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Is closing one of the areas for improvement of your sales team? Or achieve 15% conversion in prospecting? Closing is the result of a multitude of actions by your sales team: if it is not optimal, it is a safe bet that the problem is located well early in the sales cycle. And maybe even as soon as the commercial target is defined...
Business Developers who have gone through a Akimbo Bootcamp are used to asking themselves: who is my ICP and who is my typical Buyer Persona? The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) corresponds to the robot portrait of your “typical customer company”, the one that has all the key criteria that allow you to say: my product or service is 100% adapted to this company.
What is the difference between ICP and Buyer Persona?
An ICP represents the portrait of an ideal fictional company to which you would like to offer your offer and close a sale. This tool focuses on the part of the business, on its assets, its offers and the customers it is likely to attract. The Buyer Persona complements the ICP by offering a description of the various customer profiles. It is a kind of classification that groups together customers with similar buying behaviors under several types.
Building an Ideal Customer Profile - ICP
Why build an Ideal Customer Profile?
Interest in marketing
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can be defined as the identity card of the target. It describes the profile of the ideal customer, their purchasing behaviors, their budget, their interests... When developing a marketing strategy, the ICP therefore becomes a key tool in order to clearly identify the type of communication that should be put in place to attract a maximum of people.
A strength for salespeople
Knowing your company's ICP is truly an advantage for salespeople. In order to offer offers that correspond to customers and to close a sale as often as possible, the salesperson will rely on the knowledge he has of the ideal customer. It will also be much easier to identify individuals who are likely to be interested in his proposals...
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How do you build the Ideal Customer Profile?
Three ways to build it
1. Ask your sales team. She is in constant contact with the customers and prospects of your company, she can give you valuable information or co-build the ICPs with you.
2. Conduct interviews satisfied customers but also “churner” customers* (Churn = loss of a customer), to obtain more accurate and qualitative information.
3. Explore the data ! Don't leave with prejudices or vague ideas, use Data!
The data you collect through CRM represents an inexhaustible source of information, and will help you better understand and identify targets.
The first step: study the common patterns of your current customers. You can push granularity by type of product or service.
⚠️ N.B: On average, BtoB companies have between 2 and 5 priority Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) (study carried out by ideagency).
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Each profile must be evaluated according to 4 dimensions
Those who need to be convinced
Some prospects are not, at first glance, interested in your offer. Whether for financial reasons, material reasons or simply because of taste, not everyone can be attracted to your offers. However, pipe should not be swept away once and for all. It is necessary to analyze the reasons why these prospects are not yet customers. To build your ICP, it is essential to seek to identify the levers that will convince these people and understand what are the obstacles to the acceptance of your offer.
Those you need to retain
Loyalty means that the target has already been a customer of your offer. Some profiles only buy your product once and never (or rarely) come back. In the same way, it is important to look for the reasons why these people never return. The aim here is to identify the levers that made it possible to trigger the purchase and to understand how the customer felt at that precise moment. By analyzing these aspects, we determine the positive and negative points of our offer, which makes it possible to improve the customer experience and to understand what your business is working for. This is decisive in the development of your ICP.
In what way?
Market analysis must identify the means put in place to attract customers and what would be the shortcomings. You need to know about various areas such as the advertising that is allocated to the company's products or services, customer relationships, after-sales services or loyalty programs. All of the company's commercial actions must be distinguished in order to develop an ICP that is as close as possible to reality.
Through which communication channel
Communication channels are the nerves of commercial markets. They make it possible to disseminate information about the offer, to convey the image of your company, to create and maintain a link with customers but also to develop your business. This is why analyzing the type of communication used makes it possible to create an ICP. By mastering communication, you have control over your environment. Paying attention to this data allows you to get an idea not only of how the customer views the company but also of the visibility of your offer.
ICP template
In order to more clearly identify a company's ICP, it is possible to establish templates, i.e. models that will serve as reference points for the company. For example, the company Leroy-Merlin, which specializes in DIY, may have the following ICP as an ICP:
While ICP offers a global vision of how a company's ideal customers function, it does not consider the plurality of profiles likely to be interested in your offer. Different personalities can become customers despite different motivations. This is why, after establishing a company's Ideal Customer Profile, it is important to identify Buyer Persona, i.e. the different types of customers who will consume your offer.
Examples of Ideal Customer Profiles to study
The characteristics of the target companies:
● Business size;
● Turnover;
● Number of employees;
● Number of subsidiaries;
● International presence;
● Business sector;
● Geographical location;
● Motivations for purchases;
● The bottlenecks identified during the commercial process;
● Competing technologies and tools used.
Once the first characteristics have been identified, consider analyzing the sales cycle of your customers who meet these characteristics, in order to obtain more detailed information. This will allow you to be more accurate on sales forecasts when you have the KPIs in the sales funnel.
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The key stages of the Ideal Customer Profile sales cycle
It can be:
● Number of open opportunities;
● Number of closed opportunities won or lost;
● Number of contact points before getting the first appointment (e.g. 3 e-mails, 5 telephone reminders, LinkedIn connection, 1 message on LinkedIn);
● Average length of the sales cycle and total number of touchpoints;
● Number of contact (s) /ice (s) during the sales cycle;
● Transaction amount;
● Duration of contracts.
Undoubtedly, if you detect several client company profiles with the same characteristics, you have just detected one or more typical company profile (s).
⚠️ N.B: Remember to maintain the database, prospects and customers alike. Several studies show that the obsolescence rate of commercial files varies between 25% and 30% per year.
Once the Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) have been identified, you will be able to continue your investigative work in order to identify the Buyer Persona within the ICPs.
What is a Buyer Persona (BP)?
Definition of Buyer Persona
Another form of ideal customer is a buyer persona. It is the consumer who will buy or consume the products or services offered by your business. In other words, it's the target.
Defining buyer personas means identifying buyer profiles, who can attest to common buying behaviors. We often think of the term archetypes, that is, models of people and their attitudes.
Buyer Persona examples
For example, the buyer persona of a client of the BIC pen company could correspond to this: Léa, 30 years old, married and 2 children, is a primary school teacher. She enjoys family outings and meeting new people. Typically, she would be interested in the brand's school supplies during back-to-school campaigns because she is both a mother and a teacher. She would be a recurring customer who would buy BIC products a few times a year.
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What is a Buyer Persona for?
The Buyer Persona in marketing
The Buyer Persona in marketing is used to establish a guideline that is adjusted via these profiles. It is, in fact, essential for businesses to identify their prospects. In marketing, the buyer persona is used to find the tools that will be used according to the target target. Thanks to the identification of personas, marketing strategies can be personalized, by creating formulas or adapted rates for example.
It also allows you to create personalized email campaigns that better convert subscribers into customers. With email segmentation, you can organize your mailing lists by person and send offers that are targeted at the respective preferences of each group.
Likewise, the BP makes it possible to understand the habits of prospects and therefore to communicate on offers at convenient times for the targets.
The Buyer Persona on the commercial side
The Buyer persona is at the heart of commercial strategies. In order to develop an efficient commercial activity, it is important to target future customers correctly. If this step is not carried out correctly, the product developed may not correspond to the needs of the target.
During prospecting and sales operations, it is essential to consider the customer. En Determining the buyer persona of potential customers, we put our finger on their consumption habits, on their behavior, on all the details of life that explain their reason for buying your offer.
Thus, the salesperson can anticipate certain reactions, certain obstacles to buying. He can build an argument before the meeting, which will significantly affect the person to be seduced. By drawing on the key points of the offer, while transcribing the usefulness of the product or service into the customer's daily life, the salesperson is almost certain that he will get a sale.
Defining a buyer persona, if thorough enough, can guide the entire strategy.
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Buyer Persona criteria
Like the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), the Buyer Persona represents the robot portrait of the ideal customer.
As with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), data has a predominant role to play in the construction of the Buyer Personas (s).
Some criteria you can analyze for Buyer Personas:
● What are its missions and challenges?
● What are her professional priorities right now?
● What are its problems?
● How is your team structured?
● What are their buying motivations?
● What tools does he/she use on a daily basis?
● What are its typical objections?
● What is his area of influence within the company (decision-maker/contributor/etc.)?
Here is a tool provided by Hubspot to create Personas. It's easy, fast and... free!
Onboarding your team on ICP and Buyer Persona
Once this analysis work is done, take the time to properly train your sales team on:
● The best approach to be implemented by Ideal Customer Profil (ICP) and Buyer Personas to obtain the best results;
● The speech to be given according to the interlocutors in order to be as relevant as possible;
● The commercial intensity to be maintained throughout the sales cycle.
To conclude, keep in mind that this analysis of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Persona must benefit from updates throughout the year, in order to ensure that you are always the most effective in the commercial approach.
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