Outlining your ideal customer profile (ICP) and customer journey is not a marketing exercise- it’s a perfect opportunity to make sure your go-to-marketing (GTM) strategy is aligned. Not having alignment on ICP and customer journeys will most likely result in your team members filling in the marketing blanks to do their jobs. That means they will end up creating their own perspective on: who to target, where to reach them, the messaging they share, with what assets and activities, and will 100% lead to missed opportunities and, for sure, longer sales cycles.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Although this is not a complicated task, it is surprising how many companies don’t take the time to outline it properly. Your ICP should not be like a food court menu where everyone gets to pick their own dish/ICP.
As a Start-Up, it’s recommended you stick with two ICP’s–a primary and secondary ICP.
Your Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is the perfect customer/company you aim to target with your products and solutions. They are the buyers who are most likely to buy, expand their solution, stay with you over time, and advocate your solution to others.
Likewise, your secondary ICP is your next-best target audience. Following is an overview of what should be contained in your ICPs.
ICP alignment - Book a 75-minute session (including 15 minutes of Swedish fika) to outline and get agreement on the primary and secondary ICPs. The ideal participants included in this session are representatives of your Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product teams (at a bare minimum).
Define your primary and secondary ICP by answering the following questions jointly with your team members. Document your ICP’s and make them available to your whole organization. Set a review maintenance schedule every six months, for example, as you most likely need to fine tune or adapt your ICP to changing conditions. DONE!
- What industry/vertical does your ICP operate in?
- How many employees does your ICP have?
- What is the annual gross revenue of the ICP?
- What life cycle stage is your ICP in?
- What is the technology maturity level within the ICP?
- Does your product/solution match the annual key initiatives the ICP is targeting to implement?
- What jobs does your ICP need to get done?
- What does the buying journey look like for the ICP?
- What does your ICP care about? What are their must-haves?
- Who makes final purchase decisions in your ICP?
- Does the ICP have a budget for your type of product or solution?
- Have they allocated funds for or purchased your type of solution previously?
Customer Journey
How the customer journey looks is less important than the eXperience it delivers. Whether you prefer a funnel, a process with steps, an infinity loop, or a spaghetti visual doesn’t really matter, as long as you agree internally on the flow.
Customer journey alignment - Book a 75-minute session (including 15 minutes for Swedish fika) to outline and get agreement on the journey. The ideal participants included in this session are representatives of your Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and Product teams (at a bare minimum).
Define the customer journey by answering these questions jointly with your team members. Document your journey and make it available to your whole organization. Set a maintenance schedule, for example to be reviewed in six months, to fine tune or adapt your customer journey map to changing conditions.
These five questions should be outlined for each of the step of the journey (Awareness, Learn, Evaluate, Consider/Try/Negotiate and Buy)
- Target Persona
- Customer action
- Challenge that your prospect is trying to solve
- Asset or content they consume to learn more
- Channel or venue where they go to find more information
To make it easy to see how these elements come together, see the sample customer journey map.
The next step is to align this journey with your sales process, but that is for another blog post… stay tuned. ;-)
To learn more and download templates to develop your ICP and Customer Journey, you can find the SavvyX program here: Get Savvy