Developing your B2B ICPs isn’t a one-off deal. But a nuanced plan-to-action that necessitates routine check-ins.

Identifying your best buyers and building the ideal customer profile is about decoding complexity.

Much like DNA sequencing, you’re reverse-engineering what makes your best customers also ideal for your business. This is how fundamentally vital ICP is for your sales and marketing efforts.

But most marketers base the entire ICP makeup on guesswork and assumptions. Not all traits are created equal. There are specific markers that are inherently present in your best customers.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) should mimic an evolving ecosystem. One that seldom remains static. You can’t just develop an ICP and be done with it.

Yet, many teams continue to believe that it’s a done-and-forget blueprint.

However, the reality is different.

The challenges with identifying B2B ideal customer profiles

The first problem: ICPs don’t fit into a single mold.

As products evolve, new ICPs may emerge. Or if the market shifts, old ICPs may lose value. Or when the GTM strategy shifts, different ICPs might truly matter.

Your ICP is influenced by context, time, and experiences. It’s:

• Shaped by customer history
• Adapts to market competition
• Undergoes reiterations through performance analysis

And overall, ICPs also depend on your business models and overall priorities.

Marketers are failing at ICP development. They continue to force a single ICP across all verticals and use cases. This framework doesn’t account for the nuances in the buyer journey. Or the segment-specific differences.

Even with this realization, modern marketing is failing to act on it.

The second problem: Not agreeing on a unified definition.

All of it because sales and marketing don’t agree on what “ideal” means. And often drift into a too common understanding of it, it’s either too rigid or too generic.

Beyond poorly defining the basic understanding of ICP, there’s another umbrella challenge.

B2B buying processes comprise 6 to 10 decision-makers in a committee. And that’s how they make purchasing decisions. But most marketers only create individual customer profiles, undertaking a widely B2C approach to B2B.

So, ICPs represent a realistic portrayal of the enterprises the B2B buying committee belongs to. It’s the bigger picture.

This introduces another obstacle marketers face in developing ICPs.

The third problem: Ideal customer profile versus buyer persona.

There’s a huge difference between ICP and buyer personas. But traditional playbooks confuse them as the same.

Both these attributes help qualify leads, but they are inherently different tools.

ICPs focus on the overarching business, i.e., the type of business you wish to target. Meanwhile, buyer personas branch out from an ICP and outline the different types of buyers across those specific enterprises.

Source: Gartner

Buyer personas offer a detailed purview into the individual customer across the overall ICP framework, whereas ICPs are the characteristics of who your perfect customer could be. The former is a zoom-in; meanwhile, the latter is an overview.

This is where the inherent difference lies.

Albeit its likeness to B2B ideal customer profiles, buyer personas are fictional representations that provide a granular insight into who your best customers are.

Then, what does an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) really mean?

Gartner describes ICP as:

The firmographic, environmental, and behavioral attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company’s most valuable customers. It is developed through both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and may optionally be informed by predictive analytics software.

ICPs are the most valuable customers as well as prospects, who also entail high buying intent.

But the ICP itself is a genetic code of key traits that define your high-fit customers, i.e., not an account that merely buys. But repeat their purchases and become your brand advocate.

What makes B2B ICP development fundamental for organization-wide efforts?

ICP isn’t just a detailed document. But the very foundation of each business decision.

It streamlines downstream efforts, whether marketing, sales, or execution. And condenses all cross-functional strategies toward high-value accounts, especially for TAL creation and segmentation.

The objective of ICP development is straightforward: identifying high-value accounts that are most likely to become customers.

So, it isn’t about knowing what your most valuable buyer looks like. But about converting your marketing team into a well-oiled lead generation engine.

Decisions are made based on your target customers from day one. Even before you launch your product or services, you know who you’ll be catering to.

In the B2B landscape, your messaging and GTM efforts are all influenced by your ICP. Your resources are finite, and so is the wiggle room. It all boils down to capturing the right audience.

You cannot use the spray and pray approach to attract modern buyers. To witness the bottom-line impact, taking key decisions early on matters for the long term:

1. The use cases that should be illustrated on your homepage. Because in B2B, your homepage isn’t a mere landing page, but a pitch to your potential customers.
2. Every feature or add-on that you choose to spotlight must speak to your ICP’s needs and pain points. The feature roadmap should include integrations that your ICP needs to succeed.
3. Which logos should be used on your pitch deck? After all, a partnership is about trust, followed by credible proof.

Although marketers recognize the significance of ICPs, the actual curation is where they stumble.

How to Develop Your B2B ICPs? Streamline Sales and Marketing Efforts

Defining ICP is challenging because it requires an amalgamation of information sources. While some details are discernible, others require more research and deeper interactions.

To ensure this happens seamlessly, businesses leverage different methodologies- quantitative, qualitative, and predictive analysis.

Now, let’s dive into the tidbits of exactly how.

#1 Start by building a user database of your high-value accounts.

But it’s not based on personalized market research or even assumptions.

For this, you must focus on the data, which includes historical customer data. Or even sales projections and insights.

Qualitative analysis

Which were your most loyal and profitable accounts? Which accounts had the shortest sales cycle? Did any play a role as your brand advocates? Which accounts have repurchased solutions from you?

Such questions help you understand your business’s customer base.

So, create a questionnaire for qualitative data collection.

Here, marketing leverages stakeholder perception to distinguish the good and bad accounts. Ask questions, basic and precise, to decode expert insights into what an ICP should entail.

Gartner helps us jot it all down into seven fundamental questions that must surely make the cut:

1. What, according to you, is an ideal customer profile? Can you offer specific examples?
2. Which attributes actually make an accurate ICP?
3. What do you think are the ICP’s key business motivations?
4. What is the business or operating model of the accounts?
5. Can you offer insight into the buying triggers that motivate these accounts into action?
6. What do you think are the fundamental reasons these accounts don’t want to buy from us?
7. What are the attributes of an account we cannot definitely sell to? What are the basic reasons?

Also, converse with marketing, sales, and customer success teams. With almost all of them on the frontlines, you gain access to pain points, objections, problems, and brand perception, all in one go.

Quantitative analysis

Your qualitative analysis, i.e., the questionnaire, must be followed by a quantitative analysis framework. Without being data-backed, all the information could prove biased or ineffective.

Quantitative insights will either prove your qualitative findings or disprove them. And help you integrate the insights for your overall ICP development.

To start:

1. Sweep the CRM to churn out detailed information, such as company size, industry, and previous purchases.
2. Compared them against historical KPIs such as annual contract value and customer lifetime value. This comparison will help refine your ICP.

You gain informed insight into the accounts that are most receptive to your messages and have been consistently delivering value for your business as well. For this, you can conduct customer surveys. Hear from them directly rather than making assumptions.

Why did they make a purchase, what were their considerations, and what drove them to action?

Your team is literally receiving insider information.

And most significantly, you are able to discern patterns and commonalities between different accounts – the ones who were repeat customers, who dropped off, or who churned.

Use these insights to segment ICPs and tailor your strategies accordingly.

Predictive analysis

While predictive analysis for identifying high-value accounts isn’t mandatory, it still helps you gain a strategic edge. The only downside is that this process requires access to large datasets for accuracy and deeper understanding.

However, if you do, it can unearth trends and future demands, through behavioral insights, that you might not be able to gauge manually. And dig up new attributes that you haven’t been giving heed to.

#2 Boil down the data to fit the attributes of your choice.

Spotlight what your high-value accounts share. Ensure that the data categorization approach you take also gives those data points the relevant context.

Make these attributes as detailed as possible because the exact detailing depends on your market segmentation requirements.

For example, the commonplace attributes of B2B ideal customer profiles are:

1. Firmographics
2. Technographics
3. Demographics
4. Psychographics
5. Buying situation
6. Business model
7. Resources at disposal
8. And most crucially, the pain points. This might include what’s not working for them, such as financial constraints, poor customer service, and technical challenges.

A strategically outlined ICP highlights business challenges. And accordingly, you tailor strategies and messages to illustrate how your solution addresses these.

But ICP development doesn’t end here.

#3 Profile and update your ICPs as regularly as possible

Your ICP isn’t a one-time deal.

While most marketers recognize this, the final ICP development tells a different story.

Your teams must mobilize the curated ICP through a strong GTM strategy. And consistently track its performance and impact. This means your ICP should be integrated across each GTM motion, whether the leads, closed deals, or opportunities belong to your ICP.

Most of the time, your win rates are achieved through ICP-centric customers. They turn into your brand advocates and are likely to churn less.

So, don’t just focus on identifying or developing your ICPs. Keep them aligned across your GTM motions. This way, not only do you tweak your GTM approach accordingly, but you also elevate your win rates.

The logic is actually quite simple: ICPs change as the market shifts. If you aren’t updating your customer profiles, you’re catering to outdated needs. Relevancy is quite possibly lost.

And this boils down to another facet of marketing where B2B ideal customer profiles play a fundamental role-

ICPs are integral components of your targeting and branding frameworks.

If you don’t identify your ideal customers as precisely as possible, overall marketing spend goes to waste.

Think of this: You compete on every keyword and hold a very neutral position. None of the audience will really understand what you do and whether you’re the right company to approach in times of need. When it comes to rankings and search, Google takes a similar stance.

Google wants you to communicate who your ideal customers are and how it should be interpreting your position for each of your pages and domains.

If the audience doesn’t understand what you do, it’s highly likely Google won’t either. But when you narrow down the audience to your ICP, Google knows who they have to send to your brand.

In simpler words,

B2B ideal customer profiles help drive your significance to accounts that take precedence.

Your targeting fails, and so does your marketing strategy. And with the complexity that’s inherently present in the B2B buying process, you fail to unravel the customer ecosystem in itself.

And ultimately fail to reflect on your bottom line.

Your customers want consistency. But if you don’t know who they really are, how do you even begin to develop your messaging and comms strategy?

Having ICPs isn’t a prerequisite, but having the right ICP surely is. Ensuring this requires consistent monitoring and adaptation due to dynamic and ever-evolving consumer behavior. So, creating static profiles wouldn’t accurately spotlight the nuances.

It’s sure-shot a challenge to sift through the data clutter to identify what makes your buyers tick. But developing the right ICP has far more advantages for your business than comprehensible.

It puts all business functions on the same page. And makes you what the buyers want: a customer-first organization.