Why Go to Market Teams Need Both ICP Fit & Data Quality to Excel

Go-to-Market (GTM) teams for most B2B brands know exactly how essential it is to develop strong ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to help them understand their audience. 

This allows them to create stronger marketing campaigns, with messaging and sales pitches tailored exactly to their needs, pain points, and core motivations. 

When it comes to developing ideal customer profiles, however, we’ve realized that too many B2B and SaaS brands end up with ICPs that are falling flat. They’re struggling to create realistic, detailed, and thorough customer profiles that help them identify their highest-value audiences. 

Sometimes this is because they’re looking at the wrong “fit” data and being misled. In other cases, it’s a result of poor data quality.

Here at Breadcrumbs, we know that GTM teams need both a strong ICP fit and high data quality in order to excel and accelerate their revenue

Not sure what that looks like for your brand? 

Let’s go over what businesses need to know. 

How Ideal Customer Profiles Are Different From Buyer Personas 

Quick: Do you know the difference between ICPs and buyer personas?

Plenty of brands, after all, have buyer personas… but we’ve realized that many have failed to create ICPs. 

Your ideal customer profile is going to be a description of the type of company B2B and SaaS tools want to sell to. It’s going to involve demographic and firmographic characteristics of the companies that will benefit most from your specific products are services.

They are, simply put, most likely to buy and continue to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. 

Buyer personas are going to focus more on the specific individuals making the purchase decisions. 

So if you were selling automated transcription software for medical facilities, your ICP might be large hospitals in high-tech areas with large budgets that have surgery centers within them. Your buyer persona might involve details about an operational management director or a records manager who would be the one to actually make the buying decision. 

The ICP is crucial here, because it helps you focus on the type of clients that you want to target, not just the types of buyers themselves. 

Why Your Data Quality is Everything for Accurate ICPs 

Do you know who is your highest value target audience?

If you said yes—how sure are you?

Ultimately, many brands create their products with certain buyer personas or audience segments in mind, but their ICP (and the customer journey of the customers within that ICP) may end up being different than originally expected. 

This is why data is important—and why data quality is crucial.

Solid, up-to-date and accurate data is essential when it comes to understanding your true ICP. It can tell you who your highest value audience segments are, and make it easier for you to both target them with general marketing messages and identify sales opportunities for account-based marketing.  

Illustration Of Breadcrumbs Icp Worksheet

Ebook

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Worksheet

Learn how to create an Ideal Customer Profile and build a successful sales strategy with this Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Worksheet.

Why ICP Data Quality is a Struggle Today 

Data makes the world go-’round for plenty of different business departments (marketing and sales included, of course!), so it’s maybe not a massive surprise that data should be at the core of ICP development.

The hard part is that data quality isn’t always easy to maintain. We’ve written extensively about how data hygiene and poor data quality can become a crisis for businesses of all sizes. 

Let’s say that your company databases, for example, don’t track disengaged customers; all customers in your CRM are considered equal in value and importance. 

And another scenario. It’s possible that you’ve realized that companies with between 50-100 employees are right in your sweet spot for your ICP… but companies grow over time. Your leads’ businesses may have evolved since they’ve first gotten in touch, and you need to know that to upsell

You rely on third-party data tools to fill in the blanks, but you need to make sure that data is trustworthy since it’s coming from an outside source. 

These are common issues some of our clients have run into in the past. It makes it hard for them to see which clients are retaining longer and spending longer. In other words—who their primary audience segments and ICPs are now, especially if they’ve had a shift in who they were marketing to. 

Without strong data that’s accurate right now, your entire sales, marketing, and customer service team might as well be going in blind. They don’t have the information they need to either understand their ICP or to correctly market to, sell to, or pitch the leads that they’re already working with. This can be a huge source of lost revenue without anyone even realizing it. 

How Reveal Can Create Accurate ICPs by Improving Data Quality 

You know you need strong-fit data to create accurate ICPs, and you need high data quality in order to get that fit data. 

So the question is how to go about not only getting that additional data but making sure that it’s accurate and also knowing how to best analyze it so that you know you’re not getting caught up in the wrong details. (Hey, it happens to the best of us). 

Time for our shameless plug, but we promise it’s a good one: We’ve recently launched Reveal, which pulls CRM data from multiple third-party tools to analyze it for you. We’ll help you find your ICP so that we can take the guesswork out of the equation for you.

Here’s how it works: You connect your lead and customer data by integrating with popular tools you’re already using, like HubSpot, MixPanel, Marketo, and more. (See our full and rapidly-growing list of integrations here). 

Screenshot Of Breadcrumbs Reveal--Icp Fit &Amp; Data Quality Tool

You can then compare an initial list audience (like a list of all your contacts) against a more narrowed-down list. Examples might include long-retaining clients, paying customers, or customers who subscribe to a certain high-level product or plan. 

We’ll then compare the two audiences for you and help you sort out the most significant indicators of purchase intent and revenue opportunities. With this information, you can better determine exactly what your ICP is right now based on the results you’re actually getting. This is the kind of actionable data that brands need but often find so hard to access. 

Screenshot Of Breadcrumbs Reveal Dashboard--Icp Fit &Amp; Data Quality Tool

Once you have this information, you can pass it along to your entire team, using it to strengthen your campaigns and enhance the strategies you’re using to connect with existing audiences. 

Your buyer personas may need to shift based on your ICPs, for example. And you may also realize that the way your marketing or sales team has been reaching out to clients just isn’t the best option. 

You can also take advantage of our contact scoring tools on top of Reveals ICPs to better identify the high-value sales opportunities you have right now, too, before they slip between your fingers.  

Want to learn more about Reveal? See how it works here: 

Reveal Ideal Customer Profile Insights To Win More Deals

Breadcrumbs Reveal analyzes your existing marketing, sales, and product data to highlight what attributes and actions are the best predictors of revenue.

Final Thoughts 

All B2B and SaaS brands need to have a solid understanding of exactly what their ideal customer profile is and what that ICP needs from your brand. It’s hard —if not impossible— to do that when you don’t understand what fit qualities are actually reflective of who your ICP is. It’s even more difficult to sort that out if the data quality is poor. 

You don’t want to have your sales team pouring over data trying to pick out patterns where there may not be any. Instead, using a data analysis tool like Breadcrumbs’ Reveal takes the grunt work off of your team’s plate. 

We’ll comb through the data for you and present it objectively, making it easier for your team— who knows your tool and your audience best— to determine which fit qualities are true indicators of potential revenue. Data quality is of utmost importance to that, and it’s something we take seriously. 

If you’re interested in trying out Reveal for your business, you’re in luck. The first 1,000 signups will receive access to the tool for free in exchange for honest feedback. Learn more here

Want to better define your ICPs based on detailed fit data that’s up to date and high quality? Sign up for free access to Reveal today