Developing an Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile is a composite picture of the perfect buyer for your solution. Its purpose is to focus your product development, marketing and sales communications, and prospect outreach. If you have your ICP dialed in and product/market fit, you should have good margins and short sales cycles – selling should be easy.

Consider the following when developing an ideal customer profile:

• What industry is your solution best suited for? What industries are unlikely to buy from you?
• What size company is best suited (as judged by headcount or amount of revenue)?
• Are there regional differences?
• Does maturity of the prospect matter?
• Do they use similar technology?
• What is the size of their customer base?
• Is your solution best suited for non-profit or for-profit organizations? Government entities?

There are hundreds of other parameters that you can use to develop your ICP. Choose what is right for you and your business.

Observing your existing customers is a great way to begin developing your ICP. Can you group customers into categories of size, location, entity type, or some other characteristic? Are there commonalities amongst your most profitable customers?

Interview existing clients and ask them questions like:

• Why did you buy our solution?
• What challenges were you looking to solve when you first connected with us?
• Has our product help you solve those challenges?
• How do you use our product?
• What is the most useful feature or functionality of our solution?
• Why do you continue to use our solution?
• Who was the final decision maker?
• Who was the financial decision maker?
• Where did you first learn about our solution?
• Where do you go for related information today?

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of developing an ICP that can guide your business. Take this framework, add to it make it your own. There are lots of good ICP templates available online to get you started. I get value from Hubspot’s.

If you put quality time and thinking into this exercise it will reap rewards down the road.