How do you identify ideal customer profiles and operationalize them as a part of your GTM strategy?

Ideally, before a launch, you have worked hand-in-hand with the product team to understand who the product is for, and what product it solves. But if you are coming into a situation where this is not defined, here are some ways to approach it:  Ask the "dumb" questions to your product and eng team (other people WILL want to know them too): Who is this for? What pain points does this solve? Why did we build this? Develop a hypothesis on who the customer is and test it, stat. This could be in the ...Read More

Too often I see folks trying to assemble the broadest ICP possible. The logic is that by inflating my TAM/SAM/SOM to the biggest number possible, I am increasing my odds of success. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE big markets. I want markets big enough, that even if we f*ck it up, we can still be successful. It is infinitely easier to build a healthy business that is 1-5% of an enormous market than it is to build the same size business by capturing 80% of a much smaller market. The value of an ICP is ...Read More

If you understand the customer problems or market gaps you’re solving for, then you should be able to hone in on your target buyer and the types of customers you want to attract. It’s a lot easier to narrow down to an ICP if your product is already established and you have a base of customers to pull data from. From there you can start looking for patterns to see if there are commonalities across a specific segment of customers: by region, industry, company size, or type of buyer (department, jo ...Read More

Looking at your current customer base and the characteristics of top customers (I do this based on ARR) is a great place to start! You can focus on relevant characteristics such as: Industry/vertical Employee headcount — companywide and within key departments Annual revenue Tech stack Geography Size of their customer base Technologyical/digital maturity  Public vs. private company (if they are looking to IPO, we have found great success in getting our foot in the door with NEW logos!) If you wan ...Read More

Many methods exist to identify ideal customer profiles (ICP) for your product. The simple approach is to look inwards to understand product-market fit among your existing users. 1) Power Users: Identify your power users and understand why they love you. Typically, these cohorts help inform ideal targets for your ICP and how you go-to-market to acquire more customers that fit your ICP profiles. Analyze what quantitative and qualitative commonalities these cohorts share to inform your ICP profiles ...Read More

Love this question! I also have to call out we love joking about this acronym and affectionately call it "Insane Clown Posse" like the hip hop duo versus the marketing term. BUT for the industry term... I use existing data to inform the define who their ICP IS and who their ICP IS NOT.  Good ICPs typically are orgs who: Use your software (active, increasing ARR) Love your software (positive NPS, 8-10) Short sales cycle (depends on industry but typically less than 30 days) Scales with growth (no ...Read More

In order to identify ideal customer profiles as part of your GTM strategy you should do the following in the early stages of the GTM planning: Conduct market research. You can do this through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and other methods. Dig into your existing customer base. This will help you understand who your current customers are and how they use your product. Create customer personas. They help you understand the needs and wants of your ideal customer so you know how to speak to th ...Read More

This is all about the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in. I'm going to start with the three main use cases for your ICP aka operationalizing: For your GTM team the its meant to focus outbound marketing and sales efforts and to help you qualify in/out inbound leads. Your ICP is the “Who” of companies that get the most value from your offering. Put it to work by defining outbound lists, ad targeting, creating lead scoring, building discovery and qualification questions, case studies to target, ...Read More

ICP is a funny topic. First, it's not about persona. I think there is confusion around ICP and persona. ICP is about the propensity to buy, which involves firmographic (what kind of company are they from), technographic (what kind of tech stack is favorable for you and your team), compelling event (usually people buy your product because of some pain or unmet needs), persona (title, background, etc..), and last the channels and community that they live in.  Usually, you will need both qualitativ ...Read More

First, the GOAL of an ICP is to help you precisely message, find, and qualify the right prospects. So ICPs need to be more than simple firmographics + titles. Double-click into discovering tech stacks, team sizes, past companies, tenure in role, etc. AND, the ICP should include the fact that those customers expand and renew! (that they also have low CAC and high Lifetime Value). Then, to OPERATIONALIZE the ICP, you use the above detail to: Help know where/how to reach/access them Know how to pre ...Read More

The answer to this question varies dramatically depending on the size and stage of your company. Here is a model we build for B2B SaaS organizations: We believe that ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are a means to an end, which is go-to-market alignment. By creating a shared understanding and agreement on customer target definitions, we are able to drive improved execution. Over time, this allows us to improve our product market fit (PMF). With improved PMF companies are able to create much more e ...Read More

It all starts with data! I typically segment my buyer profiles into company size (which is ultimately driven by how much money they spend with us), but there are many ways to determine profile categories. Below are the steps I take to identify and create the ideal customer profiles:  Internal Data: Gather data from sales to better understand your customer segments. For each segment (for ex, company size), you need to know the average deal size, length of the deal cycle, and how big the segment i ...Read More