP in place, you have a framework you can use to create your target account list.
In most B2B markets, there is a high cost and high involvement from both the customer and the provider. That’s why you can think about your ICP the same way you think about recruiting talent. When you look for talent to hire, you look for people that will increase your revenue, stay with your company for years to come, and will culturally fit your organization. In the same way, you want your ideal customers to increase your revenue, engage with your business for years to come, and will work well with your organization.
If you want a more in-depth look at the benefits of having an ICP, check out Why You Need an Ideal Customer Profile in Account-Based Marketing. With our terms defined, let’s dive into the qualities you should look for when creating your ICP.
Identifying Your Best Customers
When you look to create your ICP, start by gathering a list of your best customers today. To gather this list of your best customers, there are a few conversations that need to take place.
Once you have these lists from these departments, start to identify some trends. A few questions you can ask yourself are:
There are numerous additional questions you could ask that will pertain specifically to your business or industry. A SaaS company will likely have a few different questions than a manufacturing company. Just ensure the questions you ask are analyzing for potential trends.
Once you have a list of significant trends based on your existing customers, create a list of positive and negative attributes for potential customers. As you look to build out of your ICP framework, this list of customers will give you a great starting point.
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile
Now that you have a list of trends based on your best customers, you want to start looking at the firmographic, and technographic makeup of these customers. By looking at their firmographics and technographic, you can create an ICP framework that will allow you to identify at a glance if a company is likely to be a good-fit customers long-term.
Firmographics
Firmographics are the physical attributes used to define organizations and are the first step in building your ICP. Most of the time, companies will use factors like company size, revenue, and years in the market to help define their ICP. These factors are a great start, but a highly effective ICP will have more specific qualities to help in your target account list creation. Here are just some of the firmographics you should consider:
The list above identifies some of the most common qualities to look for, but your organization will likely have a few nuances you should consider. Again, look at the list of your best customers. Use the values that are important to you, and meet the demands of your organization. There are likely numerous similarities that will help you as you look to outline these qualities.
For example, An HR management firm will likely care more about employee count, or employees per manager more than revenue. A manufacturing supply firm may want to add in delivery site locations and look at the time to delivery because they’ve found customer satisfaction is higher if they can do the same or 2 days delivery.
Above all else, make sure the organization is aligned. If marketing start to deliver target accounts sales doesn’t think are the best-fit customers, the entire process will break down. Everyone must be aligned and invested for ABM to work.
This category defines the technical requirements for your ideal accounts. For example, HubSpot has found that their best-fit customers use over 8 integrations with their software. That means if a potential customer has numerous other pieces of technology that all have pre-existing HubSpot integrations, they are likely a good-fit customer. That also means if a potential customer is talking about adopting numerous pieces of technology, they are a potential good-fit customer.
Once again this must be unique to your industry and even preferences. Look at your best-fit customers and see what technology they all are currently using. The technology may not need to directly integrate with your product. For example, some technology companies attract customers that may align with your organization culturally. The technology they use can be a good indication of the kind of company they are internally.
Culture Qualities
Like mentioned earlier, you want to find customers that are a good fit for your organization culturally. Not everything that makes up a best-fit customer can come from the data.
Though we use our ICP to develop the target account list, use this portion of the ICP during your sales process to ensure that the target accounts are a good cultural fit.
When looking at your best-fit customers, ask the questions below to understand why those customers are a good culture fit for your company.
You eventually need to find what works best for your organization. Though company culture may sound like something that can wait, a customer that doesn’t mesh well with your culture will increase employee turn-over, decrease revenue, and will likely disengage your business.
A customer that does fit culturally causes you to focus on putting out fires instead of delivering results to happy customers.
Demographics and Buyer Personas
If you are familiar with the Inbound marketing methodology, you are likely familiar with a Buyer Persona. Inbound marketing focuses on building out your buyer personas to tailor content to their needs by answering their pain points with your company’s solutions.
However, many inbound marketers somewhat overlook the ICP. That’s the main difference between lead-based marketing and account-based marketing. In the B2B market, you are selling to more than just a single lead. You may have 5 leads that are all attached to a single agreement.
That’s why when you start building your marketing message, B2B companies need to start with the ICP (firmographics) then identify the buyer persona (demographics). Now that you’ve identified what qualities are needed to examine organizations fit into your ICP, it is time to start looking at the individuals and the demographics that need your product.
Buyer Persona
Though your decision-maker might sit in the C-Suite, you may need to focus your awareness efforts on employees that are the end-users of your product. That’s where your buyer personas come in.
Your buyer persona determines who your product or service resonates with by meeting their pain points. It is also an important part of targeting accounts in ABM, particularly at the engagement and expansion phase of the ABM funnel. It’s about getting the right message in front of the right persona at the right time.
Identifying your buyer persona illuminates their pain points and how your organization’s solutions meet and answer those pain points. You must match what sets you apart and what you offer to solve their pain.
The Roles in the Decision-Making Process
Every decision in the sales process is filled with different roles, and it is important to understand how they differ and how it will impact your content. These roles were defined by Sangram Vajre ( @sangramvajre ) in his book, Account-Based Marketing for Dummies :
When you understand and identify these roles in an organization you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them and start the sales cycle. In ABM, roles are not titles!
Archetypes
Using these archetypes, you can identify whether your prospect is focused on the vision of their company, the strategy, or the execution that is independent of their role in the decision-making process. Each has very important needs that vastly differ from one another. It is essential for an archetype to be rooted in their personality and skills, and is inherent in who they are.
Finding Your Accounts
Now that you’ve chosen your parameters it’s time to find and score your accounts.
The first step is of course finding new accounts and identifying existing accounts (wherever they fall in your buyer’s journey) that should be scored. There are many ways to do this:
Once you have a list of accounts it is time to see how well your accounts and prospective accounts fit into your ideal customer profile and identify where your ABM resources should be spent.
Scoring Your Accounts
Take the important firmographics and demographics you identified as part of your ICP and buyer personas and weigh each one based on importance to determine your account score.
You might be familiar with scoring your buyer personas, often called a lead score. A Lead score gives you insight into how well each contact fits into one of your buyer personas and how engaged they are. You can score these based on roles, responsibilities, pain points, and more.
Your scored list of accounts will be matched against your ICP and will give you a blueprint for success with account-based marketing. These are your ideal clients that have been identified in a quantifiable and repeatable method, defined by your organization, services, and culture. Keep in mind that the account score is the sum of the individual buyer persona scores (lead scores) using the same company domain (account) and the account score itself. CRM software like HubSpot often has Account-scoring capabilities.
Get Started Today
Now understanding how to develop an ICP framework, the best thing you can do is schedule a meeting with your finance team to start identifying your best customers.
The temptation with something like developing an ICP is that it seems like it can wait for when you have a bit of time. It’s not a «pressing project» like launching the newest campaign.
In reality, your ICP should serve as the foundational piece through which all of your marketing efforts tie back. The ICP identifies the customers you should market to. If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, it becomes near impossible to effectively execute marketing.
So start today. If you need additional assistance developing your ICP and getting started with ABM, feel free to schedule a call today.
Mike Rose
A scientist by training, speaker, author and entrepreneur by drive, Michael brings a level of business acumen to marketing strategy that is rare in the emerging online marketing space. Michael’s strong knowledge and understanding of business challenges, as well as marketing best practices has evolved to him authoring and speaking on a new and innovative game-changing approach to business entitled ROE Powers ROI – The ultimate Way to think and communicate for ridiculous results. The Return on Energy® methodology is the secret sauce behind Mojo’s success and that of our clients.
Why you need an ideal customer profile
by TAYLOR COTTER March 04, 2021
Oftentimes, marketers forgo the idealistic for the realistic. We set achievable goals. We taper back expectations. Instead of shooting for the moon, we often shoot for the likelier, but still valuable, stars. This is often what makes marketers great: we know how to maximize wins and minimize losses.
Yet, there is a time when idealism can work for us. When developing a marketing program, consider building an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is an exercise and tool in understanding your target audience and optimizing your marketing efforts.
What is an ideal customer profile?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing (ABM) and targeting enterprise customers.
Ideal customer profiles are often used in B2B marketing. They allow marketers and stakeholders to understand the institutional needs of their target market. With an ICP, marketers can tailor programs to better meet these needs.
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Why use an ideal customer profile?
If you ask any B2B marketer in the world, they could probably tell you it’s a company within a certain size range, located in a certain area in the world, who has a need for their product.
The problem? Some of these companies that fit this profile are ideal customers, and some are less-than-ideal. When you are budgeting your digital marketing efforts, you want to focus on the best match.
B2B marketers can use an ICP to understand the full customer journey and find a stronger product-customer fit.
What is an ideal customer?
Let’s say you have one extremely high-revenue customer. They are loyal and they pay you the equivalent of 50 smaller customers. Great, right?
But, they take up 80 percent of your server bandwidth. They have a half-dozen dedicated account managers. They need round-the-clock customer support.
Is this your ideal customer? Would you want to replicate this customer 100 times over? Or, is your ideal customer a bit more manageable, that would allow your company to scale and grow?
It can be easy to have dollar signs in your eyes when thinking about your ideal customer. In this case, it’s important not to equate the biggest invoice with the best value.
An ideal customer is one that is profitable, scalable, and a long-term fit for your business growth.
How do you create an ICP?
There are six steps to create an ideal customer profile.
Collect customer data
Start with what you already know. Consult data collected through your CRM, customer data platform and other analytics tools. This will begin to illustrate the quantitative trends in your target market.
You may want to use a spreadsheet or business intelligence (BI) solution to layer your customer data. This will allow you to identify trends and note your ‘best’ customers.
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Identify ‘ideals’ in your customer data
When combing through your data, note some of the traits of your best customers. Those may be tied to revenue, customer acquisition cost, and/or sales cycle length.
Answering these questions about customer engagement decisively will paint a picture not of a customer, but of the ideal customer.
Document customer traits & demographics
Identify the things that you can see about your ideal customer. These might be their:
Research the ‘unknowns’ about your ideal customer
You know how your customer interacts with your company. Yet, that’s one small piece of who they are.
Here are a few questions you can ask of your best customers when building an ideal customer profile:
Detail how your company helps your ideal customer.
So far, you have created a great ideal target account profile. How do you turn it into an ideal customer profile?
Document how your product serves your ideal customer. Your new understanding of their business should make this exercise clear. How does your product solve their pain points, and how will that continue into the future?
Document your findings in a customer profile.
Once you’ve completed your research, combine your findings into your final customer profile. It should paint a picture of the exact company you’d like to have using your product with great detail. This will guide your digital marketing and sales teams on whom to target.
Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona
Modern marketing programs rely on buyer personas, or fictionalized versions of potential customers. If you are selling a manufacturing product, your buyer personas may be ‘Project Manager Pam,’ or ‘Budget Owner Bob.’
Buyer personas are useful when using buyer enablement marketing on a personal level. XYZ Manufacturing is not going to click on your LinkedIn ad or read your blog post, but Project Manager Pam might.
Ideal customer profiles zoom out from buyer personas. They are a holistic look at the entire firm, rather than the pain points of the individual decision maker. Ideal customer profiles and buyer personas are best used in concert with one another.
How can you use an ICP?
The modern B2B marketing and sales process relies on a true understanding of the target market. An ideal customer profile can influence these revenue programs in several ways:
Improving your account-based marketing
An ideal customer profile serves as a template for an account-based marketing (ABM) target account list, Your account-based marketers can use an ICP as a template for finding potential customers.
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Improve MQLs & SQLs
Use your ideal customer profile to qualify leads. If a lead is less than 50 percent similar to your ideal customer, you can take them out of your funnel. You can also use a rubric to compare leads against your ICP. By doing this, you focus on moving along leads that have the potential to be your best customers.
Improve your product-market fit
Your ICP may have revealed that your ideal customer has needs that you are not meeting. This profile can identify gaps in your product-market fit. These gaps are opportunities to innovate your product. This can lead to better, longer-term customer relationships.
Conclusion
Creating an ideal customer profile can refresh your digital marketing and sales focus. By completing this exercise, you can renew your focus on bringing in the best customers for your company’s growth.
If you’re looking for systems and tools to manage customer data, align your sales and marketing teams around the customer journey, and build lasting customer relationships, then check out Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing.
Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile: Our New Guide for the Sales Model
Though sometimes used interchangeably, buyer persona (BP) and ideal customer profile (ICP) are distinct terms that represent different ideas. For your sales and marketing efforts to succeed, you need both. In this blog post, we’ll study the ideal customer profile and buyer persona in detail — the peanut butter and jelly of your sales process. We’ll also determine the differences between them and provide clear guidelines on how to create them.
But first, let’s start with an illuminating fairy tale!
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Did you spot our logo in the comics? Have another look!
The king’s order is a perfect example of ineffective management: When applied to lead generation and selling, it can cost millions to companies that dare to use it.
The guy in our tale succeeded; however, despite being highly motivated and almost unattainably high on an ambiguity tolerance scale, his victory was due to magic and luck. After all, fairytales should all end well.
In real life, prospecting is hard, even with a clear roadmap. If you don’t provide clear guidelines to your salespeople on what companies you hope to win and who you should approach to land them, you most likely won’t succeed.
So what organizations does your business need to seek? And who and how should your salespeople reach out to them? What information will your potential customers want to obtain from you?
Creating a buyer persona and ideal customer profile will help you answer the questions above. Follow along in our comprehensive journey to find out why the ICP and BP are both essential for your business.
Table of Contents
Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Persona: What’s the Difference?
So, why does your company need both the ideal customer profile and buyer persona? Aren’t they the same? Not exactly.
The confusion you might experience when coming across the ideal customer profile and buyer persona is understandable: Both terms describe your buyers; however, the very essence and purposes of BP and ICP are different.
The ideal customer profile explains what companies and titles to target. The buyer persona describes how.
What they have in common is a profound understanding of who your customers are and who they aren’t. Furthermore, both the ICP and BP are derived from the knowledge of the market, your services, and the problems you solve.
So, make sure that your sales and marketing teams have invested enough time and resources to create these two documents.
But don’t think of your buyer persona and ideal customer profile as permanent, unchangeable components: As your business gains new clients, launches new products, or pursues new titles, you’ll discover plenty of nuances that will change your BP and ICP.
You may realize that some of your clients are too expensive to win or may not be good fits. Don’t hesitate to shift your lead generation efforts elsewhere and update your BPs and ICPs as well.
What Is an Ideal Customer Profile?
An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of a company that is most likely to become your client, along with the titles of its decision-makers that your sales team should target. In other words, it provides guidelines on how to find a perfect lead.
What are the key elements of an ideal customer profile?
The ideal customer profile consists of two essential parts: The first one describes an organization with a particular problem your company can solve. The second examines specific titles in this company that can be the decision-makers in the buying process.
You can create several ICPs to conduct various campaigns. To create a comprehensive ICP, you’ll need these elements:
1. Company
This part of ICP defines what type of companies you target:
If you target the whole U.S., begin your contact data generation from the East Coast and move westward. In this case, your sales team will have more convenient time slots for outreach, setting, and conducting appointments by territory.
2. Person
This part will include the title(s) of decision-makers or decision-influencers you plan to target.
3. Special requirements (optional)
Use criteria that will narrow your search and customize your outreach:
Special requirements aren’t limited to this list. Your marketing and sales team are free to define their criteria.
4. Your service
Many companies omit this, but it’s best to create ICPs for different products or services in some instances. For example, a software developer may offer various solutions for large and medium-sized companies. You’ll want to target them separately because they’ll most likely have distinct titles involved in the buying process.
5. Data points
What is an example of an ideal customer profile?
In this example, we created an ideal customer profile for an influencer campaign. This example is very simplified because, on average, a contact list that CIENCE creates for its clients contains around 17 to 20 data points.
As you can see, we didn’t use the telephone number in the list of data points; we included a “Category for Suppression List,” which we use for particular companies that we don’t want to reach out to for several reasons.
We also included the question: “Do you see similarities between your best customers?” It’s the first step on the path to creating the specific requirements for potential leads. In this case, we wrote that we needed sales experts, influencers, and idea creators.
Ideal customer profile template
Sales perspectives on the ideal customer profile
The causal relationship between an ICP and sales research is obvious: The more detailed description of your ideal customer you provide, the more accurate leads you’ll get at the end of the day. We’ve seen it virtually in every campaign that we’ve implemented for hundreds of clients over the years.
However, what many people seemingly fail to understand is the impact of ICP on sales development. The ICP is about the regular analysis of your market and planning your sales strategy accordingly. If you don’t understand your market, you won’t know what to expect, and you won’t be able to plan. You can’t just fill in the ICP questionnaire based on guesses. This will only ensure your results are nothing but random.
The ideal customer profile influences the following aspects of your sales development activities:
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a guide that helps your sales and marketing teams understand your potential buyers better and effectively engage with them at any sales stage. The BP should be based on a comprehensive analysis of all your customers, interviews with the sales team, and an audit of your sales pipeline.
The best buyer personas are always a combination of descriptive and prescriptive marketing analytics.
BPs always include a full name and a photo so that they can be treated as real individuals. This approach helps your staff feel closer to your real buyers and address their needs better. It’s vital to marketers who don’t always get to talk with customers face-to-face.
The BP profile is always presented as a set of generalized features relevant to the buying-selling process of your company. The term “generalized features” means that they have been observed in many, if not most, buyers. Meanwhile, “relevant” means that you need to look only for those traits that will help you understand the buying behavior of your potential customers.
Note: You don’t want to go too far in developing a BP. Only information correlated to the buying process should make the cut.
When creating your buyer persona, you need to think about the balance between the resources you’ll spend creating and the advantages certain information can bring.
Also, as a rule of thumb, it’s common to create several BPs based on different criteria: the type of service, size of company, industry, or the persona’s role in the company..png?width=1920&name=image%20(24).png)
What are the key elements of a buyer persona?
Numerous articles suggest adding tons of information to describe a buyer persona. However, not all details are equally important in B2B.
The best practice in creating a buyer persona is to provide information about your customers that’s the most relevant for your selling process.
Let’s discover what elements you can include in a BP and their purpose:
1. Name and job title
2. Personality
For instance, if you offer your services to someone out of your industry, you might want to explain what you do in simple terms. It also helps to shape the sales pitch up to your clients’ needs.
Tip: Consider only a professional background related to the current job (find a job.)
And that’s no wonder, is it? You’ve spent years doing what you do, and your leads just heard about you. If they knew all the things you do, they wouldn’t need you.
3. The working environment
For example, the goal of the VP of sales is to bring new customers and improve the ROI. This KPI is relevant for us because we can improve their ROI.
Some objections are made to attain a specific goal (reduce costs or get a more profitable position in the negotiation process). They don’t describe the actual situation.
5. Summary
Summarize all of the data mentioned above into a short reference sheet for your sales team.
You are not obliged to use all of the elements we’ve listed; however, you should include those elements that can help your sales and marketing teams communicate with your potential customers better. Remember, you can and should revisit your buyer persona from time to time to make changes and improve it.
Should I create separate female and male buyer personas?
Honestly, it’s up to you. There are pros and cons to gender-specific BPs. The obvious advantage is that you may be able to provide a more personalized approach to your potential buyers.
The other less obvious advantage is that in the industries where there are fewer women in the C-suite, you can beat your competitors by simply tuning your sales and marketing to the female decision-maker. The disadvantage is that you’ll have to spend more time creating your BPs.
Here are some arguments that support both opinions, along with some suggestions on how to tackle this issue:
Gender in Business – Generation-wise Overview from CIENCE: Summing up the infographic, women’s presence in B2B buying as decision-makers is increasing. However, gender is perceived as a scale rather than two extremes by at least half of the millennials who embark on this process.
Women as B2B Buyers from CIENCE: We haven’t found any surveys that have proven the difference in behavior between baby boomer versus millennial females with a view of less strict gender differentiation perception observed in generation Y. This subject is yet to be studied.
Three tips for creating a female buyer persona:
How many buyer personas are enough?
There’s not just one correct answer to this question since every company is unique. There are at least four factors that can influence your decision to create several buyer personas:
1. Decision-makers
You don’t need to create buyer personas for each of these roles. The best advice is to pick those roles most critical to making a sale. However, you should analyze the average buying team and provide this valuable data in your BP.
2. KPIs, challenges, and goals triangle
Basically, your company provides a solution within this triangle. Though one product or service can address multiple challenges and help achieve various goals of different titles in the company, the messages will be different.
3. Buying psychology
Behavioral features for your buyers may include attitudes, expectations, emotions, and beliefs. For instance, some people tend to think about future positive outcomes while others mostly have concerns about the negative implications:
If you’ve spotted different buying psychologies related to certain roles, you can create separate buyer personas. The RAIN Group has summarized six different behavioral patterns during negotiations and provided valuable insights on approaching them.
4. Primary searcher
Not all decision-makers will search for a solution to their problems themselves: There’s often an executive assistant or simply a person on the team who’s in charge of creating a list of vendors. You’ll want to get on that list for sure.
7 Steps to Creating the Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile
We suggest creating ICP and BP at the same time. You’ll need your marketing and sales teams to work together and follow these steps to get the best results:
1. Analyze current opportunities.
You might as well add some specifications to this table. For example, IT is a big industry. Do these companies create software or provide internet? What is the purpose of the purchase? Do they offer peanut butter to their specific clients as a bonus, or do they use it themselves? Do they use it with some particular type of bread? Do they purchase jelly somewhere else, or do they simply not like it?
For a more extensive set of data, you can create all types of analytics. Your goal here is to find out what types of customers are the most profitable for you. The data from the above table doesn’t give you, however, the complete picture.
2. Check for lost opportunities.
Are you sure that you work with all the industries and company sizes that might need your product? Can you possibly expand to other regions? What if you miss something important? That’s why you need a comprehensive analysis of the conversions along your sales pipeline. Take a look at this example:
As you can see, at some point, there’s a bottleneck that prevents companies from certain industries from advancing in the sales pipeline. Why don’t educational establishments order your peanut butter and jelly? They’ve got tons of hungry kids and teenagers who enjoy PB&J sandwiches. The same is true for hotels and hospitals.
Don’t hesitate to address the lost customers and interview them about their sales process and why they opted not to work with you. You might find out that your product is a bad fit for them or otherwise learn what your sales managers did wrong during the negotiation process.
3. Implement sales intelligence.
Look at your customers’ competitors and analyze them by industries, size, and geography. Obviously, you won’t get a full scope of their clientele. However, a simple look at the client section of their websites might get you a valuable hint of where to look for clients. Be aware that you may not implement everything your competitors do, so you’ll need to analyze how they managed to win these types of customers.
Client section of CIENCE website
Based on the information above, you can also use machine learning algorithms to identify trends from closed, won, or lost account data and offer everything from lead scoring (likelihood to close) to lookalike companies to target moving forward.
4. Define decision-makers.
Once you’ve defined the companies you want to target, you need to understand what titles will be the actual decision-makers in these organizations. Consider these two approaches:
1. Product-Solves-Problem Approach
New products and services that come out are meant to solve problems. This way, the progress and competition between companies continue. What problems does your product or service solve? What departments within an organization have them? And finally, what titles run these departments?
Let’s use the services CIENCE offers as an example. Our SDR team finds accurate contact data following an ICP and then conducts a personalized outreach to these prospects via email, phone, and social networking websites. We use our service for our internal purposes.
By analyzing how we use our product, we can outline three important decision-makers: head of sales, director of marketing, and CEO/founder/owner.
2. Customer-oriented approach
Your experience using your services may not give you the complete picture, though. For instance, some of your customers might come from very different types of departments — much to your surprise. That’s why you need to conduct a survey both among your buyers and your salespeople.
Analyze the titles in the average buying team. Don’t forget to specify the company parameters you’ve outlined before — there might be a certain pattern. For example, the average buying team for SMEs might be very different from the one at a giant enterprise. You don’t want to target the wrong people in the company.
Pick a few roles that have the most influence. Outline different names that the same position might have in various companies.
5. Summarize the ideal customer profile.
Set the list of data points (contact data entries) you’ll need to search. This list includes, but isn’t limited to: website, phone number, address, name, title, social media profiles, and any additional data that you find relevant to your business (see the “special requirements” section).
6. Compile the data.
At this step, we start our BP construction. Survey your sales team, the titles of the buying team of your clients (including former ones), current prospects, and lost opportunities (the last will save you from survival bias). Pick the parameters you consider the most valuable in the buyer persona template and outline the questions you’ll need to ask your interviewees.
We suggest omitting questions about the title, firmographics, professional background, and demographical data because it’s the information you can easily find on LinkedIn or corporate websites. Don’t ask your buyers about their psychological traits, typical objections, or prejudices (leave these questions to your sales).
Tip: Make the survey about your lost opportunities as short and easy as possible. Use checkboxes and list boxes. Explain that you want to understand the reasons why your company didn’t fit them: Was it the product, terms, salespeople, or something else? Don’t forget to express your gratitude for considering your company and services.
The survey of the organizations that are currently in your pipeline shouldn’t be too long either. Explain that the goal of this survey is to provide the best buying experience to all of your customers.
If you wonder how many people you should question about these things, we’d say, the more, the merrier. The bigger the number of researched people, the more accurate and credible the results will be. However, make sure to only question one or two people at one company to avoid spam.
Consider one more source of information — the records of the sales calls and meetings (we use and recommend both Chorus and Gong ). You might learn a lot from them. At the beginning of a negotiation, good salespeople mostly ask questions about the problems of potential customers and then listen. Use this information to shape your buyer persona.
7. Make final revisions.
Building meaningful communication is one of the primary purposes of both the ideal customer profile and buyer persona. To make sure the information you’ve included in these two documents helps to create connections with your potential buyers, you have to revise everything and ask yourself a few questions.:
Once your sales and marketing people agree upon the ways to communicate with prospects, write them down and finalize your buyer persona.
Afterward, give it to your sales team for their approval. If the BP reminds them of your customers, then you’ve succeeded. If not, listen to their feedback and improve.
What Happens Next?
Next comes the most exciting part — applying your buyer persona and ideal customer profile in your sales and content marketing. You’ll use ICP at the beginning of the lead generation process and the BP throughout every stage of the sales funnel journey.
Like everything in lead generation, creating a buyer persona and ideal customer profile takes time and effort. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend investing in this process, and as a reward, you’ll get a smoother sales cycle and happier customers.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in Nov. 2018 and has been completely updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Former Content Writer at CIENCE
Anastasia Voitehina is a Content Writer at CIENCE Technologies. She creates passionate articles, witty infographics and smart charts dedicated to B2B Lead Generation. Anastasia also records the company’s history and writes inspirational stories about her colleagues.
