So, why does your company need both the ideal customer profile and buyer persona? Aren’t they the same? Not exactly.
The confusion you might experience when coming across the ideal customer profile and buyer persona is understandable: Both terms describe your buyers; however, the very essence and purposes of BP and ICP are different.
The ideal customer profile explains what companies and titles to target. The buyer persona describes how.
The ICP is a filter for your lead generation activities. You’ll need it at the very beginning of your sales funnel. The BP is used to understand your customers, create a customized environment for communication, and tailor your messaging. It’s used at all stages of your marketing funnel.
What they have in common is a profound understanding of who your customers are and who they aren’t. Furthermore, both the ICP and BP are derived from the knowledge of the market, your services, and the problems you solve.
So, make sure that your sales and marketing teams have invested enough time and resources to create these two documents.
But don’t think of your buyer persona and ideal customer profile as permanent, unchangeable components: As mayour business gains new clients, launches new products, or pursues new titles, you’ll discover plenty of nuances that will change your BP and ICP.
You may realize that some of your clients are too expensive to win or may not be good fits. Don’t hesitate to shift your lead generation efforts elsewhere and update your BPs and ICPs as well.
An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of a company that is most likely to become your client, along with the titles of its decision-makers that your sales team should target. In other words, it provides guidelines on how to find a perfect lead.
As a lead generation company, we deal with numerous ideal customer profiles daily. In fact, without an ICP, we can’t do our job—search for reliable contact data, conduct outreach, and set appointments. And neither can any sales development team.
At CIENCE, we ask our clients to fill in a standard questionnaire. We later discuss it in great detail and form an ideal customer profile on its basis. Afterward, we give the final ICP to a researcher who will look for leads that fit the requirements.
Based on the ICP, we create a mastersheet for contacts. Each lead has seventeen data columns on average (company name, industry, name, title, location, telephone number, etc.). The mastersheet is then given to an SDR, and the outreach begins.
The ideal customer profile consists of two essential parts: The first one describes an organization with a particular problem your company can solve. The second examines specific titles in this company that can be the decision-makers in the buying process.
You can create several ICPs to conduct various campaigns. To create a comprehensive ICP, you’ll need these elements:
This part of ICP defines what type of companies you target:
This part will include the title(s) of decision-makers or decision-influencers you plan to target.
Use criteria that will narrow your search and customize your outreach:
Special requirements aren’t limited to this list. Your marketing and sales team are free to define their criteria.
Many companies omit this, but it’s best to create ICPs for different products or services in some instances. For example, software development may offer various solutions for large and medium-sized companies. You’ll want to target them separately because they’ll most likely have distinct titles involved in the buying process.
This is the list of contact information you need to know to conduct outreach to your prospects. Data points include, but aren’t limited to, the person’s full name, email, phone number, company name, corporate website, address, etc.
In this example, we created an ideal customer profile for an influencer campaign. This example is very simplified because, on average, a contact list that CIENCE creates for its clients contains around 17 to 20 data points.
As you can see, we didn’t use the telephone number in the list of data points; we included a “Category for Suppression List,” which we use for particular companies that we don’t want to reach out to for several reasons.
We also included the question: “Do you see similarities between your best customers?” It’s the first step on the path to creating the specific requirements for potential leads. In this case, we wrote that we needed sales experts, influencers, and idea creators.
Here’s an ICP template that we ask our clients to fill out. Usually, our customers also provide detailed requirements to narrow down the search—something that no software can do. If you want to learn how to leverage the ICP or get your list of high-quality leads, don’t hesitate to contact us!
The causal relationship between an ICP and sales research is obvious: The more detailed description of your ideal customer you provide, the more accurate leads you’ll get at the end of the day. We’ve seen it virtually in every campaign that we’ve implemented for hundreds of clients over the years.
However, what many people seemingly fail to understand is the impact of ICP on sales development. The ICP is about the regular analysis of your market and planning your sales strategy accordingly. If you don’t understand your market, you won’t know what to expect, and you won’t be able to plan. You can’t just fill in the ICP questionnaire based on guesses. This will only ensure your results are nothing but random.
The ideal customer profile influences the following aspects of your sales development activities:
A buyer persona is a guide that helps your sales and marketing teams understand your potential buyers better and effectively engage with them at any sales stage. The BP should be based on a comprehensive analysis of all your customers, interviews with the sales team, and an audit of your sales pipeline.
The best buyer personas are always a combination of descriptive and prescriptive marketing analytics.
BPs always include a full name and a photo so that they can be treated as real individuals. This approach helps your staff feel closer to your real buyers and address their needs better. It’s vital to marketers who don’t always get to talk with customers face-to-face.
The BP profile is always presented as a set of generalized features relevant to the buying-selling process of your company. The term “generalized features” means that they have been observed in many, if not most, buyers. Meanwhile, “relevant” means that you need to look only for those traits that will help you understand the buying behavior of your potential customers.
Note: You don’t want to go too far in developing a BP. Only information correlated to the buying process should make the cut.
When creating your buyer persona, you need to think about the balance between the resources you’ll spend creating and the advantages certain information can bring.
Also, as a rule of thumb, it’s common to create several BPs based on different criteria: the type of service, size of company, industry, or the persona’s role in the company.
Numerous articles suggest adding tons of information to describe a buyer persona. However, not all details are equally important in B2B.
According to Marcia Riefer Johnston, personal data of the lead (e.g., household income, family details, and pets) is less valuable than the professional background (e.g., years in marketing, degrees, and certificates).
The best practice in creating a buyer persona is to provide information about your customers that’s the most relevant for your selling process.
Let’s discover what elements you can include in a BP and their purpose:
Summarize all of the data mentioned above into a short reference sheet for your sales team.
You are not obliged to use all of the elements we’ve listed; however, you should include those elements that can help your sales and marketing teams communicate with your potential customers better. Remember, you can and should revisit your buyer persona from time to time to make changes and improve it.
Honestly, it’s up to you. There are pros and cons to gender-specific BPs. The obvious advantage is that you may be able to provide a more personalized approach to your potential buyers.
The other less obvious advantage is that in the industries where there are fewer women in the C-suite, you can beat your competitors by simply tuning your sales and marketing to the female decision-maker. The disadvantage is that you’ll have to spend more time creating your BPs.
Here are some arguments that support both opinions, along with some suggestions on how to tackle this issue:
Gender in Business – Generation-wise Overview from CIENCE: Summing up the infographic, women’s presence in B2B buying as decision-makers is increasing. However, gender is perceived as a scale rather than two extremes by at least half of the millennials who embark on this process.
Women as B2B Buyers from CIENCE: We haven’t found any surveys that have proven the difference in behavior between baby boomer versus millennial females with a view of less strict gender differentiation perception observed in generation Y. This subject is yet to be studied.
For our own BP, we created and used the following questionnaire. You can download it and consider it as a base for your buyer persona template.
There’s not just one correct answer to this question since every company is unique. There are at least four factors that can influence your decision to create several buyer personas:
The average number of people in the buying team now stands at 6.8. Not all of them are decision-makers (people who have the final word in the sale). The buying group also consists of approvers (to sign the contracts), decision-influencers (to provide an expert opinion), evaluators (to seek alternative solutions), gatekeepers, users (to use the product/service in the end), and more.
You don’t need to create buyer personas for each of these roles. The best advice is to pick those roles most critical to making a sale. However, you should analyze the average buying team and provide this valuable data in your BP.
The KPIs, challenges, and goals triangle is a core of your buyer persona because it’s what you’ll address when engaging each buyer using the content or in sales meetings. Every title in the company has certain performance criteria (KPIs) and problems that make it hard or impossible to achieve them (challenges). And they set many goals related to both KPIs and challenges.
Basically, your company provides a solution within this triangle. Though one product or service can address multiple challenges and help achieve various goals of different titles in the company, the messages will be different.
Behavioral features for your buyers may include attitudes, expectations, emotions, and beliefs. For instance, some people tend to think about future positive outcomes while others mostly have concerns about the negative implications:
If you’ve spotted different buying psychologies related to certain roles, you can create separate buyer personas. The RAIN Group has summarized six different behavioral patterns during negotiations and provided valuable insights on approaching them.
Not all decision-makers will search for a solution to their problems themselves: There’s often an executive assistant or simply a person on the team who’s in charge of creating a list of vendors. You’ll want to get on that list for sure.
You don’t need to create a separate buyer persona for the searcher. But when planning your sales engagement, you need to keep them in mind because they may be your gatekeeper.
We suggest creating ICP and BP at the same time. You’ll need your marketing and sales teams to work together and follow these steps to get the best results:
Analyze your current and former customers according to the following criteria: revenue, number of employees, industry, region, product, and customer lifetime value (CLV). Create a final table with these criteria:
In this simplified table, you can see that retail companies prefer peanut butter and jelly. Meanwhile, companies with $1–10M in revenues don’t buy jelly, the product favored by $0–1M organizations. You can observe that your main clients come from two states, Nevada and California. And your major industries are retail, entertainment, and IT.
You might as well add some specifications to this table. For example, IT is a big industry. Do these companies create software or provide internet? What is the purpose of the purchase? Do they offer peanut butter to their specific clients as a bonus, or do they use it themselves? Do they use it with some particular type of bread? Do they purchase jelly somewhere else, or do they simply not like it?
For a more extensive set of data, you can create all types of analytics. Your goal here is to find out what types of customers are the most profitable for you. The data from the above table doesn’t give you, however, the complete picture.
Are you sure that you work with all the industries and company sizes that might need your product? Can you possibly expand to other regions? What if you miss something important? That’s why you need a comprehensive analysis of the conversions along your sales pipeline. Take a look at this example:
As you can see, at some point, there’s a bottleneck that prevents companies from certain industries from advancing in the sales pipeline. Why don’t educational establishments order your peanut butter and jelly? They’ve got tons of hungry kids and teenagers who enjoy PB&J sandwiches. The same is true for hotels and hospitals.
Don’t hesitate to address the lost customers and interview them about their sales process and why they opted not to work with you. You might find out that your product is a bad fit for them or otherwise learn what your sales managers did wrong during the negotiation process.
Look at your customers’ competitors and analyze them by industries, size, and geography. Obviously, you won’t get a full scope of their clientele. However, a simple look at the client section of their websites might get you a valuable hint of where to look for clients. Be aware that you may not implement everything your competitors do, so you’ll need to analyze how they managed to win these types of customers.
Based on the information above, you can also use machine learning algorithms to identify trends from closed, won, or lost account data and offer everything from lead scoring (likelihood to close) to lookalike companies to target moving forward.
An efficient way to study the new industry or company size is with targeted outreach via email and phone calls. You’ll learn what competitor services they use, and you’ll be able to gain valuable insights by simply asking questions about the problems these organizations are experiencing.
Once you’ve defined the companies you want to target, you need to understand what titles will be the actual decision-makers in these organizations. Consider these two approaches:
New products and services that come out are meant to solve problems. This way, the progress and competition between companies continue. What problems does your product or service solve? What departments within an organization have them? And finally, what titles run these departments?
Let’s use the services CIENCE offers as an example. Our SDR team finds accurate contact data following an ICP and then conducts a personalized outreach to these prospects via email, phone, and social networking websites. We use our service for our internal purposes.
By analyzing how we use our product, we can outline three important decision-makers: head of sales, director of marketing, and CEO/founder/owner.
Your experience using your services may not give you the complete picture, though. For instance, some of your customers might come from very different types of departments—much to your surprise. That’s why you need to conduct a survey both among your buyers and your salespeople.
Analyze the titles in the average buying team. Don’t forget to specify the company parameters you’ve outlined before—there might be a certain pattern. For example, the average buying team for SMEs might be very different from the one at a giant enterprise. You don’t want to target the wrong people in the company.
Ask your sales team to indicate which decision-makers have the most influence on a purchase. In companies of different sizes, the same roles will have a different impact.
Pick a few roles that have the most influence. Outline different names that the same position might have in various companies.
Set the list of data points (contact data entries) you’ll need to search. This list includes, but isn’t limited to: website, phone number, address, name, title, social media profiles, and any additional data that you find relevant to your business (see the “special requirements” section).
At this step, we start our BP construction. Survey your sales team, the titles of the buying team of your clients (including former ones), current prospects, and lost opportunities (the last will save you from survival bias). Pick the parameters you consider the most valuable in the buyer persona template and outline the questions you’ll need to ask your interviewees.
Learn how to interview clients to create a perfect ICP.
We suggest omitting questions about the title, firmographics, professional background, and demographical data because it’s the information you can easily find on LinkedIn or corporate websites. Don’t ask your buyers about their psychological traits, typical objections, or prejudices (leave these questions to your sales).
Tip: Make the survey about your lost opportunities as short and easy as possible. Use checkboxes and list boxes. Explain that you want to understand the reasons why your company didn’t fit them: Was it the product, terms, salespeople, or something else? Don’t forget to express your gratitude for considering your company and services.
The survey of the organizations that are currently in your pipeline shouldn’t be too long either. Explain that the goal of this survey is to provide the best buying experience to all of your customers.
If you wonder how many people you should question about these things, we’d say, the more, the merrier. The bigger the number of researched people, the more accurate and credible the results will be. However, make sure to only question one or two people at one company to avoid spam.
Consider one more source of information—the records of the sales calls and meetings (we use and recommend both Chorus and Gong). You might learn a lot from them. At the beginning of a negotiation, good salespeople mostly ask questions about the problems of potential customers and then listen. Use this information to shape your buyer persona.
Building meaningful communication is one of the primary purposes of both the ideal customer profile and buyer persona. To make sure the information you’ve included in these two documents helps to create connections with your potential buyers, you have to revise everything and ask yourself a few questions.:
Once your sales and marketing people agree upon the ways to communicate with prospects, write them down and finalize your buyer persona.
Afterward, give it to your sales team for their approval. If the BP reminds them of your customers, then you’ve succeeded. If not, listen to their feedback and improve.
Next comes the most exciting part—applying your buyer persona and ideal customer profile in your sales and content marketing. You’ll use ICP at the beginning of the lead generation process and the BP throughout every stage of the sales funnel journey.
Like everything in lead generation, creating a buyer persona and ideal customer profile takes time and effort. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend investing in this process, and as a reward, you’ll get a smoother sales cycle and happier customers.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in Nov. 2018 and has been completely updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.