When you think about some of the most famous speeches ever delivered, what comes to mind?
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. told 250,000 people in Washington, DC about his dream to end racism and discrimination in America. 100 years prior, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address called for a nation to unite under the principles of equality and freedom. Winston Churchill earned his place in history in 1940 when he told the British House of Commons that Britain would never surrender to Nazi Germany, even if it meant fighting alone.
What if the audience wasn’t listening? If the people in the crowd were not the right consumers of those messages, would these speeches be taught in history classes many years later?
To grow a business from a seedling of an idea to a thriving enterprise, it is imperative that the right audience is in the room to hear about your mission, learn about the problem you’re trying to solve, and share in your passion for the product or service that will fix it. This process starts with a crystal clear definition of perfection in your target audience.
Key Questions To Create An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Without a clear archetype of your ideal customer, your product and its revenue potential can be threatened in a few ways.
It becomes more difficult to create targeted marketing and sales messages that resonate with the customer, leading to wasted time and resources, and lower sales revenues. Worse yet, you may attract the wrong kind of customer, one who is not a good fit for your product or service. It becomes more difficult to know which features and improvements to prioritize, creating potential misalignment with the needs of your target market. All these make it very difficult to achieve scale.
A founder or leader of a Seed stage company will often ask themselves certain questions to address this challenge:
- What would our perfect buyer look like?
- What are their demographics (e.g., company size, industry, location)?
- What are their business goals and challenges?
- Why would they switch to a new solution?
- What pain are they feeling that we could alleviate?
- How do they make purchase decisions?
- What are their budget constraints and buying habits?
- What are their technological needs?
- What do they value most?
- What research can narrow the field, and how do we conduct further discovery to qualify prospects?
Creating An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) For Social Impact
Pretend you’re in the healthcare space and your solution improves access to quality care. To establish an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for social impact, you need to consider the following factors:
The social problem that your product or service solves. Who are the people who are most affected by this problem? What are their needs and pain points? This audience could include people with low incomes, people of color, rural communities, even women and children. All these groups tend to be either uninsured/underinsured, have a higher incidence of chronic health conditions, or suffer from barriers to access.
Your resources. What are your budget, staffing, and other resources? What kind of customers can you realistically reach and serve? Healthcare organizations span a wide range, including hospitals, clinics, medical practices, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and medical device manufacturers. You can filter by size and location, by financial indicators such as revenue or profitability, or even specifics such as services offered or technologies adopted.
The impact that you want to have. What specific social impact goals do you have? Who are the people or organizations that are best positioned to help you achieve these goals? Organizations who want to expand access to quality healthcare might have key initiatives they’re focused on, such as early disease detection, reducing disparities in healthcare outcomes, and implementing telehealth services. Alternatively, they may be aligned to tangential areas of focus, e.g. health literacy and education, social determinants of health, workforce diversity and inclusion (DE&I) or environmental sustainability in healthcare practices. Any of these could be an indicator of strong strategic alignment for your own organization.
Our Approach To Creating An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Once you have considered these factors, you can start to develop your ICP. Your ICP should be a detailed description of your ideal customer, including the firmographic and strategic indicators discussed above.
This list of indicators can be built using a variety of tactics. Market research can help identify the people and organizations most affected by the social problem that you are trying to solve. Through customer interviews and surveys, you can talk to your existing customers and learn about their needs, pain points, and motivations. Website traffic, conversion data and social media analytics can help educate you about your visitors and customers.
The three pillars of an effective Ideal Customer Profile
- Specific. The more specific your ICP is, the better. This will help you to target your marketing and sales efforts more effectively.
- Realistic. Consider your resources and don’t try to reach too wide of an audience. Focus on the customers that you can realistically reach and serve.
- Flexible. Your ICP should be a living document that you update regularly. As you learn more about your customers and the market, you may need to adjust your ICP.
Solutions For Creating An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Your customers come in all shapes and sizes, but there are certain characteristics that isolate the best prospects from the rest of the pack. Without a clear profile to pursue, you risk spinning your wheels on the wrong prospects.
Define your model customer in very precise terms, to add focus to your sales and marketing investments.
Our Process
- Source customer intelligence (from CRM, feedback surveys, analytics, social, etc) to develop working hypothesis for ICP
- Develop initial list of firmographic and strategic criteria for evaluation, augmented by drivers of relationship health
- Analyze competitive ICPs to isolate white space & drive product/marketing differentiation
- Provide ranges for qualitative & quantitative indicators, to distinguish between tiered customer segments
Deliverables
- Comprehensive resource encompassing all collected customer intelligence
- Master ICP document to be referenced by sales, marketing and leadership teams
- Measurement framework to evaluate performance vs. ICP and guide future review/refinement
- Recommendations for incorporation of ICP into internal marketing playbooks/reference materials
Impact
- Higher efficiency and effectiveness across sales and marketing functions
- Improved customer satisfaction & improved customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Streamlined prioritization and decision making for customer-facing initiatives
Click for more information on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), or get in touch.
Other Revenue Growth Challenges For Seed Stage Companies
This discussion about how to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is one post in an 8-part series about revenue growth challenges for seed stage companies. See below for how to address other common revenue challenges (titles in italics yet to be released):
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