What Is An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) In B2B Marketing?

DEFINITION
An ideal customer profile (ICP) in B2B marketing refers to your perfect client who benefits from your product or service the most. Your ICP helps create focused sales and marketing strategies and identify the most qualified leads, resulting in more profit for your business.

💡Understanding Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Before you devise your GTM strategy, you need to understand and define “who” will be using your services and the exact problems you’re solving for them: the perfect fit for your offer.

It saves you from a ‘spray and pray’ strategy where your sales and marketing team are reaching out to your entire addressable market, trying to find the right product-market fit.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is how you identify your ideal customers. It describes the exact type of customers you want to attract.

Instead of chasing unqualified leads with low chances of conversion, you focus on marketing and sales strategies that are laser-focused on a single kind of company.

By creating your Ideal Customer Profile, you characterize the list of qualities your best customers should have. It takes into consideration firmographics and other industry-specific and niche-specific data like:

• Annual revenue of the company 
• Size of the company 
• Number of employees 
• Team size
• Location
• Budget
• Tech stack
• Industry size

Your ICP will be more descriptive, but starting with the above criteria can give you direction.

🖋 Takeaway 

An ICP in B2B marketing is the North Star for every team across your organization. It’s a template for the ideal company you want to do business with.

With an Ideal Customer Profile, your marketing team knows who to speak to and how to speak to them, your sales team can filter qualified leads, and your product team can get hyper-focused on developing and modifying the product based on who exactly is using it.

As your company grows and matures, your ICP will change and expand, too. But it’s important to focus on your current ICP to guide your organization in the right direction. 

What Is ICP In B2B Marketing? 

All leads are not equal nor should they be approached and treated the same. For example, if you have a lead who’s only problem-aware, you don’t want to send them to your sales team straight away. An ICP saves you from making this mistake.

An ICP or ideal customer profile, as the name suggests, is the profile of your ideal clients. This profile includes data about them, such as their location, size, and budget. These are the customers you want to stay with you.

As you know exactly what your customer needs, your ICP lets you create alignment between your offer and customer needs.

Ideal Customer Profile lets you identify what stage of the funnel the lead is in, and what they are looking for information on. As a result, you can design your entire marketing and sales strategy around them, instead of the other way round.

Why Is ICP Important?

An ICP stops you from wasting money, be it on marketing or sales team time. 

Having a thorough understanding of your best customers steers clear of any noise and helps you focus your time and budget on high conversion spots. Here are some more reasons why an ICP is an important aspect of your business:

1. Personalize Your Message 

Your customer wants to be treated special. If you have a scattered and wide target market, you won’t be able to speak cohesively to any of your customers.

By personalizing your messaging based on your ICP, you can tell your ideal customers how your product or service is going to solve their specific problems. And you can create assets like ebooks, whitepapers, blog posts, website copy, and ads in a way that your audience relates to. 

2. Targetted Prospecting 

During sales outreach, it’s easy to lose focus and divert to the “numbers game”. 

While numbers do matter, it really comes down to the quality of outreach. Are you reaching people who need your product or service? 

For example, you might not make any conversions if your offer is created for an early-stage start-up and your sales team is reaching out to enterprise businesses, regardless of how valuable your product is.

Knowing your ICP also gives you the ideal lead generation channels you should be using. Not just outbound lead generation, your sales team can also lead score based on an ICP and filter relevant inbound leads.

3. Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

As you’re well aware of the problems of your ideal customer, you can make changes to your product based on their needs. 

Constantly improving your product based on feedback will keep your customers with you for a longer period of time. You can also perfect your onboarding process and collect accurate customer data, resulting in a low customer churn.

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The time to define your Ideal Customer Profile and apply it in your sales and marketing process is now. All of us have an Ideal Customer Profile in mind. Very often, it is anecdotal, not supported by data or backed by outdated research that is not relevant today.

Not anymore. In just a few steps, your sales team can connect with Breadcrumbs Reveal and leverage Machine Learning to look into thousands of leads and customers’ profiles so that you can validate your ICP assumptions with actual data and/or discover completely new ICPs worth focusing on.