From Research to Revenue: How to Apply Your Ideal Client Profile (ICP)

Understand your buyers. Win more business.

That's what an Ideal Client Profile (ICP) helps you do. 

In today's episode, John and Mark explore why understanding your ideal client profile is essential for aligning your sales and marketing efforts, and offer examples of how to apply your ideal client profile (ICP) in business development activities.

On this episode, we'll explore:
 
00:00 What is an ideal client profile? 
04:57 The four quadrants of an ICP
08:20 Sources of primary data
12:18 Different ICPs for various company roles
14:26 Using ICP to qualify leads and opportunities
15:40 Email segmentation based on ICP.
16:47 Use ICP to refine service offerings.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

Welcome back to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. If it's your first time here, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast where Mark and I like to beat up and break down topics related to business development. My name is John and I'm joined as always by my trusted cohost, Mark Wainwright.

Mark Wainwright: 0:36

Hello, John. I am looking forward to our conversation today. This is an interesting topic. The ideal business model. client profile. And we may even use an acronym with this. The ideal client profile is our ICP. I know people love their acronyms out there. So we may even use that. So this is, this is a good one. And this applies across marketing and sales. You know, when we invoke our marketing and sales continuum, the number ones being, marketing focused activities, number five sales focused activities. And we march our way through, I think this, this ICP concept applies across that, that whole sort of marketing and sales continuum.

John Tyreman: 1:29

Yeah. On a recent episode, we were just talking about the underdog effect and why that's killing your business. And I think an ideal client profile is a way to help you kind of understand the The best clients, the right kinds of clients that you want to go after. So you can avoid being in that underdog effect situation.

Mark Wainwright: 1:49

All right, John. So here's, here's the big question. So let's, let's, let's get an understanding of what, what is an ideal client profile? An

John Tyreman: 1:59

ideal client profile is really a product of who you are. Research that you do on your best fit customers. and it's a tool that can help your team align your sales efforts, your marketing efforts. direct the creation of messaging for marketing, content, and it can even help you understand which channels are the best ones to use to reach those prospective buyers. so it's, it, think of it like your North star. for your business development efforts. and I think that it's, a tool that you can use in your toolkit to help find the best kind of clients for your firm.

Mark Wainwright: 2:37

Yeah. That makes, that makes sense. You know, when, when you say that one, one additional sort of question comes to mind is that does an organization need, or can an organization have multiple Ideal client profiles.

John Tyreman: 2:51

you can absolutely have multiple ideal client profiles. some folks might split hairs and, you know, say, well, what's the difference between an ideal client profile and a buyer persona? And I think they're related, you know, there's probably some overlap. You could think about, you know, your ideal client profile as maybe an umbrella and there's different personas underneath of that. relate to different geographies or different verticals. so yeah, I think that you can, and it just depends on, does that make the most sense for your firm and your, your clients?

Mark Wainwright: 3:24

It makes total sense. So, I'm kind of assuming there's some different bits and pieces of an ideal client profile. What are, what are all these different elements that, that fit within or make up an ideal client profile?

John Tyreman: 3:37

Yeah. So in professional services, you know, we're dealing with not only other businesses or accounts, but we're dealing with people too, right? There's the company and then there's the individuals within that company. and I, and so I think that that's, imagine. a two by two matrix, right? Where, you've got the company and individuals as your horizontal axis. And then you split those up in your vertical columns. You've got primary data Around the company of primary data around the individuals, and then you've got secondary data. And so let me back up for a second. Let me explain. So what? What is primary data? primary data needs to be uncovered by you. Secondary data is available out there. You can go to zoom info. You can go to linked in. You can go to all these different sources to find data like, Industry or company size and location or number of offices. Those are all secondary data pieces that relate to the company. So firmographics, right? job titles, role and department. These are all secondary pieces of information that relate to the individuals within that company. the primary data that you need to construct your ideal client profile, you need to find that out yourself. you go out and talk to your customers. This can happen in sales conversations. You could do this through the lens of maybe it's a research project that you're taking on. but some primary data examples for a company. Might be, their strategic goals and objectives or some of the major business challenges that they're facing, or maybe it's technographics, right? So what's, what are some of the technology platforms that are using? and maybe that's a good or bad fit with your company, right?

Mark Wainwright: 5:38

Gotcha. Gotcha. I, I love how you're, you're framing this what we're talking about here is what's most important secondary data is not, is not, is not most important here. The primary data here is really what we're, what we're kind of chasing after in our, in our little two by two. Matrix. I mean, both are important, but it seems like primary data is the, is the, the more important stuff. And it's a little harder to get. It's

John Tyreman: 6:00

harder to get. And therefore it's more valuable to you when, when you ultimately have an ideal client profile. Yeah. You can maybe, maybe you can get. 40, 50 percent of the way there with secondary data. But to your point, Mark, yeah, the primary data, that's really what's going to help you best understand the working relationships that work well with your company.

Mark Wainwright: 6:23

Yeah, I, I got it in and, this it's, it occurs to me that this ideal client profile can apply to organizations that you. Organizations and individuals that you've never met before, prospective clients. It also fits with organizations and individuals that you worked with for a while. You can start to divine some of this information and likely that primary data, that harder to get stuff. is way easier to get with organizations and people you've worked with in the past.

John Tyreman: 6:50

And you might know it too. You might know it offhand just from the conversations that you have, just from your weekly or monthly touch points with your client, and understanding, like for example, some primary data around the individuals are like their career ambitions and aspirations. Or maybe there's a specific challenge that, your primary point of contact is going through that. That's not related to maybe the overall business challenge, but it's still a pain in the ass, right? And, if you understand that and maybe they're that same challenge for that individual is common among that role in your target accounts. And so if you understand that, then you can bake that into your ideal client profile. you know, to look for that. And so if you see that it's a signal that tells you, Hey, this may be a good client for us.

Mark Wainwright: 7:39

Good. Good. Okay. That I, I, I love that. There's, there's multiple layers of, of, of data that can be applied both to organizations and to individuals. I think that totally makes sense. You know, my bias is always focusing on individuals because ultimately, When we're talking about stuff that's on the sales end, we're dealing with people. We're dealing with, with individuals, of course, that all of that needs to fit together with their organization as well. All right. So. If we've gathered this information from individuals and organizations, both the easy to get stuff and the not so easy to get stuff, how do we then take that and develop an ideal client profile?

John Tyreman: 8:20

Yeah, so these conversations that you're having with your clients, these are, that's absolutely one way to source this information. I think another lens that you might want to take a look at is, revenue analysis. Going back and seeing, okay, what's the first gate that we, we want to take a look at, where's the high margin revenue coming from? And so you just take a look at that and use that as your primary filter in your analysis, and you might be able to see, oh, okay, there's some commonalities in here. These three or four clients, they all share one common characteristic. And so that might be one way to unearth a characteristic about your clients that you, then you, then you could go and ask them about it, right? You can go and kind of validate what you're finding in that revenue analysis with those conversations. another, another way to surface the, the different characteristics of your ideal client profile is to ask your employees. They're the ones that are having the conversations with their clients on a day to day basis. And so, you know, if you help them understand what to look for, they can start surfacing this information and creating a feedback loop to, to whoever is involved in, in developing this ideal client profile. Great. So I think, you know, you asked, how do you develop that? First of all, it's gathering all that information from all those different sources and then putting it all together in, I would recommend, you know, kind of like a one pager, a one sheet overview and something that's easily digestible that you can share across your organization.

Mark Wainwright: 9:59

Yeah. I, I, I like the, the, the different components that we're bringing together to form this, this ICP. the first one you mentioned. interviewing and knowing your, your customers. I think that's important. You wrap in the revenue part as well, both, you know, top end, top line revenue and profitability, both important. And then you go talk to employees. I know I've been in situations in the past and I'm just picturing that a lot of times these, these sort of silos of information can be completely independent. Like your employees can, love working with this particular client or this particular client type doing this particular work with them. And the clients may be overjoyed, but the revenue and the profitability may, might just be, you know, non existent, right? Or you may be working with a particular client and the revenue and the profitability might be great, but your employees might not be happy doing that. So you're pulling all of this in. This information together, creating this sort of one page kind of, kind of profile, I could see how that could create a little bit of conflict, but at least we're starting to pull all this information together and hopefully. Coming up with something that we can call ideal and we can start to chase after

John Tyreman: 11:16

those two scenarios that you just gave Mark, I think, you know, just by surfacing that information and understanding that there is a conflict there, you know, you can go and you can, you can address the profitability, Challenge, you can address the employee morale challenge now that you understand that, right, right. And so just by going through this exercise, not only are you helping you working to identify who those good clients are, but you're kind of doing an audit of your existing clients in your existing work at the same time and understanding, do we need to prune, right? Do we need to prune some clients because they're not profitable or do we need to invest in increasing employee morale? Because those are the, you know, that equation does need to be balanced.

Mark Wainwright: 12:01

Yeah. So, so you described kind of a, a one pager. Is that a, is that a, is that a narrative? Does it have different sections? I mean, what does the, what does this sort of one pager profile from your perspective, kind of contain and kind of ultimately,

John Tyreman: 12:18

I've seen it come about in a different, in a couple of different ways. There are, I've seen different kinds of ICPs not only across different companies, but for different roles within the company. So for example, a salesperson or someone who's sitting in a sales seat might want more of like a checklist type of, one pager where they're saying, okay, does this prospect meet this criteria? Right. You know, and maybe that's an oversimplification of it, but it's just a reminder for them to look for these things in their sales conversations. Now on the other side of it, an ideal client profile, a one pager for a marketer might be a bit different where it's got key messages. On there that maybe relate to a business challenge or, a specific, technology platform that they're using, where you can come in and say, okay, we've got expertise in Oracle or Eloqua or whatever, But I think the important part is getting to that understanding so that you can create that material to enable your team.

Mark Wainwright: 13:19

Good, good. I, I, so, so different people in your organizations are going to need different information in a ideal client profile and potentially presented in, in different ways, which ties really, really well. I think to what I mentioned initially is this, you know, marketing and sales continuum. When we think about what's happening on the, on the, the ones on the marketing and how are we then taking these ICPs and applying them?

John Tyreman: 13:46

Yeah, I think we, we just kind of started wading into those waters a little bit. Um, as a marketer, you know, I've used ideal client profiles to influence blog creation and writing blog posts, for example. If you have an individual that you are writing for, your content becomes much more powerful. And so if you have this ideal client profile, if you have an understanding of who they are and what they care about, your writing reflects that. And so I think that that's one use case of an ICP in marketing. What about on the sales end of things? What would you say is one way that you could apply an ICP to sales conversations?

Mark Wainwright: 14:26

Well, you, you hinted at it initially there is that in, in some way, this ideal client profile needs to inform your qualification. Process and that's early on in your sales conversations where you're just getting to know an individual in an organization where you are qualifying them to see if there is fit right to see if the two of you can be mutually successful together. So having. And ideal client profile likely and hopefully inform some of those checklist items in your qualification. You know, do they work with organizations like us? Do they know how to work with us? do they have ongoing needs, that align with, our expertise, can ultimately we develop this longterm mutually beneficial relationship? is this a good fit? Is this worth? And I can see how this ideal client profile informs, all of that in a, in a qualification step in your sales process.

John Tyreman: 15:26

the thought is that if you have that ICP tuned in, then that qualification process is going to result in opportunities with a higher likelihood of closing. I can give another example on the marketing side of things. Email segmentation is a great way to apply your ICP. And you, you asked me earlier, Mark, are there different, can a company have different ICPs, right? Can they have different ideal client profiles? And I think that this is a great, way where you can apply multiple ideal client profiles, right? So if you segment your audience. Let's just use verticals, industry verticals, for example. So maybe you work at an accounting firm and you've got an industry vertical in the entertainment industry and an industry vertical in manufacturing. So you go to your CRM, you go to your email automation platform and you have a field for industry so you could split it by that. And then understanding the different things that are the different challenges that your manufacturing clients are facing versus your entertainment clients. You can craft different offers to put in front of them. You can craft different content that they may find valuable. so that's another way that you can apply your ICP to marketing is by segmenting your email database.

Mark Wainwright: 16:47

Good. one that comes to mind that likely spans Both sales and marketing is thinking about further, maybe developing new service offerings or refining existing service offerings. You can do that, informed by your ICP. Right. You can, you can understand what, what clients are we serving now in what service areas and, and if that's going incredibly well, both for us and, and for them, how can we further enhance and refine that? Conversely, You know, if you're serving existing clients or, or offering to new perspective clients in the marketplace, a service or an offering that just is completely out of alignment with your ICP and maybe it's, you know, maybe you've done it in the past and it wasn't profitable or it wasn't, it wasn't something that, that, you know, your clients responded well to, then you can prune that. Right. So your ICP can be used to inform this service delivery and how you're teeing all that up in marketing and in sales. So I think that that spans both. But I think it's a great tool to kind of put your put your services sort of under the under the microscope and take a good look at them.

John Tyreman: 18:04

Yeah. Your ICP can absolutely, influence R and D you're developing new services to offer different ways to add value to those clients. I'll, I'll give you another example. And this is, you know, relate, relates to lead generation. let's say that you have a podcast that you run, right. you, you, if you understand who your best fit clients are, invite them on to your podcast and have a conversation. Right? And so if you understand, you know, those challenges, let's say it's a prospect that you haven't had a conversation with yet and you invite them onto your podcast and then you ask them questions about those challenges that you know are commonly held by your ideal client profile. Not only are you creating content, but you're also kind of going through that qualification process live in a recorded fashion. So there's another way that you could apply an ICP.

Mark Wainwright: 18:55

That's, I think that's fantastic. So, one that I use frequently and, and this is about referrals and referrals are professional introductions. Referrals falls under this umbrella of prospecting, which is this proactive outreach that individuals undertake, to pursue, great prospective clients. but talking about referrals, you can ask your ideal clients for referrals. You know, you're working with a handful of organizations. Sure. They're all good clients. everything's going fine, but you might have a subset of those clients, maybe just even a handful that you would consider ideal financially, service delivery wise, relationship wise, you know, checks all of the boxes, right? If you want more of those clients, use your ICP in the process of going and asking those questions. great clients for introductions for referrals, right? This is a way to, you know, have your great clients help you make more great clients, right? So hopefully these ideal clients have, organizations that behave in a certain way, or maybe there's individuals that, you know, you just work really well together. Chances are pretty good that those individuals that you connect with well, Will be associated or affiliated with other individuals that you would, that you would be able to work well with. So in the, when I think about ICPs and referrals, I think, great, you want to identify your current clients and your current relationships that fit right bullseye in that, in that ideal client profile. And you want to go ask them for introductions to others. And

John Tyreman: 20:42

I think that there is a relationship there between, you know, the, the kinds of people, maybe it's like that, that X factor, that intangible component. you just, you just hit it off with them. And maybe it's, you know, a certain, personality trait. do you have any other examples, Mark of, um, applying ICPs to marketing sales?

Mark Wainwright: 21:02

this is a good sort of scratching the surface of the ideal client profile. We didn't dig super deeply in how, you know, how to, how to script it, what the specific framework is, et cetera. But I think this is, this highlights the importance of really coming to an understanding of who your ideal clients are, and then taking that information and applying it. To service delivery to marketing to sales so that you are always moving in the direction of your ideal clients, I say a lot of times that the organizations I work with is that, every choice you make is either moving you towards some, desired future state or, maybe even away from it. You know, slightly or even radically. And I think if, if the, your decision making in all those different areas I just mentioned are in alignment with your ideal client profile, you will be moving towards that ideal picture you have in your head of your organization and not away from it. Yes, exactly.

John Tyreman: 21:58

Yep. Your ICP is a North star to help guide your firm towards success and profitability.

Mark Wainwright: 22:04

Good. I like it.

John Tyreman: 22:06

Excellent. Well, Mark, I think this has been a great conversation. Until next time. Thanks, John. Until then.