How to create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and personas

Do you know which type of companies is most likely to benefit from your solution? Which stakeholders should you target to hit your marketing and sales goals? A better understanding of your B2B ideal customer profile and personas enables you to focus on the accounts most likely to become high-value customers, which increases annual recurring revenue and customer satisfaction.

This article provides insight into why and how you can better understand your ideal customer and buyer personas. As well as how to create an ideal customer profile of your targeted accounts.

Written by: Christine Karlsen Hammeren, Marketing Manager at Viking Venture

Mapping your B2B ideal customer profile 

When mapping your ideal customer profile, we recommend first looking at your existing customer base. Determine whether your best customers share any common traits. Use data, like annual recurring revenue (ARR) and usage, to describe the characteristics of the companies most likely to benefit from your value proposition.

The description of your ideal buyer can include industry, geography, company size, and other relevant characteristics. You can also attach negative aspects to help you exclude companies that are not a good fit for your solution. A clearly defined B2B ideal customer profile helps marketing, customer success, and sales team focus on the correct type of leads and customers. The input from your ideal customer profile can also help with segmentation, targeted campaigns, and a lead-scoring model for marketing.

Find the decision-makers and influencers in the buying process

After determining which accounts to target, the next step is to accurately map out the most important stakeholders within these companies. Thereafter, you analyse what decision-making power they hold. When analyzing sales and customer data, you should be able to identify the buyers involved in the decision-making process.

It could be that the CEO is the final decision maker. However, that the first contact in the process is in an entirely different role within the company.

Use stakeholder mapping to identify key stakeholders and understand their level of interest and decision power for targeted communication. This exercise will give you a high-level view of the entire journey. This overview can help you decide how, and when to communicate with different stakeholders. 

Understand how your personas think and act

When you know the roles you need to target, you can build your buyer personas. Include and engage your commercial, product, and finance departments to get their input on what characterizes the key stakeholders. In addition, look into your data to collect demographic and buying insights. This research should uncover job descriptions, goals, challenges, interests, what motivates them, and where they get their information.

After mapping your personas, collecting feedback and data from actual customers and prospects is essential. Avoid making assumptions about your customers’ thinking and perception of the buying journey.

Your internal teams have a lot of customer input, which works well as a starting point and can help form hypotheses. However, you should also involve the actual customer perspective and test the hypotheses you set. There are many ways of collecting feedback and data, like interviews, surveys, mining data, and social listening.

Map the buyer’s journey from a customer perspective

The buyer’s journey shows a customer’s experience with your company, from becoming aware of you to purchase your software. The purpose of mapping the buyer’s journey is to understand better the actions, touch points, gains, and pain points a customer has throughout the buying process. This understanding should consequently help improve your engagement with the customer. It is key to increase their gain and reduce their pains in the most effective and efficient matter.  

Start by mapping the journey with customer-facing people in the organization. It is essential to map the journey for one persona at a time. Define the journey across different sales process stages from the customer’s point of view, not just the internal one.

The process needs to be reviewed and tested with actual customers. In customer interviews, you should focus on customers’ actions and emotions along the journey. Learn whether they are delighted or frustrated, confused or stressed. An overview of the personas’ experience will help you in the final step of finding possible improvements.

Why understand your B2B ideal customer profile and personas better? 

A better understanding of your B2B ideal customer profile should help sales, marketing, and customer success teams increase annual recurring revenue and customer satisfaction. You want to ensure that your marketing department target and attracts the appropriate leads through their inbound marketing efforts.

Attracting the right companies will help your sales department focus and improve the sales cycle. Resulting in spending more time on high-quality leads, which in turn increase the sales closing rates. Moreover, these customers are less likely to churn as they are a good fit for your offer. 

The customer should always be at the center of your business. Ensure the entire organization understands and agrees on your ideal customer profile and personas. Set a reminder to update and revise your definitions yearly and update internal teams on possible changes. Also, continue to focus on positioning your solution towards the customers differently to create gain or relieve pains.  

Utilize inbound marketing to grow organically

Get more insights on how to scale your business

Sign up for our newsletter to get valuable insights and the latest perspectives on how Nordic software companies can scale faster. Learn how to improve sales processes, develop your management team, optimize pricing and accelerate through acquisitions.