How to Build Your ideal Customer Personas

An Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) enables you to locate and rank prospects according to their behavior, but how do you create a thorough and accurate ICP at first?

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To draw in, convert, and delight new customers, you need to invest time, resources, people, and the right marketing techniques.

As a knowledgeable professional, you ought to want to focus on customers who will guarantee the highest rate of return on your investment. You can't market to everyone, that much is true. A carefully crafted customer list is essential.

An ICP framework empowers new customers to feel reassured, appreciated, and a member of your community even long after they've made a purchase, in addition to ensuring that your existing customer base is content to engage in business for the long term.

You will be able to recognize your prospects' pain points both now and, in the future, if you master your ICP framework.

What is an ICP (Ideal Customer Persona)?

The behavioral and firmographic characteristics that best describe your ideal customer profiles are combined in the ICP framework. Your sales and marketing teams will be better able to develop quantifiable strategies and convert top-of-the-funnel leads if you develop a general profile of your business and its distinctive value proposition.

Combining Sales & Marketing Efforts

An effective strategy for coordinating your leadership, marketing, and sales efforts is to draw up an ICP.

Your entire sales and marketing strategy, including your content, advertisements, and community outreach initiatives, will be governed by the ICP.

These are the 4 queries that your ICP can help address for sales and marketing alignment.

1.    What kind of messaging best reflects the interests of your customers?

2.    What prevents potential customers from purchasing?

3.    How can you best share your value proposition?

4.    How many deals have you successfully closed?

How to Create an ICP

1. Find the Data

Start simply: Take stock of your current customer base and uncover their common characteristics.

The ICP can be as detailed or general as your team needs it to be. A few basic characteristics to consider are company revenue, employee headcount (either the entire company or within a relevant department), industry, location, or job titles.

Export opportunity data from your CRM and append account information as needed. Then build it out with more data points relevant to your activities and industry.

Then, look for patterns. It’s different for every business. You might notice that they are concentrated in a particular region of the country, a certain industry, a similar size, or involve a specific buyer.Get 100 FREE Leads

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2. Determine Your Best Clients

You must create a list of stakeholders and customers who satisfy a specific criterion before you can narrow down your list of ideal clients.

Among the metrics you could employ are:

• Highest potential for growth;

• Highest retention rate or longest tenure with your company;

• Highest NPS (Net Promoter Score);

• Highest ACV or TCV (Annual Contract Value or Total Contract Value);

• Highest Customer Health Score

On your list, you might take into account the clients who are most profitable and active. Repeat the process to find patterns in the data once you've determined the criteria to qualify your customers.

Don't just consider your entire customer universe when determining who your ideal customer is. Focus on the world of your best customers.

Additional Considerations for Customer Profiles

The qualities listed above might be enough to create your ICP on its own. However, we advise digging deeper to identify customer characteristics.

Customer Lifetime Value: Find the total CLV or Customer Lifetime Value, also known as the total net profit a company earns from a particular customer over the course of the relationship. Businesses can forecast and plan their customer acquisition budgets with the help of CLV.

Referrals: Your "best" clients may not always have the highest CLV. Referrals from incredibly satisfied customers boost value even more. 84% of B2B decision-makers start the buying experience with a referral, according to facts and figures. Additionally, the majority of marketers and sales authorities agree that referrals speed up the closing process.

Product/Service Use: How frequently customers use your product or service can have a big impact on the expansion of your company. If necessary, examine each feature individually to see how well-suited any particular functionality in your proposition is to the needs of the market.

Customer advocacy: Your "best" clients may also be the businesses that are most eager to promote and attest to the quality of your goods and services. Participation in research papers, customer testimonials, and other activities can all be done by utilizing this customer pool.

Popular Businesses: Customers who have well-known brands give your company the validity and brand recognition it needs to succeed in the marketplace.

3. Look for Parallels

Your ICP data may contain some patterns that you perceive as crucial. Others might initially be more difficult to pinpoint.

Below are a few questions you might try answering to begin your ICP.

• Are they situated in the same area?

• Are all organizations at the same stage of development?

• Do they work in the same field?

• How many people work for these clients?

The only restriction, in this case, is the level of detail in your classification tools and data collection methodologies.

These traits serve as the building blocks of your ICP. Since it is based on your absolute best current clients, you know it symbolizes your best prospective consumers to focus on.

4. Set Priorities and Carry Out

Create a metric to measure how closely accounts match your Ideal Customer Persona based on the information gathered during your evaluation. You can easily align strategies and resources to find the leads worth pursuing by using these predefined metrics.

For instance:

• Best Fit: US-based businesses that produce and market security software and have over 500 employees

• Companies that distribute security software in North America and have more than 200 employees are a good fit

• Companies outside of North America with fewer than 100 workers that don't produce or distribute security software are a bad fit.

By using this exercise, you can decide how to follow up or transfer them to sales processes more effectively. Additionally, it gives your corporate strategy, outbound, or account-based target procuring efforts a clear direction.

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Don't waste your time chasing the wrong fish in a sea of possibilities if a company doesn't fit the ICP you've developed –

since there's a good chance it won't be a good fit for your services or products if it doesn’t match your ICP.

Lastly, any advice? Refactor and modify your ICP metrics frequently, ideally once or twice a year, to make sure your target list is always up to date.

You can leverage FalconLogix's B2B contact database of verified leads if you're looking for high-quality leads to power your marketing campaigns.