Operationalising Ideal Customer Profiles in your business

So you've defined your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – now what? If your ICP is just a slide in your strategy deck, it’s useless. So how do you actually put it to use in your business? And how do you know it’s working? 

Your Ideal Customer Profile(s) should run through the core of your organisation, guiding every choice and interaction you have with your customers. Done well, it creates consistency across all of your Go To Market activities - marketing, sales, account management and customer service – and even how you think about product development and service delivery. It ensures teams are all speaking the same language.  

Here are a few practical ways to bring your ICP to life: 

Adapt marketing activities 

• Prioritise channels where your ICPs are found e.g. targeting specific industry events, conferences and trade publications, or deciding which social channels to prioritise.  

• Tailor materials, messaging and imagery to address specific needs by ICP e.g. dedicated pages on your website for that industry using relevant messaging, segmented email journeys.  

  
  

Prioritisation of leads 

• Build target account lists for each ICP.  

• Categorise inbound leads into ICPs (or non-ICP fit) and prioritise ICP leads e.g. triaging for faster response time, allocating ICP-fit leads to higher performing sellers. This might even mean saying no to non-ICP leads (but not necessarily). 

  • Lead scoring is one of the reasons it’s important that the attributes and behaviours defining your ICP are ‘prospectable’ i.e. visible from the outside and therefore possible to categorise before initial contact with them.  

    • It should be possible to be quite specific even from the outside e.g. using AI to categorise sub-segments within an industry based on the website, or using tools like BuiltWith to assess a company’s tech stack. 

• Align sales incentives to ICPs (which, by definition, should have higher lifetime value). 

Tailor the sales funnel 

• Hire and train staff aligned to ICPs e.g. building industry understanding, network, and understanding of key pain points. 

• Adapt sales collateral e.g. messaging aligned to buyer rationale, relevant case studies and credentials.  

• Build sales playbooks aligned to specific ICPs e.g. addressing regulatory hurdles which might be specific to a certain industry.  

  
  

Account management and customer service 

• Train staff to understand key needs and likely roadblocks and issues e.g. data protection and cyber security requirements might be much higher for government or healthcare customers.  

• Tailor upsell and cross-sell journey e.g. SMEs might want you to bundle services and be a ‘one stop shop’, whereas Enterprise clients might be more focussed on APIs into their existing systems.  

• Focussing your customer services team on your ICPs could mean reducing support for non ICP-fit clients. This can be uncomfortable and mean losing some existing clients, but it can ultimately increase profitability in the longer term. 

  
  

Product / proposition development 

• Align your proposition to the needs of your ICP. Clarity on your ICP(s) should make product roadmap prioritisation much clearer – if it doesn’t solve a key issue for your ICP, don’t build it.  

• This can be a real test of embedding ICPs beyond the ‘core’ of sales and marketing. Product teams may be more interested in building the ‘sexy new thing’ or have sunk cost in building something bespoke for non ICP-fit customers.   

Pricing and packaging 

• Optimise and test different models by ICP e.g. a restaurant chain might have one ICP looking for a regular, consistent and efficient meal (hello Dave and his family at Pizza Express), for whom a loyalty scheme might work well. They might have another ICP looking for date nights, where they could test a Friday night set menu with wine to extract maximum value.  

  
  

Embed the ICPs in your strategy, reporting and culture 

• Ensure the ICPs are known across the business – extend the reach from sales and marketing to product, operations, finance, etc – ensure everyone is speaking a consistent language 

• There is a strong culture and communication aspect to this, and it can take businesses a couple of years to really embed ICPs. You will get more buy-in as the approach starts to bear fruit, and institutional knowledge is built. 

• KPI reporting should reflect the ICPs e.g. focussing on ICP-fit new leads, splitting conversion stats into ICP-fit and non-ICP, and the ‘ICP lens’ should inform decisions and trade-offs for management and the Board 

Splitting KPIs by segment can help identify ICPs, and then track trends

Making hard trade offs 

Here’s the real test: what are you willing to stop doing? This might be removing non-core markets from the website or taking things off the product roadmap. Are you willing to say no to non-ICP fit leads? Non-ICP customers aren’t the enemy — but they can be a distraction. The ICP should be a critical lens on how resource is allocated. Non-ICP customers can quickly suck up time and end up low or negative profit! 

How do you know it’s working?  

When the ICP is clear and well embedded, there's a feeling of consistency. Everyone’s speaking the same language. Decisions are simpler. Things just run smoother.  

Some of the ‘hard’ results should include 

• Reduced cost per lead  

• Reduced sales cycle length 

• Increased conversion rate 

• Increased customer satisfaction 

• Increased customer retention and lifetime value 

• More engaged and satisfied staff – feeling more knowledgeable and empowered  

• Stronger margins - increased efficiency across teams with everyone pulling in the same direction 

Keep testing 

Your ICP isn’t set in stone. It’s a living hypothesis. You will likely need to go through a few rounds of testing and refining. It is normal that your ICP might change over time. You might start with one then expand to a few more. You might also start to build out sub-segments within your original ICP as you refine it.  

On an ongoing basis you should review the ‘likeability’ (lifetime value) and ‘likelihood’ (conversion) of your ICPs and sense check these are the right ones. It’s to be expected that conversion will be lower at first when you target a new ICP, as you build out knowledge and credibility. But if it doesn’t start to increase, and you’re continually facing roadblocks, whilst another ICP is flowing easily. Then recognise when it’s time to pivot.

If you’d like to discuss how you can create and operationalise Ideal Customer Profiles in your business, please Contact Us.