Designing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Season 9, Issue 9: A guide to thinking about ICP for B2B SaaS
📬 In this issue:
None of that “Sassy Sarah” demographic-based persona bs
Figuring out your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and how this filters down to personas
Battlecards your sales team will actually use
Wassup Mehketeers,
Starting with a hot take — 99% of personas and projects to build them are a complete waste of everyone’s time. Research is poorly thought out (and done without speaking to customers,) Way too much effort is spent “branding” the personas and giving them snazzy names, and then rolling them out is treated as an announcement and that’s it.
A proper approach to personas includes asking how these personas are going to actually be used day-to-day. Sales qualification is one thing, but are you actually going to build out nurture journeys per persona? Can you even segment them properly in your CRM? Will you do paid media campaigns targeted at specific personas? What about product development? Are features and roadmaps allocated by persona?
Why do they even matter? Are you trying to figure out your most profitable segment? Tighten the targeting on your website?
If the answer is no then don’t waste your time. It’ll just be a task that keeps marketing “busy” and then contributes to the “what does marketing even do?” reputation.
Don’t do these:
Here are some common descriptions or focuses in personas and why I think they’re a waste of time:
Age — if you’re selling B2B then age might pay a role in top of funnel channel selection but you’re looking at buying groups not individuals
Location — if you’re selling software, it should be with the aim of being (or becoming) global, not limited to a city, limiting yourself too early could be problematic. Limiting to language is different.
(I have a great annecdote for this — I interviewed one of the co-founders of Klaviyo yesterday and they said a bunch of their earliest customers [i.e. first 10-30] were surprisingly from Australia even though they were not targeting here)Hobbies and interests — if your target audience is product managers and your persona info lists “bouldering” as important information, you are wasting your time
Number of employees — this is changing so rapidly because of AI and the proliferation of outsourcing (including to fractional people like me)
All of these things could inform a campaign, though it’s not central to the campaign. None of these things speak to value, pain points, or really anything. There’s lots more, but I want to get to the good stuff.
ICP factors that actually matter
For us B2B SaaS mehketeers, your ICP should be completely focused on the business, not individuals. It’s a list of ideal characteristics, which means no one will actually perfectly match up with this list. Your ideal customer will be easy to sell to because you match their pain point perfectly, they’ll stay with you for a long time, they’ll give you word of mouth referrals, and generally you both with be very satisfied.
For example, here’s what a Mehdeeka subscriber ICP looks like:
Is a mid-senior marketer
Works for a B2B SaaS company
Is either a solo marketer or in a small team
Is interested in tactical tips on a variety of marketing topics, in a long-form, written format
Is located in Australia or New Zealand
Based on the fact that only 40% of my subscribers are based in Australia, I can already tell you very few people (if anyone) actually hits 100% of this list.
What’s important for you to take away from this is that you need to settle on a threshold. How many list items must a prospect meet in order for you to qualify them, put them on an ABM list, and prioritise how much effort you put into winning them as a customer.
You can’t split resources equally amongst all prospects, so your ICP is your guide for how to appropriate prioritise your time, budget, and effort.
ICP inspo list
Your classic ICP checklist includes industry, budget, and that they’re experiencing the pain point you solve for.
has this as a starting point for thinking about your ICP:Company size (e.g. 1,000-5,000 employees)
Job title (e.g. engineering manager, social media manager)
Pain point you’re solving (e.g. compliance, internal transparency)
Company’s unique way of working (e.g. design-driven, operationally heavy)
Specific tech used (e.g. data warehouse, GitLab)
Type of business (e.g. B2B SaaS, e-commerce)
Price point (e.g. sells software that’s $10k ARR)
Geo (e.g. urban centers, LatAm)
A unique place the user spends time (e.g. Node.js community)
Here’s what I want you to consider the following list items when thinking about what makes a company your ideal customer.
Education — How educated are they about the problem? How mature or immature is their function/processes/systems?
Inciting incident — What is the trigger that initiated the prospect to become problem or solution aware? And think outside the box here, it’s not very often that the answer is “financial year” or budget planning. Think: new leadership entered the business, board management planning, a cyber security incident (even if this isn’t publicly known) and so on
Regulatory requirements — Sorry to the non-Aussie Mehketeers I don’t know if this is relevant to you. I would highly recommend checking out if any industries you serve have regulatory bodies, and then watching what those regulators are doing. If your value proposition includes any form of “reduce risk,” then you’ll want to be keeping a close eye on this and targeting c-suites and board members
Large financial and personnel changes like capital raises, exits (or secondaries), M&As, expansions — If your product is something that really kicks into gear when structural change or quickly scaling is a pain point, I hope you’re keeping an eye out for this!
Essentially, don’t just think about the person, think about the maturity and stage of the business. What do your customers have in common? What brings them to you? There’s a trigger point where pressure is bringing about this search for a solution. Your job is to find out if that pressure is external, internal, aspirational, or driven by fear.
How this becomes personas
Once you’ve figured out your ICP, it’s time to figure out who the work gets delegated to — that’s your personas in a B2B buying group. Has a board member who’s asked the CEO for a risk appetite plan triggered a chain of events leading to a junior being asked to do some preliminary research? Has the CEO taken it so seriously they’re going to attend a risk event?
Has feedback given by a customer not renewing jolted the leadership into realising they’ve gotten complacent, and the ankle biter competitors are closer than they realised shaken a whole team of middle managers into frenzied action?
Think not only people actively in market, but people not in market as well. This will cover your entire customer journey.
Realestate.com.au (or Domain, can’t remember which one) gave a talk about how they market to each stage of the customer journey for buying a house:
Day dreaming about one day being a home owner
Checking the viability of buying a home (mortgage brokers, saving for a deposit)
Understanding what you need to know when selecting a property (browsing)
Actually being in-market and serious about buying
Renovating and/or building extensions
Leasing a property you own
Selling a property you own
Each of these have very different emotional sells, motivations, and the pressure source is quite different. The beginning is aspirational and could be internal or external pressure, with various types of urgency all being possible. At the other end of the spectrum, selling a property could be cashing in on an investment (yay), a family member has died and you’re splitting the asset (not yay), a divorce (not yay), moving overseas (possible yay), upgrading the family home (yay), retiring and downgrading (a yay).
Obviously there’s a huge list of potential personas in here, and none of us reading this have the budget of Realestate.com.au, but we can still reframe personas from a “silly marketing exercise” to “moments in time that inform the type of marketing that will work on a prospect in that moment.”
And remember, buyer personas may not translate into user personas!
Battlecards that will actually be used
Very quick on this one because my laptop is running out of battery as I write this and I will not be getting up to get the charger.
If you use a template to build your battlecards, sales people won’t read it. Instead, my recommendation is to listen to their call recordings and focus on the questions they actually ask in these calls.
Don’t rely on the beautiful qualification questions they’re supposed to ask. Salespeople rarely follow protocols, even when they’re excellent. Instead, you want to find the information they most often ask for. They are actively trying to put prospects into categories, so they know how to approach them.
The job of a battlecard is to go from identifying the box that a prospect fits in, to one of these:
Common objections and how to handle them (this could be listing some compelling stats or research)
What motivators or offers work well on them (if urgency is a driver, for example, what pre-approved sales tactics can they offer straight away without needing to confirm?)
Which competitors they’re most likely comparing you to (another anecdote here, I recently was talking to the incredible
who told me if he does an in-person sales meeting he’ll ask when the competitor is also coming to the office, highlighting already that he’s going above and beyond compared to them — so smooth. Don’t be afraid to talk about competitors!)A list of follow up resources available (with links.) If you have content or assets made specifically for a persona, industry, or ICP, then it’s quite likely it’s not getting used because sales doesn’t know it exists. Yes, you have to update this more regularly.
It goes without saying this battlecard should fit completely on a screen, no scrolling or zooming in to make it readable. Include the sales team when you’re making these, ask if they’re helpful, if something isn’t, take it out and don’t take it personally. The point of these is to be helpful, not to make people give forced thank yous and be polite.
Previous related Mehdeekas:
Lenny’s ICP issue:
I got here without needing to get my charger!
Some pretty cool news, I got to interview one of the co-founders of Klaviyo this week, and I’ll have a write up of it in the next Mehdeeka. Look forward to that, it’s definitely up there as one of the cooler interviews I’ve done, however I do have to flex that I did interview a Canadian astronaut in a past life. One day I’ll have to host Mehdeeka Trivia with all these weird facts.
Until that day, though, it’s all about tactical B2B marketing baby.
Kayla