Ideal customer profiles are essential for businesses of all sizes, especially small businesses. By knowing who your ideal customer is, you can focus your marketing teams’ efforts on attracting those prospects and ignore the rest. So what’s an ideal customer profile?

This article will explain what’s an ideal customer profile (ICP), why it is important, and how to create your ICP to help your sales team succeed.

What’s an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile is one that best suits your company’s needs. Companies that fit your ICP will most likely purchase and continue using your product. This is a crucial step in business growth.

Why is it important that you create a customer profile that is ideal?

The buyer’s journey is changing rapidly and it’s changing quickly. 2021 saw 28% of Amazon’s orders completed by customers in less than three minutes. Half of all Amazon purchases were completed within 15 minutes.

Some sales leaders believe that B2C purchases will eventually be completed at the same speed as B2B.

How does this relate with the creation of an ICP This is how it relates to the creation of an ICP.

If you don’t offer value to prospects immediately, you will lose the opportunity to close the door faster than ever. This is where your ICP comes into play.

A customer profile that is ideal will help you identify the customers you should target and why. It will help you identify the key characteristics of your most profitable customers.

Always back up your ICP by providing accurate data, such as technographic customer data and funding status, industry revenue, location, and funding status.

This information is essential before you start sales prospecting and move leads through qualification. This information will allow you to make better sales decisions about which leads to pursue.

How do you create a perfect customer profile for your startup?

It takes just a little bit of customer data digging.

1. Find commonalities among your customers

It is a great way to identify who you should target by analyzing your customers.

First, download or compile a list with all your customers. You can then go through the list to identify the largest deals and companies that have benefited from your product. SaaS businesses can use this information to assess how valuable they are to customers by working with their product team.

Another indicator to watch out for are customers with which you have successfully up-sold your contract.

Once you have narrowed your customer base to the people most likely to benefit from your product it is time for trend spotting.

These are questions to ask when analysing customer data.

• Industry: Do you have a common industry with your customers?
• Where are your customers located?
• Founding Date: When was this company founded?
• Funding status Do these companies have similar funding histories?
• Total funding Are these companies able to raise similar amounts of capital?
• Valuation Do your customers share a common valuation?
• Investors: Do you have common investors with your customers?
• Company status Are your customers for-profits or not-for-profits?
• Acquisition:Have customers been acquired?
• IPO status Are your clients private companies or public corporations?

Are there any commonalities that you are noticing between your customers? You should begin to notice commonalities among your customers. If you can identify commonalities between your customers, it will be easier to create your ideal customer profile.

Now, make a list of any similarities you find in a spreadsheet or other document. Keep track of all similarities so you can refer to this spreadsheet when creating your ICP. Once you have all the data, it is time to go straight to your customers and ask them questions.

2. Get in touch with customers who share your pain points

Depending on your time and resources, you can connect with your existing customers via Zoom interviews, email, or surveys to find out why they purchased your product. Learn from your customers how to target accounts that have similar pain points.

Interviews, surveys, or other methods can help you gain a better understanding of what data you don’t have. It is possible to ask subjective questions like “Why did your company buy our solution?” To gain a better understanding of your customers.

These are questions you can ask during interviews to gain a better understanding about the people and motives behind purchasing decisions.

• What made you choose to purchase our solution?
• Who was the final decision-maker for your purchase decision?
• What were your pain points after you bought our solution?
• How has our product helped you solve your problems?
• How do you use the product during the day?
• What do you consider to be our most valuable feature?
• Why continue using our product?
• Where did you hear about our product the first time?
• Where can you find information?

These customer insights, combined with company data, will help you better understand your target audience moving forward.

3. Your ideal customer profile

Now, it’s time to gather all the information and create your ICP. Your ICP should reflect the similarities that you discovered while analysing your star customers. This is the group that receives the most value from your product.

There are many great ICP templates that can help you organize all of the data you have. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can create your ideal customer profile template with a simple spreadsheet or table.

How do you find prospects through ICP

Now it is time to test your ICP. Simply search for companies that match your criteria.

Here’s how to find companies that match your ICP using Crunchbase.

1. Search for filter companies

Crunchbase’s company search allows users to choose filters that will allow them to filter millions of companies on Crunchbase and find the ones they are looking for.

2. Add the companies to your CRM

Click a button to add companies you found on Crunchbase into your CRM. Crunchbase lets you see which companies are already in your CRM by allowing you to search for them.

3. Keep track of key purchasing signals

You can save your Crunchbase customer database so that you get notified when a company matching the ICP raises funds or is mentioned by the media. This will allow for you to personalize sales outreach and contact prospects when it is convenient.

4. Find other companies that match your ICP

Crunchbase’s recommendation company feature allows Crunchbase, based on your territory or accounts in your CRM, to recommend new accounts to you. It also considers your unique Crunchbase activity.

Crunchbase’s recommendation engine becomes smarter as you search for companies that match the ICP.

Conclusion

So now you know what’s an ideal customer profile. If you’re still not sure how to create one for your business, don’t worry – there are plenty of resources out there to help you. The Small Business Administration has a great guide on creating customer profile templates, and HubSpot offers a free worksheet that can help get you started.