Your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) helps you understand who you should be targeting, so you attract the most valuable customers to your business.
What’s an ICP?
An ICP, or Ideal Customer Persona, defines the perfect customer for what your product or service provides value for. This is a fictitious company that has all of the qualities that would make them the best fit for the products and/or services you provide.
Having a clear ICP in place can help define the problems that your product or service is trying to resolve, aligning your product/service capabilities with customers’ needs, and assist in laying out your future road map for product/service enhancements and development.
Getting clarity on your ICP enables your business to understand the total addressable market (TAM) for your strategic planning.
When do you use it?
It’s important to use your ICP at the beginning of the Sales and Marketing cycle to help when qualifying leads. It's not worth your Sales team spending time on leads that won’t close because they can’t - because of size, revenue, or other predetermined factors. If you can use your ICP at the front-end of that relationship, it can help your Sales reps know which prospects to prioritise (i.e. good fit customers).
How can you refine your ICP?
Prospect's RFM Analysis identifies who your Champions and Loyal Customers are, enabling you to learn from them to identify and refine your ICP. Engage with these customers to learn about why you have such a successful partnership, where you can identify common factors to help build or strengthen your ICP.