How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile In 10-minutes or less!

What is an Ideal Customer Profile in Sales? According to Hubspot, an Ideal Customer Profile “defines the perfect customer for what your organization solves for”. Too many inside sales reps try to go after every lead that comes their way. The true sales professionals know the secret to cold calling starts with knowing who to target. And that is what an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) does – it identifies which leads will have a higher probability for an opportunity.

Why You Need to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

“Inside Sales” is a tough gig. No matter if you use the phone, email, social media, or a combination of all three, if you target the wrong audience, you will never be successful. Frustration will be high; motivation will be low, and “selling” won’t be any fun. At all. Not even a little bit.

I’ve always been a strong closer but despised prospecting – until I was fortunate enough to get a sales manager that taught me the secret to prospecting. It was so simple that I was shocked that I didn’t figure it out sooner, and yet, without this sales manager’s enlightenment, I may never have. So I am looking forward to sharing this essential sales tip with you and passing on what seems so obvious, but it eludes a lot of new and experienced sales professionals.

Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Salespeople want to sell to everyone. We do not want one single deal to “get away.” It’s inherent. So we go after anybody and everybody. We go “wide” in our outbound prospecting efforts when instead, we should go narrow and deep.

The reality is, every market has a niche. Some even have multiple niches. The key is to know how to pick your “zebras” out of the herd and build a prospecting list of just your target audience.

Like the top hedge fund billionaires who know how to see “marks” that give them an edge, top salespeople know what “marks” their ideal customer profiles have.

B2B Ideal Customer Profile Example

At its core, the basic Ideal Customer Profile will include:

• Industry
• Location
• Annual Revenue
• Employee Size

You should know if you have a higher close rate with less stress with companies with 200 to 500 employees, or with companies with 50 to 200 employees, just as an example.

Drilling down and knowing companies within X location, with X number of employees within X industry, and has an annual revenue within the X range, is critical to building an ICP Profile so you can create a list of targeted suspects to go after.

Knowing this data gives salespeople a competitive edge to closing more deals.

Using firmographic data to build your prospecting list is essential to scaling while reducing sales turnover.

Using Technographics to Build Your ICP

Technographics is the profiling of target accounts based on their technology stack. So, for example, if your BEST clients all use a CRM, such as SalesForce, you would look to ONLY find leads that match your FIRMOGRAPHIC ICP, PLUS have SalesForce in their tech stack.

Now you’re drilling down to who your best prospects are!`  

How to Build an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

So, how do you quickly build an ICP profile, without guesswork?

There are several tools available to do this, and I used to use Datanyze to help me, but they got a little expensive. I have since found another solution that works just as well, called UpLead.

Here’s how you use tools like Datanyze and UpLead to quickly identify who your target audience is and how to find more companies like them and their contact info.

It’s super-simple:

1. Run a report in your CRM that pulls the WEBSITE ADDRESS from your BEST Clients.
2. Upload that Excel sheet to UpLead (or any other data enrichment program)
3. Read that Data!

When you get your data enrichment report, sort the data by employee size (as an example) and see which group bought the most (by group, I mean companies with 1 – 10, 10 – 50, 50 – 200, 200 to 500 employees, etc.)

You can also segment by Industries, Location, Annual Revenue, etc.

This is a quick way to identify your ICP’s and give you the best chances for targeting the right accounts.

– Michael Pedone

Michael Pedone is the founder of SalesBuzz.com: Phone Sales Training Course that Reduces Turnover, Increases Pipeline, and Shortens Sales Cycles.

Try a free class today.