Overview
If you want to lay the foundation for a successful sales strategy, you need to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP).
An ICP is a fictitious company that combines the key characteristics that best portray your ideal customer. By analyzing firmographics such as company size, industry, location, annual revenue, and budget you can more easily define the types of companies that you serve best. This in turn helps you to better understand your customer’s biggest pain points, tailor your products or services to their needs, and focus your sales efforts on bringing in the most qualified customers so that you can reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Any B2B business set on boosting growth, improving customer relationships, and increasing sales should identify and define their ICP.
Check out Apollo's book Outbound Sales for expert advice on identifying your ideal customer, including comprehensive targeting frameworks to build out your ICP.
Check out the following sections to learn more about how to identify, create, and apply your ICP to Apollo.
Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile
To ensure you find, engage, and convert the right businesses for your product or service, you need to identify the defining characteristics of your ideal customer.
Pull a list of all your deals from the last 90 - 120 days and include all titles involved in the purchase. Ask key questions about the types of people and companies involved in the deal:
- What industries are they in?
- What are the titles of people you've interacted with?
- What are the characteristics of their company, like employee count, locations, etc.?
- Is there a difference between who signed the contract and who actually uses your product or service?
Identify common threads in the data: What’s common across industry, geography, company size, technologies, or services used?
If you’re brand new and don’t yet have a solid customer base, start with hypotheses: Who do you think could buy your product?
If you're an upcoming or established business, dive into your data and align all departments. Every team in your business can offer valuable insights that will help influence and tailor your sales strategies so that you can share the right message with the right companies at the right time.
To better pinpoint what your ideal customer profile looks like, follow these 3 steps:
Analyze Your Existing Data
Gather data from your CRM and look for key trends between your customers. Categorize them by defining attributes such as industry, company size, revenue, funding, technology stack, and location. Compare these attributes with their profitability scores. Think about which customers have been with you for the longest. Is there a relationship between certain firmographics and their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores? Could industry or employee headcount, for example, be impacting customer longevity?
Consider which industries have the shortest and longest sales cycles. What characteristics differentiate them? Examine the main causes of customer churn. Do these companies share any defining attributes? Look for distinct patterns between all of the companies that you analyze.
Rank Your Customers
When you analyze your data, create a list of your best and worst customers. Consider what makes them a great fit or a big risk to take on. Discuss the most common objections your sales and customer success teams face regularly. Reflect on the key attributes that can lead these deals to falter. Talk to each department to clarify the metrics they use to set their team’s objectives and define success. This will help frame the specific attributes you all agree to be the most important for your company.
Remember that there isn’t one “right” metric to determine the ideal customer profiles for your business. What might be important to one company, is not necessarily relevant to another. You need to adapt your analysis to fit your company’s objectives.
One way to go about this is to rank your customers based on their CLV, return on investment (ROI), and CSAT scores, and then compare this data with the firmographics that you gathered at the beginning to see if there are any distinct patterns between them. You may find that what you thought were your “best” customers don't actually bring the most benefit to your company long-term. By teaming up with other departments, you can take a more holistic approach to defining your “best” and “worst” customers.
Dissect Your Success
Get granular. Once you have a list of your “best” and “worst” customers, don’t just analyze the data, but also analyze the approach that you took to close and maintain these customers. The more detail you go into, the easier it will then be for you to relate to your customers and build your product or service around their needs. You can then start to hone in on the types of personas to reach out to within your ICP.
A persona is not the same as an ICP. To identify your ICP you need to use measurable data, like company size and industry for B2B or age and gender for B2C, to gather information about the type of business or individual best suited to your company offerings. To identify your personas, you need to use qualitative data, like pain points, goals, and personality type, to gather information about the kinds of individuals that fall within your ideal customer profile. An ICP helps you to clarify who you sell to, whereas personas help you to clarify how you sell to them. Both should play an important role in your sales and marketing strategies, but you can't define your personas without first defining your ICP.
Once you understand your ICP from the inside out, you can better tailor your product or service to address the specific pain points of your personas. Speak to your customer support team to identify the common questions and characteristics of your long-standing customers. Consult with customer success to find out what kinds of accounts are easiest to upsell. If you dissect what is currently working and analyze the common factors contributing to that success, you can replicate your efforts in a more scalable and sustainable way.
Create Your ICP
Now you’re ready to set the parameters for your success. Use the data you have gathered to draw conclusions about your ICP.
Here's an example of what your comparison might look like:
| Best Companies | Key Firmographics | CSAT Score | ROI | CLV Ratio | Customer Health | # of Referrals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company Type #1 |
|
95% | 30% | 3:1 | Healthy | 5 |
| Worst Companies | Key Firmographics | CSAT Score | ROI | CLV Ratio | Customer Health | # of Referrals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company Type #1 |
|
50% | -10% | 1:1 | At Risk | 0 |
Once you've analyzed your best companies and grouped them by their key characteristics, you're ready to create your ICP.
You can have more than one ICP. This may be necessary if you offer more than one product or service that focuses on solving different pain points.
Here's an example of what your completed ICP might look like:
Our primary ICP is a medium-sized B2B company in information and technology. Their HQ is located in North America. Their clients are medium to enterprise-sized companies and their annual recurring revenue (ARR) is between $500 million to $1 billion. They have a 20+ size sales department and are currently using at least one of the following technologies: Hubspot, Salesforce, Salesloft, Outreach, Gong, Calendly.
Apply Your ICP to Apollo
Now that you have identified your ideal customer profile, there are several ways that you can use Apollo to further tailor your sales approach to find and engage with your ideal customers.
Filters
Search filters allow you to include or exclude specific subsets of data when you search for new contacts or accounts in Apollo. This helps you to better segment and personalize searches in Apollo so that you can find and engage with the companies that best reflect your ICP.
As you use Apollo to hone in on your ideal customer profiles, search using the most relevant filters for your campaigns. This helps you to concentrate your sales efforts on finding the specific companies that share the same characteristics as your ideal customer.
Use AI power-ups to hone in on contacts and find qualified contacts. You can create custom power-ups to refine contact lists, discover details about prospects, and generate highly personalized messages.
Personas
Personas are sets of titles, seniorities, and departments that define different groups of people that you can target. This allows you to find contacts faster, receive better recommendations, and improve analytics.
As you use Apollo to hone in on your ideal customer profiles, create personas that best fit the description of your ICP.
Sequences
Sequences are outreach campaigns with any number of sequential contact points and tasks that you can customize to personally engage your ideal customers at scale. Sequences help your team communicate with your ICP and complete the right tasks at the right time to speed your prospects through your pipeline and turn them into paying customers as efficiently as possible.
As you use Apollo to hone in on your ideal customer profiles, create sequences to match each type of persona — then engage with automatic and manual messages, LinkedIn engagement, calls, and action items that speak directly to the needs and goals of your ideal customers.
Analytics
Analytics on Apollo provide you with actionable data that you can use to improve your sales strategies. Analytics consists of 2 important assets you can use to fine-tune your campaigns and more effectively engage with your ideal customer profiles: reports and dashboards.
Reports provide aggregated in-app metrics in various visualization types, with filters to refine the data. Dashboards provide visualizations of several related reports in a common place.
As you use Apollo to hone in on your ideal customer profiles, create ICP-related dashboards that include the reports from your highly targeted sales campaigns. Apply the appropriate filters when you create reports and you can visualize how ICP affects your engagement. This means you can continue to refine and solidify the attributes that best define your ideal customer profiles and make more informed decisions based on actionable data.