Down To One!
Card Games and ICP similarities
Focus on your specific audience to advance you potential to grow.
Summer vacation means card playing at the beach or in the mountains for our family. One of our favorite games is rummy which culminates in the winner shouting “down to one” right before they go out of cards and win the hand. It’s a big deal because we assign bragging rights and dish-duty after meals based on these wins.
Getting your team aligned to a core client focus allows you to commercially win, although I don’t think assigning dish-duty to the sales team would go over too well. For today, the “down to one” I’m referring to means getting to your one, ideal client profile (ICP).
For businesses with a sales team of less than 5-10 contributors, it’s common to have many ICPs at work. That’s largely the result of each salesperson having their specific client or market they focus on and their individual selling style. The result of that fragmented approach is a regular stream of custom deals and variable scope and applications.
It’s really hard to scale when you’ve sold the same product 12 different ways and none of the outcomes are comparable. Owners and operations pros see this issue evolve into scope creep issues, project overages, and most frequently, turnover and stress in the sales-delivery process.
Disclaimer: not all businesses will have one singular ideal client profile, but for small businesses trying to build a pipeline and extend the client list, getting specific on an ideal client profile can make all the (profit and growth) difference in the world.
Getting started
Get specific on your ICP. Detail the business size, headcount, geography, market position, and all other identifiers that make them a prime candidate for your solution. Expand that to also include the factors around how they think and behave commercially (psychographic profile). With that in hand, you need to know what goals and outcomes they are aspiring to or have detailed as a current goal.
“Reminder: having more than 1 ICP slows down your ability to sell and often causes confusion and misalignment between sales and marketing. ”
Get your organization to 1 ICP definition, know how to talk to them, what issues they are facing, and how they are opting into sales discussions about solving those problems (buying signals). You’ll know if a prospect is out of target, faster which allows you to prioritize time management and resources more appropriately.
I worked with a client who had worked on their 3 ICPs for over 6 months with mixed feedback on their sales and marketing efforts. They had only closed 1 deal and had minimal traction in their pipeline. By pivoting to 1 ICP, in 1 month we tested against that ICP and got market feedback.
The feedback allowed for nimble adjustments and messaging tweaks that were wildly more valuable than the 6 months of outreach across 3 ICPs with 0 traction. We were able to take their value proposition and features with that feedback and create a compelling story and customer facing content that helped us fill the piplene fast. Only then were we able to pivot our focus to qualifying and closing efforts.
Ideal Client Profiles are not…
Clarity is important to define who we want to work with. The ICP is not necessarily the biggest revenue client or the client with the highest margin % or $. The ICP profile is a mix of those data points plus some of the other demographic/ psychographic/ firmographic qualities that you desire to work with on projects and over time.
To help frame this discussion of what an ICP should and should not look like; imagine creating a relationship or household, and how you seek certain qualities in another person to accomplish this. Entering into a mutually beneficial relationship with 2 businesses should be approached in a similarly structured way.
Refining an Ideal Client Profile
Imagine a client that you prefer to call on and serve. Imagine their building, their team, how they serve their clients. Repeat this exercise for your top 5 (or so) clients and you will begin to see patterns.
Example for defining an ICP: The target clients in our profile demographics have a flat organizational structure and make business decisions based on a 3 core customer satisfaction and service factors. They involve us in their annual planning efforts to enhance their service offering and our value to them.
When you pull these factors together and create the profile of the company you want to work with, you can see their qualities in other clients you serve and prospects you do not currently serve.
“An accurate ICP is like a spotlight that identifies the right clients as best fit opportunities. ”
With this insight and narrow focus, the volume of opportunities and clients where you prioritize time changes dramatically. By knowing the best fit and highest potential for success an added benefit is in the annual budgeting and forecasting process. Your strategic outreach and effort becomes laser focused and you are prepped and ready for a moonshot.
The Reality
It’s not all roses and rainbows. There’s work to do in defining your ICP, building lists of potential fits for your ICP, testing messaging to them, and understanding if/how your messaging resonates. These profiled prospects and clients are still people with free will and preferences and it is our role and task to better understand them. You have to earn their trust and attention, first.
By getting your ICP down to one, you can tackle this and other challenges in marketing and sales methodically. Most of the B2B sales challenge is getting organized to the point of being able to act and adjust to client needs and preferences.
With that organization in a selling system, we can start to build infrastructure and tools to ramp up and onboard other success tools. You should be able to begin the process of getting organized with these initial guiding thoughts. Think marathon, not sprint, when building the components of your sales organization.
Happy Selling!