What is Ideal Customer Profile Sales? With Examples

Understanding what ICP sales is and how to integrate this concept into your everyday sales initiatives can help you generate more qualified leads, conversions, and happier customers. If you are not focusing on ICP sales, it can be easy to sell to the wrong people and fall behind your competitors. With the market so hot, this can put your company in a bad position. To prevent this from happening, learning what ideal customer profile sales is, and how to implement it in your company to give your company the upper hand. 

What is ICP Sales?

ICP, otherwise known as ideal customer profile, is the idea that your company revolves around the concept of a perfect customer. With your ideal customer profile in mind, you can optimize your sales, marketing, website, communications, and other business processes around what your customer will respond the best to. As a result, your company is more likely to turn prospects into paying customers. When creating your ideal customer profile, you should include information about their demographics, geographics, firmographics, and other considerations. The more details you can include, the more specific and high quality your prospects will be.

Why is ICP Sales so Important?

An ideal customer profile will tell you exactly who to target, and why. By targeting the right people at the right time, with the right content, you are more likely to grow as a company. ICP sales focuses on scalable and practical sales strategies that ultimately speeds up your sales cycle. In turn, you are able to generate more leads and conversions in less time and use fewer resources doing so. And, your clients will be happier and more loyal to your company. But, it’s also important to be aware of the difference between ICP sales and ICP marketing in order to properly optimize your sales tactics.

ICP Sales vs ICP Marketing

While there may be some overlap between ICP sales and ICP marketing, it’s important to understand them both individually. This will ensure both your sales and marketing teams are on the same page. And that they are able to drive the most conversions possible. ICP marketing focuses more on tailoring marketing initiatives, like social media, website design, and SEM, to target your ideal consumer. Once those consumers have been targeted, sales can come in and finish leading them down your sales pipeline to convert. You should ensure that your ICP for marketing is aligned with your ICP for sales. It is helpful to keep communication lines open between your marketing and sales teams. This will help your marketing and sales team on the same page, and allow all of your touchpoints to remain omnichannel.

Get Familiar With Your Sales Pipeline

Your sales pipeline might seem like a basic concept, but it’s very important to understand if you want to focus on ICP sales. In short, your sales pipeline is the concept of how you attract leads, and guide them towards converting into a paying customer. Marketing is generally responsible for filling your sales pipeline with leads. When you get your lead’s contact information, your sales team comes in to follow up, book a demo, and answer any questions they may have. The more your sales team is able to have good conversations with each lead, the more likely they are to convert. By understanding your ideal customer profile, including their struggles, goals, budget, and other considerations, your sales team will know the best ways to communicate with them. If you’re not familiar with your sales pipeline, check out this article.

Look at Trends and Data

As a salesperson, it can be a pain to look at trends and data. But, looking at customer trends and data points can help you see commonalities between your current customers. Additionally, you can look at data of the leads that you have generated, and haven’t converted. This can help you see if there is an industry that is ending up in your sales pipeline that isn’t part of your ideal customer profile, and you can change your tactics to either better fit their needs or try to remove them from your sales and marketing initiatives. 

Pain Points

One of the best ways to use your ICP sales tactics is to explore your client’s pain points. In general, your company will have one main problem that it solves. But, in most cases, your company can solve smaller issues that can really drive home how useful you will be to your prospects. This can make your demos, calls, meetings, and other communications with prospective customers easier and more enticing as they will be able to see how much your product will truly be able to help their company.

Understand the Competition

Generally, your clients will share a lot of similarities with your competitor’s clients. So, it can be helpful to check out what your competitors are doing. Other than looking at their website and social media channels, take a look at their reviews. This is the most helpful way for sales professionals to understand what their competitors are doing well, and what they’re not doing so well. If you see that your competitors have a common complaint, ensure that your company solves this problem, and make your prospects aware.

Social Selling

Social selling is a great place to use your ICP sales initiatives. If you know the geographics and firmographics of your ideal customer, you can use LinkedIn to search for relevant leads. This is simple and it’s easy to find companies and people that might be interested in what your company has to offer. Once you find a company or person that you think could be interested, you can message them right on LinkedIn, or use Hunter.io to discover their contact information. If you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it can make this process a lot easier. You can simply enter in your ideal customer’s information, and Sales Navigator will take care of the rest. It can show you a number of profiles that match your description.

Get Insight on Your Current and Prospective Clients

If you notice that a lot of your current clients share similarities, this can be helpful when researching and targeting prospective clients. When you are getting to know your new clients, conversations about the previous solutions they have used, problems they’ve had, features they’d like to see in the future, and more. Once you find out this information, share it with your sales and marketing departments. This will give both teams valuable insight that they can use to fill your sales pipeline.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business. When you are focusing on ICP sales, you are more likely to have happier customers. And, the happier your customers are the longer you will retain them. If you know that your customers are happy, ask them for a review. Prior to purchasing, most prospective customers will check out your reviews and your competitor’s reviews. Whoever has the better reviews may end up getting them as a customer.

Utilize Your CRM

I often see that salespeople don’t utilize their CRM to its full potential. Your CRM is a great tool for managing contact information, following up with prospects, and onboarding new customers. But, you can also use it to tag and track contacts that meet certain criteria. As an example, if you service the entire United States, you can tag contacts from each state to see if you have more contacts in one state than the rest. Then, you can decide if you want to focus more marketing efforts on those states if they yield the highest quality customers.

ICP Sales with Visitor Queue

If you’re not sure where to get started with ICP sales, check out Visitor Queue. Visitor Queue is a B2B lead generation software that identifies the companies that visit your website. We can tell you what industry, employee count, geographic location, and other firmographic information to help you understand what kind of companies are visiting your website the most often. This technology can also help you see untapped industries that you might not have thought of. But, it doesn’t stop at company information. We can also provide you with employee contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles to help you reach out to your leads. Visitor Queue can be used from both sales and marketing perspectives to help you fill your sales funnel. Then, guide them down the right path. Send your leads straight to your CRM to easily follow up with them. Start your free trial of Visitor Queue today to enhance your ICP sales and increase revenue.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, learning what makes your ideal customer profile can greatly benefit your company. Whether you’re wanting to track your current clients, increase customer relationships and retention, or generate more qualified leads, ICP sales can help your company grow. If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at your current customers and try to gather commonalities between them. This will help you build your ICP. And, you can get an idea of the best way to communicate with them. Don’t forget to check out Visitor Queue if you want to identify your website visitors and increase revenue by 10-20%.