“We” tend to be very sloppy in our definition and focus on our Ideal Customer Profile. Yet it is probably the single most important thing to producing results.
We tend to define the functions that may be the purchasers/users of our solutions. “We sell IT solutions to CIOs and their teams.” “We sell sales/marketing solutions, to CROs and their teams.” “We sell financial solutions to CFOs and their teams.”
But every IT exec, CRO, CFO probably don’t fit our ICPs. We may refine it to, “We sell solutions to CFOs in financial services companies.” But that’s a big space, it covers retail banking, commercial banking, investment management companies, insurance companies, credit card, international banking, trust and so forth. Our ICP fit one of those segments, and not others.
Or we may have a size dimension to our ICP. “We sell to CROs in large multinational corporations, We sell to CROs in small/medium businesses, we sell to CROs in very early stage companies….” While we might find some customers across that space, there is a clustering of customer size that is optimized to our solutions.
Through the work of my friend, Hank Barnes, we know there are different behavioral styles and maturities of organizations in which we have greater success. For example, in our own business, innovators, early adopters, and fast followers tend to find what we do is intriguing. Late followers and laggards don’t have any interest in us, nor have we in them.
Interestingly, as you talk to customers about these different dimensions, basically firmographic, demographic, behavioral graphics, they can characterize themselves against those. They tend to see themselves in very similar ways, and can say “this is where we fit in, this is where we focus our work and strategies.” And they may identify several areas, but they are well defined within those dimensions.
There’s another way we characterize our ICP, it’s based on our solutions. “We target orgs interested in these types of solutions.”
But this presents a problem. Customers don’t naturally view themselves in terms of solutions, particularly when we get more specific about the type of solutions (for example in consulting solutions, services, software, hardware, web, technology, training, etc.) Of course they can say, “we are interested in solutions that improve our ability to provide the IT services and support our customers need.” But they probably won’t say, “Yes, we characterize the solutions that we are always interested in as AI based knowledge management platforms that work in the hybrid web…..”
If the customer characterizes themselves in anyway it’s based on problems, opportunities, or challenges. “We have these problems that impact our ability to perform as we want. We are looking to do these things. We are facing these challenges.”
While it may seem subtle, from a mindset point of view, and from the point of view of connecting with our customers. We cannot define our ICP as “These types of customers need our solutions.” We have to shift our thinking to “These types of customers are likely to have the problems that may require our solutions.”
Now that we start focusing on customers that tend to have these problems, we now begin to start thinking: “How does the customer know if they have the problem?” Not every customer that might have the problem actually has it, so we have to think about how they figure it out. And there are lots of ways we can engage the customer in thinking about the problem. Thought leadership pieces, other customers talking about the issues. The simple change that sellers make in moving from, “Do you need a lead gen tool” to “How do you generate demand for your offerings? Are you getting the sufficient quantity and quality?”
Once we start defining our ICP in terms of problems they might have, we focus on those organizations/people with those problems. While there may be organizations in the same industry, or people with similar titles/functions, they are irrelevant to us. They are outside our ICP.
Our focus is on those organizations/people that recognize they have the problem now and want to do something about it. While they may recognize the issue, they may not fully understand it, what it means, how they should be looking at it, it’s impact. They may not know who they should involve in addressing the problem. They may not know what support is required from management. They may not know…..
It’s with these organizations/people that we can leverage our experience and expertise in helping them navigate their change/buying processes. These customers will have a high degree of interest in working with us, as long as we focus on their problem. At some point in the process, the customer will always ask, “Can you help us?”
We can also look at those organizations/people who have the problem, but don’t know it yet. And then we can help discover the problem and incite them to do something about it. We help them think, “Why should they do anything about it? Why should they change? What would the impact of those changes be on them? What is the impact if they don’t change…..”
This simple shift of defining our ICP as “customers needing these solutions,” to “customers that might have these problems” changes our ability to engage customers and dramatically expands our potential opportunities.
Try it.
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