According to research, 42% of IT leaders claimed that their organization uses AI to help draw important insights. In the B2B space, a buyer’s journey is constantly changing, and to keep up with this pace it is important to implement sales intelligence. Sales intelligence refers to a variety of tech solutions that provide data to salespeople and marketers. It aids sales and marketing teams in discovering, analyzing, presenting, and utilizing data about potential customers.
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
It is important to note that in modern times, clients demand a personal experience that sales intelligence can provide. Sales Intelligence helps in creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) for your business. It's designed to give your sales and marketing efforts a laser-like focus, focusing only on companies that will benefit the most from your product, solution, or service.
This helps you avoid wasting time on prospects who aren't a good fit for your solutions and/or who, even if they do buy, are likely to abandon it soon after implementation due to a misalignment of their goals and your solutions.
How do you create an ideal customer profile?
Step 1: Identify how and why companies use your product
At this point, far too many businesses rely on firmographic data. It's a good place to start, but identifying businesses based on their size and location is insufficient.
The key is to discuss how current customers use your product and why they do so.
While quantitative data is important in defining your ICP, this stage also requires you to gather important qualitative information. With your sales and marketing teams, start a conversation and document the results.
Consider the questions below:
- What is the name of your most important client, and why do they use your services?
- What services do you offer? What services do you emphasize in your marketing campaigns and on your website?
- Why do customers prefer your product to that of your competitors?
- Why does one business invest more in your service than the other?
- Is there a use case where your company can make more money?
Step 2: Identify your data sources
We'll assess the technical and firmographic information that makes up the companies that have a use case for your product in this section.
But don't just look at customer data; that relies too heavily on previous behavior. You must concentrate on your company's present and future.
Customers who don't provide much value in terms of renewals and no longer fit the ICP are referred to as "customer debt" by even the largest companies. They're still a customer, but that doesn't mean they're perfect.
You'll advance your ICP thinking by focusing on the makeup of companies with the use cases you identified in Step 1.
Step 3: Preliminary ICP and data pull
By assisting in the identification of your TAM, your ICP becomes more actionable.
An AI software like Clodura can help you extract the most accurate data & sales insights needed to identify the low-hanging sales opportunities and engage with potential buyers within your Total Addressable Market.
You can get an up-to-date picture of not only the total market but also the most promising opportunities in your prospect list by compiling company spending, growth, and product usage.
Pulling initial data will help you verify that you have a large enough TAM for long-term revenue growth.
Step 4: Evaluate customer data
Instead of serving as the foundation for your ideal future customer, evaluating the holistic, big picture of customer data hones the ICP.
Customers aren't always the best representation of where you want to go as a business, so customer data frequently misinforms the definition. Customer data works well for segmentation after your ICP is completed because we've already determined who's the best.
With the help of Clodura, you can obtain actionable intelligence on opportunities that are more likely to close and also get context to craft the perfect sales pitch to the ‘right’ prospect.
Step 5: Finalize your ICP
You have everything you need to finish your ICP, including an analysis of current use cases, data about your vertical and TAM, and customer data.
Maintain a record, for instance, "Our ideal customer is a company with more than 500 employees that spends more than $100k per month on cloud services," says the company. They are based in North America and are planning to open new offices or locations." This will provide you easy access to spot your star customers and target them accordingly.
The final tip is that you can have multiple ICPs. The good news is that you can create multiple ICPs and prioritize them based on the best fit using updated spending data and segmentation.
Data is the fuel that propels sales intelligence forward. An ICP, or customer avatar, is not a new or novel concept. Data aggregation and average profiling have been used by businesses and marketers all over the world for decades. The success of your sales and marketing efforts hinges on the design of your ICP. Companies that invest in a well-defined ICP see significant business benefits, such as shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates.