Is your Ideal Customer Profile truly ideal?

You may be missing out on an opportunity to make your offering even more appealing.

THINK ON IT: Is your Ideal Customer Profile truly ideal? 

Let’s talk a little marketing; because doing this one thing right has strategic implications that can literally change your business.

I invite you to rethink your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If you don’t have one, then this is an even more important issue for your business.

An Ideal Customer Profile is a description of who is in the sweet-spot for your offering, and why. It is a way of establishing product/market fit: What are the characteristics that are a best-fit for our offering? It’s even better to think of it as an expression of value/market fit: Who can get the most value from our offering?

Having a well-conceived ICP for your offering brings three key advantages:

1. It enables you to create a more-targeted value offer. The more specific your value proposition is to the felt needs of your customer, the more likely you are to attract them.

2. It enables more effective marketing. Marketing to your ideal customer means you can save money, not trying to attract those who are not ideal.

3. It enables a faster selling cycle. Sales teams that understand what makes an ideal customer ideal can more quickly demonstrate the value drivers that are most important to your prospects.

Developing an ICP can be an anxiety producing exercise because, to do it correctly, you must decide who is your ideal customer and why. Even more importantly, you must decide that others are not ideal and you won’t spend money or sacrifice the clarity of your value proposition for them. 

This may leave you feeling like you’re missing out on revenue opportunities by narrowing your focus, but you are, in fact, choosing to invest your marketing budget on your most valuable customers.

Too many companies create an overly generic value proposition in order to appeal to as many buyers as possible. But this wastes your marketing budget and your sales team’s time pursuing leads that are unlikely to buy.

Choosing to target your ideal customers doesn’t mean you won’t sell to non-ideal ones. It just means that you won’t waste your marketing budget to reach them. (There may be other reasons to not sell to non-ideal customers, but that’s a topic for another day).

So, what shape is your ICP in? Do you clearly know how to direct your sales and marketing resources to the prospects with the highest probability to purchase? And if so, do you know what would motivate them to purchase from you?

If those questions are challenging to answer, you may need to redesign your ICP to make it truly ideal. Paid subscribers, read on for exact steps to do that. (Become a paid subscriber.)

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” — Steve Jobs

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