What are your tips for creating an ICP from scratch?

Ideal customer profile (ICP) is a great way to focus on the most valuable prospects likely to purchase your product and align all areas of the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy on targeting those accounts. I recommend taking a three-pronged approach when it comes to collecting data for ICP. 1) Do the quantitative analysis 2) Conduct internal interviews from sales and account managers 3) Talk to customers. You’ll then start to see some trends across several attributes like industry; use case; tech stack; regions, growth rate; etc.

It’s always good to think about your future ICP as well when designing and implementing and ICP so you’ll have some room for growth. Ask yourself what your most valuable prospects will look like in 6 - 9 months? Is your product changing? Is your company entering a new region? Launching a new product line? All these will have an impact on your future ICP.

And always, always, always identify key stakeholders early on in the process as implementing ICPs is a cross-functional project and requires collaboration to get an ICP successfully implemented across many GTM teams.

An ICP or Ideal Customer Profile is meant to serve as a guide for who to target, attract, and retain as the most valuable customers.  In other words, an ICP is about advising your sales team on accounts that they should be targeting based on specific qualities, but can be more broadly considered to support marketing and product teams.

Here are tips for creating an ICP:

1. Talk with internal stakeholders, like product, sales, and other subject matter experts (SMEs) in the industry that work at your company to determine what exists before “starting from scratch”. Getting input early on is always helpful as well to guide the process as it is a team effort. 

2. Review current customers to identify patterns and characteristics in your most successful and satisfied customers. Ultimately, the focus should be on themes to allow a grouping of the most relevant information to support the sales team to isolate who to target, and similarly, who not to target. Consider:

   • demographics (characteristics of a population, more likely in B2C), 

   • firmographics (characteristics of businesses and organizations, more likely in B2B such as industry, geography, company size, revenue),

   • buying process (such as decision makers, budget to spend on product, likely time to close a deal)

   • satisfaction scores, like CSAT

3. Conduct necessary customer research to further refine findings, and better understand 

   • customer pain points and challenges related to finding a solution like your product

   • business goals on what they are trying to achieve