Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

From our experience with Sales Training, we’ve found that most organizations don’t know their Ideal Customer Profile. Like most things in sales, ideas are being split like the atom at a rapid rate. ICP is one of them. Let’s get some definitions straight:

1. ICP = Ideal Company Profile – Industry/Vertical, Employee Count, Revenue, Geo, and Total Addressable Market with specific high level pains. 
2. IPP = Ideal Persona Profile – These are the decision makers and decision influencers (good and bad). Here you align the unique pains to the specific persona. Meaning everyone has the same high level pain, aligned with the company strategy, but based on their titles and roles they become nuanced. CRO has a different feel of pain around growing revenue than a VP of Sales, a Sales Manager, and even a Sales Rep.

This is also a great place for sales and marketing to coordinate. With the help of sales, marketing and product marketings should be leading the charge on figuring this out. Your product or service may be amazing, but if it is not reaching the customers in your total addressable market or if your inside sales teams are courting the wrong prospects, then your revenue and ROI will collapse.

Once you have a deeper understanding of your ICP, it becomes easier to focus on messaging from both an outbound and an inbound perspective, as it relates to the various sales roles, such as Inside Sales, SDR, and Field Sales.

At the Harris Consulting Group, we continually stress to give your sales team the tools to succeed and this means defining your Ideal Customer Profile. We fully believe in the 80/20 rule, that 80% of a companies profits will be generated by 20% of their customer base. From this 20% is where the ICP is created.