Gain more actionable customer profiles

Are your ICPs and personas letting you down?

No B2B marketer will be a stranger to buyer personas. Likewise, the ideal customer profile (ICP) isn’t new.

The theory is solid. Gain clarity on the kinds of businesses you should target and the motivations of the people who’ll buy your product.

You begin by identifying the characteristics that define a good fit customer (often these match your current most profitable customers).

Then, you humanise those buyers – turning them from an IT director in a large financial services firm into Susan, a time-poor financial services IT director who spends too much time fire-fighting and too little on what really matters.

The problem is that too many of these ICPs and personas deliver too little actionable value.

ICPs are often too vague and overly focused on an in-house view of the market. And personas? Let’s face it, everyone is time-poor, everyone is juggling competing challenges and who cares if the buyer has a dog named Nigel?

 

Why this matters

Having robust, focused ICP and buyer profiles is one of the core foundational elements that have a force multiplier effect on pretty much everything else you do.

Consider this – in our B2B Effectiveness Engine database, those who have researched their ICP are:

• Over 20% more likely to be a leader in lead generation
• Also over 20% more likely to lead in demand generation
• And over 25% more likely to be a leader in brand-building

 

So, yes, getting this right matters. A lot.

Nailing your ICP

An effective ICP should enable you to identify where there is both significant market opportunity and a good fit for what you offer.

We’ll work with you to create a robust ICP allowing you to focus your efforts on segments where you stand the greatest chance of achieving standout success.

The programme focuses on five broad areas:

1. Understanding what’s happening in the market – researching the key catalysts that are driving the broader market and the barriers to change
2. Assessing the competition – exploring who you’re up against (both direct and indirect competitors) and how they’re positioning themselves in the market
3. Determining your strengths, weaknesses and potential points of differentiation – taking a real-world view of how you stack up in the market (and for different segments)
4. Agreeing where to focus – assessing with you which segments of the market should be the focus for your sales and marketing activity (and which segments you should park for later)
5. Creating an actionable buyer profile – one you can use to sharpen who you target and what you’ll say to them

 

Delivering more actionable buyer profiles

Once we’ve identified your ICP at a company level, we’ll help you create buyer profiles that identify why customers make a purchase, what motivates them and how you can win their business.

We base our buyer profiles on the Jobs to be Done framework. This focuses on the key essential elements that a customer wants to make progress on when they make a purchase.

Because people don’t buy because of who they are, they buy because of what they need to get done.

So we spend time interviewing customers, speaking to your sales team and researching what’s driving change within your market. We use this to get under the skin of who your customers are and what’s really driving their behaviour.

We then bring this together into a profile for each of your buyer segments that outlines:

• Catalysts for purchase (the jobs they need to get done)
• How customers buy
• Who’s involved in the purchase
• What real-world pressures they’re under
• Their motivations for making a change (or resisting it)
• And how we’ll win their business