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Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

While most companies and SAAS organizations have a general idea of the Ideal Customer Profile, it is essential to directly outline to the sales team and marketing team the makeup and demographics of the ICP.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Give your sales team the tools to succeed by defining your Ideal Customer Profile.

Analyze

Analyze Your Current Leads & Customer Base

Define

Define Your Ideal Client Profile

Measure

Measure Your Total Addressable Market

Create

Create Appropriate Content

Share

Share With Sales, Marketing, Prospects & Customers

ICP vs IPP

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.

ICP Key Points

Capitalize on the 20%
Average Sales Cycle – 79 Days
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) – $125,000
Lifetime Value (LTV) – $375,000

To define your ICP, we recommend starting by asking these questions:

  1. What about our messaging “got through the noise” you experience on a regular basis?
  2. When did the pain actually start with your organization, when did it become so unbearable you decided to make a decision?
  3. What made the pain grow over that time period? How did it fester?
  4. Where did your search for solutions (Google, G2, Referral, MSP thread, etc)?

The more you have around this, the closer you can get to define your IPP intent data needs.

What Our Clients Say

"Your training reminded me that everyone in the organization is selling, not just sales."

Ted S.

CFO, GainSight.com

I've used Richard's training at multiple companies to help us shape our lead generation efforts with our SDR teams as well as outside sales executives. He helped us examine our process, tune it up, as well as train the team on the NEAT methodology which had an immediate impact on our selling efforts.

Bryan S.

VP Sales

Sometimes trainers do not acknowledge that specific industries have specific eccentricities to their sales process so it was nice that he did not assume anything and gave us time to share our input on situations too. I have used a lot of what I learned each day and feel more confident in the sales process.

Team Member in Computer Software

Mid-Market

We've seen a big improvement in the depth of the conversations our team is having with customers. Our team now have a much better understanding of the customers' pain and can then best recommend if our platform is a good fit for them or not.

Donal T.

Small Business Owner

He easily adjusted to our environment and nuances, and his suggestions have proven to bear fruit with getting prospects on the line. I'd definitely work with Richard again.

Freddy D.

Enterprise Account Executive

Richard was adaptable to our needs and our ambitious timeline. He delivered CONCRETE tools that our team was able to apply the DAY AFTER. We credit him with enabling us to create a string of breakthroughs in the days and weeks following our training.

Natalie P.

VP Sales

Richard helped provide insights into how to successfully lead a discovery call. His wisdom and expertise will leave you in a better position to sell more.

Team Member in Information Technology and Services

Small Business

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