Why you need a precise ideal customer profile
It simplifies your go-to-market.
“What is your Ideal Customer Profile?” is one of the first questions I ask anyone who asks me for GTM advice. I usually get responses along these lines:
“CROs at Mid Market companies with 50-2000 employees”
“Development teams at Fortune 500s”
“Marketing teams at tech startups”
“Anyone who builds apps”. (No joke, a founder actually told me this in a job interview a few years ago).
The common thread here is a lack of precision. While you could paper over a broad ICP in the past with free-flowing venture capital, in today’s more sober economic climate you to make tougher decisions about where to invest, including:
What is the messaging that will separate you from the noise?
Do you focus more on inbound marketing or outbound prospecting?
What is the mix of organic and paid marketing that enables you to acquire customers cost-effectively?
Do you build a self-serve channel or hire a sales team?
If you hire a sales team, what questions will they ask to predictably surface your buyer’s pain, impact, critical events and decision making process?
What enablement and training will you give your sales team?
How do you define your first impact milestone?
How your ICP drives your product roadmap
As we shall see in this post, answering these questions with clarity is very hard if you have a broad ICP, whereas with a precise ICP the answers are obvious, making your ICP a critical driver of your GTM strategy.