- Companies that create an ICP,
an ideal customer profile.
When they actually create an ICP,
to mobilize the go-to-market strategy,
they see on average, a 721% increase
in top-of-funnel inquiries.
A 721% increase,
it's no wonder I'm really obsessed
with ideal customer profiles and ICPs
as a core growth strategy.
This is something I go in depth into on how to create an ICP
inside of my SaaS Go-to-Market Program.
But for those of you that are still skeptical,
for those of you that are just getting started,
I wanted to go through the three core principles,
the three core principles that you need to follow
to actually create the first version of your ICP.
So that you can start to get started in this journey
and start to see some of these results,
so that maybe you'll invest more into building an ICP.
And I'm gonna cover these three principles
on how to create one in this episode.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody.
Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, and on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you navigate
and accelerate the path to the next stage of growth
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
I drop an episode every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday,
all about growing SaaS businesses,
exiting SaaS businesses,
starting SaaS businesses.
So if you're new, be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon, so you get notified
every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy.
Also, if you are already part of the community,
if you're already part
of my SaaS Go-to-Market Coaching Program,
welcome back.
It's really great to have you here.
Now here's the thing.
The year where I was running my SaaS business ToutApp,
that year we grew 300%,
which led to raising our Series B
led by Andreessen Horowitz,
we used ICP as a core part of our strategy.
The two years where, once we sold out to Marketo
and I joined the executive team in Marketo,
and we did a two year transformation,
that led to Marketo's sale to Adobe for 4.75 billion dollars
because we got growth going and profits growing,
the core to the strategy was again,
the ideal customer profile.
It's no wonder,
that when an ICP strategy is used to drive growth
for a SaaS business,
people see up to 721% increase in top-of-funnel inquiries.
And that obviously flows through
to everything else that you do.
And ICP strategy is a very, very strong strategy.
This is why I'm a big believer in it.
I've seen it work well at ToutApp and Marketo
and all the other SaaS businesses that I coach right now.
So in this episode,
I'm gonna give you the three principles
on how to create your first version of your ICP.
So you can get a taste of it, see some success,
and then if you wanna dig more into it,
you can check out my SaaS Go-to-Market Program,
which I'll tell you about all the way to the end.
So if you're excited to dig in on the three principles,
so you can start applying today.
Go ahead and smash that like button
and let's get into principle number one.
So the first thing you want to really answer
in terms of your ICP,
as you're crafting your ideal customer profile is the who.
Who is the most important question,
who are the people that are out there?
Or the types of accounts that are are out there,
who have these three things.
First, who are the people that have this urgent problem?
Urgent, meaning they need to solve it now
not tomorrow, not someday, not a nice to have
but this is an urgent problem that they need to solve.
The problem that you're solving
through your software and your SaaS business.
The second thing is,
who are these people that have the urgent
and important problem?
Meaning something could be an urgent problem
but it may not be important,
so they won't really focus on it.
People tend to focus on what's important and urgent, right?
And the third thing is, it needs to be frequent enough.
If they have to have an urgent important problem
and they solve it,
and then they're like cool,
"Now I never have to think about it ever again."
Then it's probably not a very good subscription business,
which is what SaaS businesses are.
They won't keep paying you.
They wanna to pay you once and that's it.
And then they'll move on.
It doesn't make for a great SaaS business strategy.
So you wannna find and define as principle number one,
who are the people that have the urgent important
and frequent problem?
That is like more than half the battle.
If you can just do that, and really list out,
you are well on your way to implementing an ICP strategy
to grow your SaaS business.
So once you've defined the who, which is,
who are these companies that have the urgent problem?
The important problem, and the frequent problem,
you'll hopefully start to see some patterns
and the patterns should form into what these companies are,
what categorizes these companies?
What are the characteristics around these companies?
And that's principle number two.
What we wanna dig into is,
what are some of the characteristics
that really define this type of company?
That includes things like firmographic data
and demographic data.
Firmographic data kind of goes into how big is the company,
what's the revenue of the company,
what industry they're in.
And demographic data goes into where they're located, right?
Is it a North American company,
a European company, an Asian company?
So it kind of digs into on both sides.
And what is the characteristics
that defines your ideal customer and company?
It could also go into things like a specific person
or a title that really articulates
the person that would be having this urgent
and important problem,
and frequent problem and needs to solve it.
And therefore for that job title
in that company that you wannna be going after.
So principle number one is starting to get an abstract idea
of who your ideal customers are,
based on these set of characteristics.
And the principle number two is flushing that out further,
based on firmographics and demographics.
Let me just pause here for a second.
So you start to see to see how powerful
an ideal customer profile strategy is.
Cause it forces you to do some research,
make some strategic decisions,
make some choices on who we wanna after and not go after,
instead of trying to be anything for everyone,
be sure to smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
And also hit me with a yes in the comments below,
with any other insights that you've gotten around an ICP.
And by the way, if you are thinking
about building out an ideal customer profile,
and if you're starting to think like
man, how do I actually do all of these things?
Be sure to check my SaaS Go-to-Market Program.
That's my coaching program,
where we go a lot more in depth into how to build out an ICP
as part of a broader strategy
for your go-to-market strategy, right?
So I'll tell you more about this at the end of the video.
But let's go into principle number three, first of all.
So, so far we've gone into who has an urgent, important
and frequent problem.
Then we started thinking about
well, what are the characteristics that define these people?
What's their firmographic information,
demographic information?
And hopefully this starts to flush out
some sort of a profile around these people,
these ideal customers.
This is where principle number three comes in
because a lot of times, people would just stop there
and then kind of ignore the ideal customer profile,
and then just like kinda does a bunch of blind marketing
and sales activities.
The true power in ICP,
comes when you actually mobilize it, right?
When you actually mobilize it,
that's where principle number three comes in.
What you wanna really get into is,
especially if you're an early stage SaaS business
which is probably what you are,
if you're watching this.
What we wanna figure out is, out of these people
who have the urgent,
and important and frequent problem,
who are the people that tend to be early tech adopters?
Cause here's the thing,
let's just say, you really narrow down on like left.
If you're, I don't know, texting software, right?
I was working with a client,
they in the texting space,
if you're a texting software,
you could narrow down your ICP to look,
"We're gonna go after tech companies,
"we've already invested in sales engagement software."
But that could be a very, very wide group of companies.
Because at this point,
sales engagement is actually a pretty mature category.
It wasn't when we started ToutApp, but today it is.
But out of those companies,
there's gonna be a subset of those companies
who have this urgent, important and frequent problem,
but tend to be early tech adopters.
So what I would go look for,
is what are some newer technologies,
beyond sales engagement
that they're already starting to use.
It doesn't have to be competitive to you,
but it can be complimentary to you.
And if they're using those technologies,
it will signal to you that out of the 1000 companies
that I can go sell into, here's the 50 or 100
that tend to be early adopters of technology.
If we go to them, they're more likely to buy.
Cause as a startup, let's just be honest,
you probably don't have a full enterprise sales process,
you might not have SOC 2 compliance,
you might not have a perfectly rounded out product.
So what you really want, are the early adopters
instead of the people that are gonna tie up all your time
cause they want all the things available,
where you're just not there yet.
So you wanna start building momentum,
with these early adopters.
And so what you wanna do,
and in this whole thing,
each of these principles are a filtering process, right?
So first it's just figure out,
who are the people that are your perfect customers,
that have this urgent, important, frequent problem.
Then further define them with firmographic
and demographic data, their characteristics.
And then further define them and say,
"Okay who are the people that have all those things,
"plus tend to be early tech adopters?"
And the best way to figure out who is an early tech adopter,
is to figure out what technologies they're using.
The easiest way to do that is using a tool called BuiltWith.
BuiltWith is an amazing tool,
I'll link to it below.
You just have to install it.
When you go to a company's website,
it'll tell you all the technologies they're using,
hundreds and hundreds of technologies that it can detect.
And based on that, you can start to understand,
if a company is using cutting edge technology.
And if they are, they tend to be early adopters,
and they're more likely
to buy your cutting edge technology
to gain an extra edge, right?
When you combine these three things,
principle number one, who are these people
with an urgent, important, frequent problem?
Drive further characteristics
including firmographic and demographic data.
And then start to figure out who are the early adopters.
What you end up with is a target list
of ideal customers that you can go after.
What you end up with is a profile that you can define.
So when an inbound lead comes in,
you can compare to see if they're fitting your ICP or not.
So you can better prioritize on those leads.
When you do this,
you can actually start to run a much more efficient
go-to-market machine.
You can start to actually drive your marketing dollars,
your attention, your time, on the customers that matter.
And because of that,
you'll be able to accelerate your growth.
So now you know how to actually build out your ICP
or at least the first version of it.
Building an ICP is one of the core pieces to do,
to build out your overall, go to market strategy.
So if you are building out a SaaS business,
and you're looking to drive growth,
and you're building out that go-to-market machine,
then one thing I'll tell you to do,
is check out my SaaS Go-To-Market Coaching Program.
Inside of the program, we do three things.
The first thing we do is we really go into defining
what your ICP is,
into a lot more detail than this one video obviously.
The second thing we do is, we take that ICP
and that market,
we help you do the recent create your manifesto.
Manifesto is essentially a strategic narrative.
It's a way to get that attention
of all the people in your ICP.
And then we actually teach how to mobilize that manifesto
with what we call a Broadway show.
That means going, driving your inbound machine,
your outbound machine, your advertising machine,
using the ICP and the manifesto,
that we help you create.
All three of these things together,
your ICP, your manifesto and your Broadway show
create a very differentiated go-to-market machine
that helps you accelerate your growth.
So if you're interested in that
and you're in that stage
where you really wanna accelerate your growth,
you wanna build out a repeatable,
predictable go-to-market machine,
what I invite you to do,
is book a one on one strategy call with me.
I have a few slots available.
All you need to do is go to TKKADER.COM/GTM
you'll get details around my SaaS Go-to-Market Program,
how to get more deep into building an ICP and mobilizing it.
So all you have to do is go to that page,
I'll also link to it below tkkadet.com/gtm,
and you just need to apply.
And you'll have to answer a couple
of questions just to make sure
that you're the right fit for the program,
we can actually help you.
And when you do that, we'll get on a strategy call.
And then we can talk about where your SaaS business is,
where you're looking to get to.
And I can tell you if you're a good fit for the program
and you can take it from there.
So you're building SaaS business,
you wanna accelerate growth,
be sure to check out my SaaS Go-to-Market Program.
That's what I wanted to cover today,
on why you should think about an ideal customer profile,
the three principles that you can
follow to start to build it out for yourself
and the resource, my SaaS Go-to-market Program
that you can join,
so that you can actually follow the whole strategy
instead of just the ICP.
I'm gonna thank you for watching this episode.
If you've got value from it,
be sure you smashed on the like button
for the YouTube algorithm,
and also just means the world to me and my team,
who put a lot of effort into these videos.
And also if you have a friend,
a cofounder or another SaaS founder
that would get value from this video,
please share it with them.
Feel free to tweet it out,
we have a click to tweet link down below.
It would be awesome
if you just tweet this video out as well.
And lastly remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business,
but when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.
(upbeat music)