Do you know the acronym ICP? Know how your identification can help increase your saless?
ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile, is the term that identifies the profile of your best customer. The key to being able to sell more is to identify the main characteristics of this type of prospect. If your company is focused on the B2B market, know that this type of strategy is powerful for your business. This is because it will optimize your resources on customers with the highest return. Attention to the ICP makes your company stand out in the market, standing out among so many options.
Ready to improve your business results and increase your company's sales?
A Amplifica Digital separated the most important information about the ICP for you to leverage the number of sales of your company.
What is Ideal Customer Profile?
The Ideal Customer Profile is the meeting of the standard characteristics of your best customers, that is, it is the representation of your perfect customer. It is someone who identifies with the benefit of your business, understands the use of your product/service, uses it constantly and achieves good results.
Having an ICP-focused sales strategy makes it easy to create marketing materials and outbound prospecting campaigns to impact and attract the best customers for your business. With the clear definition of the ICP, you can optimize the approach, nutrition and maturation of leads for the best results. You save time, money and effort.
Don't fall into the trap of shooting everywhere when prospecting, it will waste the efforts of your entire team!
What is the difference between ICP, target audience and persona?
You might be thinking, "But isn't that definition of persona?"
No, there is a difference between ICP, target audience and persona that we'll point out now so that you never get confused again.
Audience
The target audience is defined through a demographic, economic and behavioral cut that defines the general characteristics of a consumer audience. To create your target audience, you need to take into account data such as age, gender, social class, location, job title, nationality and consumption habits.
It is possible to see that the target audience is a non-specific sample; therefore, it is used a lot at the beginning of a business plan. But as the company develops, the ICP and the persona are created.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
ICP is that perfect consumer you dream of having. To identify the ideal customer profile, points such as engagement with your brand, how you use your product or service, how useful it was and what level of satisfaction is observed.
Persona
The persona is a much deeper ICP. She's a fictional character who has the ideal characteristics you're looking for in a client, but even more detailed. You define name, age, profession, habits, customs, hobbies, lifestyle, behavior, preferences, and relationship status, to create strategies to reach her.
Benefits of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
By defining your ICP, you can guide all your marketing actions and the business process as a whole. In this way, it is possible to customize materials, create content, have a more assertive prospecting, segmentation, among other advantages. With a more efficient approach, you focus on customers who are truly profitable and valuable to your company. This is true not only for optimizing prospecting efforts, but also for offering cross-selling and upselling for your current customer base.
See some other benefits:
- Reduction of your Acquisition Cost per Customer (CAC);
- Shorter Sales Cycle time;
- Increased conversion rates in the funnel;
- Churn reduction;
- Increased customer satisfaction;
- Improve your company's reputation in the market.
Learn how to identify the ICP
Which customers bring in high potential revenue, in addition to a high potential for closing deals? It is this type of customer that is your ICP. Here are some tips for you to identify your ICP, see and apply in your company:
make a segmentation
Among the points you should take into account in your targeting are:
- The ideal sector for your company
- Ideal companies
- Search for functional teams (departments)
- Find the influencers
- Identify the challenges
- Does the client you are looking for fit?
We went into some details that are important when making your segmentation:
Number of customer employees
Your customers need to be big enough to need your service or product. On the other hand, if they are very large, there is a tendency to hire employees to perform the service internally.
sales model
Note that they have their own sales structure with at least three salespeople and a sales manager.
monthly expense
Analysis of whether the customer is able to pay for your services.
Financial situation
Generally, growing or profitable companies are the best long-term customers. Think about it, organizations with financial difficulties end up being troubled.
people and values
Seek to do business with honest, collaborative and respectable people. Your best long-term customers are those who would easily be your friends.
Watch for warning signs
Customers who will become a problem usually give signals. It is important to be careful to identify them. We point out a few here:
- They've just deployed a solution or service just like the one you provide;
- They already have a company that does the service proposed by you;
- Their track record with other companies is not good, they push for services and solutions that were not hired;
- They claim to know everything about your solution or service and prevent you from correctly carrying out what was hired;
- The industry never seems to have worked with their solution or service;
- What your company offers is totally new to them, so they don't understand what you do. In that case, your efforts will be enormous in order to educate them, to make them understand the value of your service or solution.
Define who your ideal contact is
Map the profile of your buyers, influencers, all the people who buy from your company. Who is the decision maker when making purchases? Is it the sales director, the manager? Knowing who you should talk to will help you create more assertive strategies when contacting the company you want as a customer.
List your best customers
For this you can use tools such as Google Analytics, CRM or marketing automation. Thus, collecting relevant data about the type of prospect who consumed certain content from your company. You might be wondering how to know who your best customers are. They are usually the ones who bring more profits, positive feedback, pay on time, treat their team with respect and understand that in a business relationship, both companies need to win.
do interviews
In interviews, you can gather important qualitative information to form the perfect customer profile. Interviews can be done in person or via video calls, but if necessary, you can also create survey forms. Find out who makes the decisions in the company, why they chose your company and if they are satisfied with the solutions offered.
Some important questions at the time of the interview:
- What are your biggest challenges?
- What makes you lose sleep?
- What are your main frustrations?
- What are you afraid of?
- What's more important to you?
- How much do you invest in it currently?
- What do you really want?
This way you will know the main challenges of companies looking for your service or solution.
Organize the data and create the ICP
After following the other steps, it's time to organize all the information and start defining your ideal customer profile. Identify the common points among the best customers and you will have your ICP.
Update these profiles periodically. It is not uncommon for you to find more than one ICP profile, however, you need to be focused, so limit yourself to a maximum of five profiles.
Now it's just a matter of creating prospecting and digital sales strategies to reach this audience.
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