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Ideal Customer Profile and Personas: Your Broken Funnel Starts at the Top

Who would have thought this vacationing couple would be the poster children for sales marketing misalignment?!!!

Originally posted at CMS Wire by Aimee Schuster and Jessica Schultz

Imagine you and your partner are on a beach vacation together. On the first morning you both get up to get ready to go to the beach. You bring your stuff in the bathroom and your partner gets ready in the bedroom. When you both meet at the front door, you’re in your running clothes, and your partner is in full snorkel gear. You thought you were both going for a run on the beach; your partner thought you were headed out for an early morning swim and snorkel session.

What happened? Wrong assumptions based on a lack of communication.

Extrapolate the scenario; marketing is you and sales is your partner. You think all your content, advertising and organic search efforts are for CFOs at big box retailers. Your sales partner is focused on VPs of HR at manufacturing firms.

What happened? Wrong assumptions based on a lack of communication.

While relationship counseling is definitely not our specialty, we are experts at sales and marketing counseling for B2B businesses. We’ve seen the fallout from a lack of communication and how it negatively impacts demand generation and ultimately sales and revenue. We know that problems at the bottom of your funnel are a direct result of the miscommunication at the top.

So how do you make sure both sides show up at the front door in the right outfit? The very first step is to agree on who you are targeting. That means a deep dive into ideal customer profiles (ICP) and personas.

Crafting Your Ideal Customer Profile

Defining your ICPs -– a process involving analysis of existing customers, market research and ongoing testing to make sure the ICP reflects customer needs and market trends — is mission critical in making sure that both teams agree on how big the target market is. Without definition around a few ICPs, the organization is basically saying they’re going to market to everyone. This is fine when there’s an unlimited budget, but in most realistic scenarios, we have to be more exacting in where our dollars are allocated.

We like an ideal customer profile to have the following characteristics:

• Large Industry Bucket (can use SIC codes if necessary)
• B2B | B2C | D2C | Other?
• Revenue Size

Effective Strategies for Defining Your ICP

• Look at existing successful clients. Who are you successfully marketing and selling to already? What industry buckets do they fit in? Do you notice a trend among FinTech or a large number of D2C retailers? Without even knowing or planning it, your product/service helped to create your default ICP by appealing to specific groups in the market. You may have new product lines or offerings where you are trying to break into new ICPs; if that is the case, use your existing success (or lack thereof) to help define a new set of criteria for an additional ICP.
• Review existing unsuccessful clients. Looking at the clients you closed-lost in aggregate will help you define buckets of groups you don’t want to go after. Sometimes defining who was not a good ICP helps you figure out who is a good ICP. Also, understanding these groupings of closed-lost clients can reveal themes and characteristics that help you define and develop new products.
• Use third party resources and tools. Get technology to work for you to help further understand and define your ICP.
  • Baseline: Your website’s traffic analytics, CRM and marketing automation platform tell you so much about your potential ICPs by letting you know which individuals are investigating your content. For example, Joe Smith, VP of HR from Building Corporation comes to your site, visits 10 pages and downloads a white paper on “Career Coaching in a Virtual World.” You learn about Building Corporation as a potential ICP.
  • Step up: Buyer intent and ABM tools like ZoomInfo and 6sense can help you to understand global search for terms and solutions. For example, companies like Building Corporation are searching for career coaching on average 3,000 times per 30 days, and it is up 20% YoY. This is great information as it validates that this type of search is popular among ICPs like Building Corporation. This tells you that you are reaching the right audience.

A very important concern that we hear often is, “If I create an ideal customer profile, I might miss out on a great potential industry. I don’t want to turn anyone away.”

To be clear, you are not turning anyone away. Your inbound will capture more than just what is defined as an ICP, and you can always work those opportunities. Instead, you are narrowing the outbound focus of your sales and marketing teams to just one or two ICPs. You are putting dollars and resources toward the industries that are most likely to buy from you quickly, at the highest price point and with the greatest return on investment.

Developing Target Personas

Once you’ve got the profile of the company you’re targeting, the next step is to establish the buyer persona(s) you’re targeting within those companies. A buyer persona is the profile of the person or people you are targeting.

In the B2B world, we like a buyer persona to have characteristics like:

• Title
•  Length of time / History in role
• Education level
• Prior work experience

For example, let’s say we are selling to the HR department. A company that fits my ICP definition may have an HR leader with a chief people officer (CPO) or chief human resources officer (CHRO) title. While it may look like a subtle difference, this matters a lot for some products. If I am selling a career coaching service, which title do you think would care more about career coaching? Due to historical knowledge in the industry, we know that a CPO title signifies the person and the company may be a bit more progressive and people-focused. They may be more likely to value providing an ancillary benefit like coaching to their workforce. Additionally, there is publicly available data on the demographic makeup of certain roles. Find that data and consider it for your overall brand, tone and messaging.
The length of time in their role may matter as well, particularly in an enterprise sale. It may take time for them to build the political capital needed to implement a large-scale change. The same is true with their education level or prior work experience. For example, if the CPO used to work at a Big 4 consulting firm, she is likely going to be more aware of digital transformation trends and more open to strategic changes. If she used to work at a large bank, she might be used to more structure, process and compliance.

Put together a list of top champions within your current client base and analyze their LinkedIn profiles. What trends do you see in their titles, tenure in role, education level and prior work experience? Why do you think those trends are making them your biggest super fans? That is how you’ll get closer and closer to a persona that is more refined than “We sell to HR departments.”
Finally, sometimes you are targeting more than one persona because there are different use cases for your product. The same process applies to identify their common characteristics.

How to Optimize Your Positioning

For your targeting to convert your target audience, you need to clearly understand your positioning. Why do you win with your ideal customer profile and buyer persona(s)? What pain points do you solve for them in their roles? How does your approach or solution differ from your competitors?
You need to speak directly to this defined target audience in their own language and answer those questions. One of our favorite positioning experts is April Dunford, and this is her stellar framework for approaching positioning:

• First, consider the competitive alternatives. What would your customer use if they didn’t know you exist? This could be another vendor, or it could be a homegrown system or a manual process.
• What key unique attributes, features or capabilities make your product different from those alternatives?
• What value do those attributes provide to your customers?
• Who cares a lot about that value?
• What context makes that value obvious to your target segments?
• Your positioning will and should change overtime, and that’s a good thing. As you scale and acquire more logos, features and case studies, you may broaden your ICP definition or add new verticals to target. The important thing to remember here is that your current positioning should reflect your current product capabilities and therefore your current ICP at all times.

Aligning Sales and Marketing with Your Ideal Customer Profile

By now it’s clear that your sales reps want — and your marketing team needs — clarity on ICPs and personas to effectively target the right people at the right companies with the right message. And industry experts agree with your sales and marketing teams.

This type of industry work is part of the Deep Sales: The B2B Sales Playbook to Boost Revenue in 2024, recently released by LinkedIn. According to the report, only 18% of sellers are "deep sellers," meaning that they are top performers and are more likely to succeed using AI and sales intelligence (SI) tools to outperform “shallow sellers.” Those AI and SI tools are used to conduct industry research, such as identifying ICPs and personas.

According to the report, doing that research is a “difference maker, [as] 62% of deep sellers conducted industry research.” The report also said that “buyers say demonstrating a clear understanding of their industry is one of the top ways to increase the likelihood of closing deals with them."

But what happens if you don’t do deep sales work like ICPs and personas? If you don’t give sales the right roadmap, a few things can happen:

1. They get analysis paralysis and don’t know where to start, so their activity is stalled.
2. They spend time (and money) bringing in leads that don’t convert because they aren’t a good fit.
3. They somehow close customers who aren’t a good fit, leading to poor experiences that ultimately result in customer churn.

If you fail to give marketing the right roadmap, you will see the following:

1. An incredibly wide net that captures everything under the sun, bloating the top of your funnel.
2. Sales gets frustrated and starts to say, “Marketing keeps sending me bad leads.”
3. Marketing gets frustrated and starts to say, “Sales won’t convert the leads I send.”

Not properly defining your ideal customer profile and buyer persona is like telling your revenue department to go eat an elephant. It’s really hard. But when you define it, they will be able to perform more effectively, resulting in better leads and ultimately more closed deals.

by bandwidthstrat