Picture this: You’ve got skilled marketers on your team, leadership fully on board with your marketing strategy, and the ABM tools and platform that bring everything together so you can quickly launch and optimize your account-based marketing campaigns and collaborate across the organization.
But without a clear target, all of that is just untapped potential. The old-school “spray and pray” methodology doesn’t work anymore—especially when it comes to your ABM engagement efforts that should yield high-value clients and foster strong relationships. What your team really needs is a strong ideal customer profile (ICP) to guide a high-value target account list (TAL) and focus your ABM strategy.
Account-based marketing (ABM) succeeds when you target customers with the highest propensity to buy. But many businesses miss the full potential of ABM because they lack a well-defined ICP. With a strong ICP in place, your team can target accounts most likely to convert, maximize ROI, and make the most of your ABM investments.
So how do you create an ICP that targets the right companies and unlocks the full potential of your ABM program? Read on to understand the importance of a strong ICP and discover a three-step process to help you create one that strengthens your target account list and drives better ABM results.
What Is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
An ideal customer profile describes the characteristics of a company or organization that is a perfect fit for and would benefit the most from your product or service. The purpose of an ICP is to concentrate your account-based marketing plans and efforts on the opportunities with the highest impact, which further helps to guide your marketing and sales teams’ targeting efforts on high-value prospects that are most likely to convert.
An ICP should not be confused with a buyer persona, which focuses on individual decision-makers within the buying committee. Buyer personas include details like job titles, challenges, motivations, and preferences, allowing you to tailor your messaging to resonate with the specific buyers within the company. Your ICP guides the overall account selection, while B2B buyer personas help refine how you engage with the individuals within those accounts.
Creating your ICP is a collaborative effort that involves sales, marketing, and leadership teams. The criteria for your ICP may include common attributes such as:
- Firmographic data (e.g., industry, company size, location, revenue)
- Third-party intent data, which includes technographic data (e.g., technologies currently in use, tech stack preferences, software and hardware dependencies)
- Behavioral data (e.g., engagement patterns, past purchase behaviors, interactions with your content)
- Historical data (e.g., previous purchase history, length of customer relationship, support inquiries, upsell or cross-sell opportunities)
Creating an ICP is a valuable exercise for companies of any size. It helps marketing teams focus their efforts on the right channels and craft content that resonates with their target audience. For sales teams, an ICP ensures they prioritize the most promising leads, enabling more targeted outreach and higher conversion rates by focusing on prospects that are the best fit for the product or service.
For example, an ICP for a B2B SaaS company targeting medium to large organizations might look something like this:
How Ideal Customer Profiles Benefit Your Targeting Strategy
Without the right target, you may run into ABM challenges and your efforts can become scattered and less effective. This is where your ideal customer profile comes in. By defining the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, your ICP sharpens your targeting strategy. It enables you to focus on high-potential prospects that are most likely to benefit from your solution, ensuring that every effort is directed toward the accounts with the greatest opportunity for success.
Here are five ways a strong ICP benefits your targeting strategy:
1. Strengthens Your Target Account List (TAL)
An ICP is the foundation for building a stronger, more focused, and high-quality target account list (TAL). Your TAL is a curated selection of specific accounts that closely align with your ideal customer profile. By understanding the ideal customer’s characteristics, you can prioritize the accounts that are most likely to convert, ensuring your TAL is filled with best-fit prospects.
2. Improves Resource Efficiency
Save time, resources, and boost your ROI. Knowing which accounts are the best fit allows sales and marketing teams to allocate their resources more effectively. By concentrating on high-potential accounts from the start, these key teams avoid wasting time and effort on leads that are unlikely to convert, optimizing their overall productivity and ROI.
3. Strengthens Alignment Across Sales and Marketing Teams
Creating an ICP is a true team effort, bringing together insights from sales, marketing, and customer success. With a shared understanding of what makes an ideal customer, all teams can align on targeting, messaging, and outreach strategies, leading to more cohesive and targeted ABM efforts.
4. Boosts Customer Retention and Lifetime Value
By targeting companies that are the best fit for your offering, you’re more likely to build trusted, long-term relationships. This alignment drives higher customer satisfaction, leading to greater retention and increased opportunities for customer expansion. Satisfied clients are more inclined to explore additional offerings, which creates valuable opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and sustained growth, and ultimately maximizes the customer lifetime value of each account.
5. Expands Personalization Opportunities
A well-defined ICP allows your teams to better tailor messaging and outreach. By understanding the unique needs, pain points, and goals of your ideal customers, you can create highly personalized content that resonates with them.
4 Challenges with ICP Creation
Despite the clear benefits of a well-developed ICP, many marketing executives and teams miss the mark when developing an ICP due to several challenges. These challenges can lead to wasted resources, misaligned strategies, and missed opportunities for growth. Here are some common hurdles when it comes to developing an ICP and strategies to overcome them:
1. Being Too Broad
When building your ICP it’s crucial to be specific and targeted. Marketers often encounter problems when they focus solely on broad quantitative criteria, such as targeting only large enterprises in the ecommerce sector. While this may help narrow the audience, it can also result in an overly generalized ICP that doesn’t effectively target the right prospects.
Rather than relying only on size or industry, dig deeper into qualitative criteria like customer needs, pain points, and buying behaviors. Instead of only using size or industry as criteria, consider how well your product or service addresses specific challenges or aligns with the goals of a potential customer. The more refined and specific your ICP, the better you can tailor your marketing campaigns and sales process to attract truly qualified leads.
2. Lack of Data on Target Audience
Creating an ICP based on assumptions or anecdotal evidence can lead to inaccurate targeting. Without reliable, data-driven insights, you’re essentially working off a “wish list,” which wastes time and resources. For example, when navigating new market entry, you may lack direct customer data to inform your ICP. However, despite the lack of first-party data, you can still build a solid ICP by leveraging competitive insights.
Look to competitor ICPs, case studies, and customer reviews on platforms like G2 to gain a deeper understanding of customer pain points, needs, and preferences. Analyzing this external data allows you to identify patterns that resonate with your ideal customers, even if you don’t have direct insights from your own customers yet.
3. Market Shifts
Rapid shifts in markets—such as new technologies, regulations, or economic factors—can quickly change your customer needs and behaviors. If your ICP isn’t updated regularly to reflect these changes, it can become outdated and misaligned.
To ensure your ICP remains relevant, consider setting up regular standing meetings with your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to review and refresh your ICP. Establish a cadence for re-evaluating your ICP, whether quarterly or biannually, to ensure alignment with market trends and customer feedback.
4. Team Silos
Sales and marketing misalignment is a massive problem in ABM, with 90% of sales and marketing professionals reporting challenges in their organizations’ marketing strategy, process, culture, and content due to not working together. This can lead to inefficiencies, wasted efforts, and missed opportunities.
Ongoing collaboration ensures your team is always on the same page and targeting the right accounts based on shared goals. Consider implementing feedback loops where sales can provide insights into lead quality and conversion rates, and schedule consistent meetings to keep both teams focused on filling the pipeline with the right prospects. Ongoing collaboration will help align sales and marketing efforts, making sure they are working toward the same goal and leading to sales meetings.
3 Steps to Create Accurate Ideal Customer Profiles
Unfortunately, there is no universal ICP that works for every marketer. Your ideal customer profile will vary depending on your specific business goals and the solutions you offer. In some cases, you might even need multiple ICPs to account for different solutions or customer segments.
To help you define the right ICP for your B2B business, here are three simple steps to guide you through the ICP building process:
Step 1: Determine Your ICP Criteria
Let’s start with the basics. Think about what your business is striving to accomplish and use that to outline the success criteria for your ideal customer. Identify the key characteristics of the customer base you want to target—this will form the foundation of your ICP.
These characteristics or attributes may include:
- Verticals or Industries: Identify the specific sectors or industries that are most likely to benefit from your solution, such as healthcare, technology, retail, or finance.
- Company and Buying Team Size: Consider the size of the organizations you want to target, including the number of employees, especially in relevant departments or teams.
- Annual Revenue: Focus on companies with revenue levels that align with your pricing model and solution scalability.
- Budget Allocation: Determine if the company allocates a portion of its budget to the problem your solution solves.
- Geographic Location: Pinpoint regions or countries where your solution is most applicable or where your team can effectively engage.
- Existing Technology: Identify companies already using similar or complementary technologies that could integrate well with your offering.
- Current Customers: Examine the customer base of the organizations you want to target.
- Roles Within the Buying Committee: Understand the specific decision-makers and influencers, such as C-suite marketing executives, team managers, or technical leads, involved in purchasing decisions.
The more insights you can use to build an ICP, the more you’ll understand how to successfully target and sell to these accounts. When evaluating your best-fit customers, analyze your pipeline and closed deals can help uncover patterns that align with your ideal customer criteria. Your pipeline can provide insights such as:
- High Revenue Accounts: The types of customers contributing the highest value to your business to refine your targeting efforts.
- Sales Cycle Duration: How long it typically takes for similar accounts to convert from opportunity to closed-won, helping you gauge pipeline velocity.
- Like-Accounts: The accounts that share characteristics with your top-performing or best customers.
With this information, you should be able to take your list of characteristics and compare it to your existing and recently won customers. There should be some overlap between the criteria you’ve defined and the accounts currently in your pipeline. If not, this might indicate an opportunity to target new customer segments.
Step 2: Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success on the ICP
ABM focuses on the account level, so who better to help than your sales and customer success teams, who interact directly with your best-fit accounts?
Sales and customer success teams both have daily conversations with current customers and prospective accounts. Account managers and sales leaders are often the customers’ first point of contact when they have an issue or a question, making them invaluable resources for identifying the best accounts to target for higher ROI and pipeline growth.
To refine your ICP and better align it with their experience, it’s crucial to encourage regular sales and customer success collaboration. To better understand your ideal customer profile, try asking questions like:
Questions for Sales:
- Which companies from which industries do you see in the pipeline the most?
- Which buying committee members within an account do you speak with most often?
- Which type of company verticals have you seen the most difficulties in selling to?
- How would you describe our ideal customer?
Questions for Customer Success:
- Which types of customers have the highest retention and satisfaction rates?
- Are there common attributes among customers who renew or expand their contracts?
- What kind of companies have the most success using our product over time?
- Where do we see the most customer challenges, and which customer profiles tend to face these issues the most?
By combining insights from both your sales and customer success teams, you’ll get a more holistic view of what makes a high-value account. Listen to their answers and go back to your first-stage ICP(s). What matches up? For example, if your biggest deal of $200,000 is from an account in the energy sector with 1,500 employees, there may be similar accounts that you can target with similar messaging and content.
These conversations and feedback will help you validate your assumptions from Step 1, identify any gaps, and further refine your ICP.
Step 3: Validate Your ICP with Data
Now comes the most important part: it’s time to validate your ICP with quality data.
Start by diving into your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Look at your top-value customers over a specific timeframe. Categorize these customers by factors like revenue, relationship length, product adoption, or lifetime value. This helps you identify which accounts are truly your best fit and should be targeted. To make this process easier, we recommend connecting your CRM data to a platform that aggregates and analyzes your data with other critical sources in one holistic signal.
What do we mean by other critical sources? Review the following list:
Firmographic Data
Firmographic data refers to the key characteristics of businesses that provide insights into their operations and goals within their respective markets.
In B2B, firmographic data is crucial for refining your ICP by helping you build detailed customer profiles and market segments based on attributes like:
- Verticals or industries
- Type of organization
- Industry/markets
- Company employee size
- Annual revenue
- Budgets
By comparing the firmographic characteristics of your best-fit customers to your ICP, you can spot trends and refine your target accounts. For example, do certain industries or company sizes appear more frequently among your top customers? Firmographic data helps ensure your ICP is grounded in real-world insights, and when used in combination with other data signals, it can significantly enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of your account targeting strategy.
Technographic Data
Technographic data refers to information about technology that a company uses within its tech stack. This data can help you in three ways:
- Identify gaps: Understanding the technologies a company already uses can help you pinpoint gaps in their current tech stack, where your solution may be the perfect fit.
- Identify challenges: Technographic data reveals potential pain points based on the tools they use. If your solution can integrate with or complement their existing technology, it can highlight areas where your offering can resolve challenges.
- Identify opportunities: Knowing what technologies a company uses also helps you recognize opportunities for your solution. For example, if your product integrates with Gong, targeting companies already using Gong would be a smart move. On the other hand, if you offer a competing solution, understanding which companies use Gong allows you to position your product as a superior option.
Technographic data also helps you understand how companies use technology. Companies vary in how they leverage their tech stack—some are advanced users with multiple integrations, while others may only be using basic solutions. This understanding enables you to tailor your approach; more tech-savvy organizations may respond better to sophisticated messaging, while others might need more foundational education.
The timing of a technology acquisition or purchase also offers insight into whether they are in-market for a new solution. Many vendors require at least a year-long contract; if the company just purchased a competitor’s product, they may not be in the market for a new solution. However, you can time your outreach for when their contract is nearing renewal, positioning your product as a better alternative.
By leveraging technographic install base data, you can uncover complementary or competitive technologies to refine your ICP and optimize your account targeting and messaging.
Engagement Data
Previous engagement is often a good indicator of future engagement. Buyers engaging with content or advertising on a particular area of interest are likely to continue engaging if there is a clear need and interest from within an organization.
Your job as a marketer is to persuade potential customers throughout the buyer’s journey by informing them of trends and potential problems within their organization that your solution can most effectively solve. By aligning your messaging with the pain points and needs of your ICP, you ensure that your content speaks directly to the right audience at the right buying stage.
Engagement signals, when compared to your ICP, provide valuable insights into which accounts are in-market and engaged. Thanks to behavioral data sources, you can gather enough data on how an account responds to your content or advertising during their progression throughout the buyer’s journey. You can then use quantitative behavioral data points to determine if buyers react to your content and advertising, such as ad engagement, content downloads, site visits, and account exposure time. These metrics can help identify propensity to purchase, while at the same time serve as signals that uncover active solution interest and opportunities to further engage the buying group.
Buyer Intent Data (Third-Party Intent Data)
Buyer intent data reveals which accounts are most likely to purchase your solution based on their engagement and research behavior.
To deepen your understanding of your ICP and gain broader insights, consider leveraging third-party intent data. Partnering with trusted and transparent data vendors allows you to complement your first-party data with external information, such as market trends, competitor intelligence, and broader industry insights. This combined approach ensures your targeting strategy is based on solid, real-world data, giving you a more comprehensive and accurate picture of your ideal customer.
Watch now: How AgentSync Leveraged ML Insights for Their ICP.
Learn How Madison Logic Helps Make Your Ideal Customers Real Customers
Creating and refining your ideal customer profile is the foundation of any successful ABM strategy. With the right data and insights, you can refine your ICP to target accounts that are genuinely interested in your solution, leading to faster and more efficient sales cycles. However, to reach these best-fit accounts effectively, it’s critical to validate your ICP continually with accurate, real-time data that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems.
Madison Logic’s industry-leading buyer intent data, ML Insights, simplifies the process of refining your ICP by delivering actionable data and insights. By leveraging real-time intent data from over 20 million companies worldwide, ML Insights helps you pinpoint the accounts most likely to convert, enabling you to focus your efforts where they matter most.
Want to leverage the power of ML Insights in your own ICP process? Download our ABM Buyer Intent Guides for access to data-driven ABM insights into in-market accounts and buying group personas. Use this resource to refine your ICP and targeting approach and drive more impactful ABM strategies.
If you’re ready to dive into how our intent data empowers your ABM strategy and campaigns request a demo to learn more!
