Maximizing the outcomes of marketing and sales efforts depends heavily on identifying market opportunities you must focus on first. Aligning your Product, Marketing, and Sales efforts with Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) attributes will surely unlock the growth potential for years to come.
That said, developing a data-driven ICP for B2B business objectives takes both art and science. Let’s map the necessary steps for ICP development and explain why it can’t do without B2B data enrichment.
What is B2B ICP and What It Isn’t?
There is a sea of differences between the Ideal Customer Profile and the buyer persona. However, many people confuse these terms and mistakenly perceive ICP as a set of qualitative attributes. The problem is those attributes aren’t measurable and actionable. You can’t convert them into targeting criteria.
For instance, someone might consider “B2B SaaS” a targetable industry description, but it isn’t. It’s a vague persona that doesn’t describe what the prospect (e.g., company) does, what challenges they experience, and what solutions they’re interested in.
You must define ICP using measurable, quantifiable, and qualitative data, preferably derived from historical records on close-won sales with the highest annual contract value. Run a regression analysis on these high-value accounts, and you’ll get the essential data points like company size, tech stack, and buying intents. These will become your initial ICP attributes.
Why ICP Matters for Long-Term Business Growth?
The new reality of B2B marketing puts much pressure on marketing and sales. They must continuously grow pipeline productivity and bring in high-quality leads to maximize the outcomes while keeping ad spending low. An ICP-driven growth marketing helps overcome budgeting restraints as it fosters:
- Productive Sales and Marketing alignment. By targeting ICP-fit audiences, marketers increase lead nurturing efficiency and bring out more qualified leads for sales follow-ups. The sales reps, in turn, can provide feedback on customers with the shortest sales cycles to Marketing, which helps them refine lead-scoring criteria.
- Breadth/relevance balance for B2B demand generation. Building a demand-gen campaign around ICP makes it more balanced. In this case, it’s worth scrutinizing the intent signals to see how TA discovers new products and adds them to the ICP dataset.
- ROI maximization. An ICP-centered approach helps marketers pursue accounts with the highest lifetime value and strongest buying intent. Thus, they can run full-fledged account-based campaigns on them that pay off with much higher returns compared to broad-based ones.
- Stronger customer satisfaction. ICP marketing allows B2B companies to build retention-focused customer relationships, where clients constantly grow on your brand and eventually become loyal ambassadors.
Designing Actionable ICP in 5 Steps
ICP development requires understanding what makes a customer a perfect fit, matching these qualities with measurable attributes, and reaching a company-wide buy-in on such a holistic ideal customer view.
1. Have a Get-together to Discuss the Objectives of ICP
The trick is that the professional purposes of ICP differ for particular teams. Your marketers might want it to pinpoint targeting criteria and ensure high lead quality. The Sales rely on ICP to verify the sale-fitness of MQLs handed off by marketers. The product team would expect the ICP definition to clarify what customer needs should be met by your product functionality.
Take time to reconcile different views on your ICP purpose and form a unified ICP definition that can extend into all possible use cases.
2. Collect Data Inputs on High-Value Customers
You shouldn’t analyze only marketing and sales data if you want to develop an exhaustive ICP definition. You must also include insights from the Customer Support and Customer Success teams to understand in what cases you exceeded or failed customer expectations.
As you isolate the most profitable close-won deal, run regression analyses. This will inform you about the typical buying behavior that your best-fit customers show from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.
3. Purge the Inputs Don’t Impact Conversions
Ensure you identify the dropped-off leads and don’t consider them when designing the best-fit customer model. If the attributes of this ill-performing audience overlap with those of your champion customers, you can discard them or reduce the weightage of these data points in your ICP.
4. Enrich ICP with Additional Data Points
Extend the raw ICP by sourcing additional data points from third-party B2B data providers. Using audience audience-building solutions like Primer, you can merge firmographic, technographic, and intent data from several marketing intelligence platforms.
We’d recommend you enrich your ICP with the following company and person-level attributes:
- Company-Level: Location, Headcount, Industry Type, Annual/Quarterly Revenue, Tech Stack Used, Website Traffic
- Person level: Title, Department, Seniority Level, Decision-Making Power
- Intent Trigger: New Vacancies, Funding Stage, Acquisition
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5. Reach a Company-Wide Buy-In
Stakeholders and department heads must weigh the solidified ICP definition. They might have some remarks on what additional data sets to include in ICP to align it with their work objectives.