- Hey there. Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
This video I'm gonna share with you how to define your ideal
customer profile also known as your ICP for your B2B SaaS
business so that that way you can focus on the customers that
are excited, ready and willing to buy your solution.
Be sure to the end where I'm gonna share with you
my Rocket Demo Builder.
Essentially it's a process for doing demo calls that will allow
you to close twice as fast and not do a boring demo.
(upbeat music)
So recently I was working with a coaching client and one of the
struggles they were having is really getting the market to
resonate with their solution.
They have an incredible technology that allows agencies
to connect their product information with their financial
dashboard to show them profitability but it wasn't
resonating as exciting as they thought it
would with the market.
So what we did is we went through the six core aspects of
an ideal customer profile that I'm gonna share with you to make
sure that we could find not only a focused customer segment but
also the geography. If you think about even just
compression in a market or awareness.
Focusing on a geography is gonna allow you to kind of build a
mini-brand in a location because if all of the customers that are
similar start using your solution,
they're all gonna talk about it.
They're all gonna be raving fans and it's gonna allow you to
kinda expand, expand, expand.
The way I think about it is like air pressure in a tire.
It's really those last few pumps that give it the definition of
the tire but it's all that focus and work of pumping,
pumping, pumping up until that point.
That's what we want to do by nailing a customer profile is so
that you can actually start to make the job of marketing and
sales easier on yourself.
So these are the six key areas that I look at
when working with a client.
Number one, firmographics.
The firm, the business, what's true about them?
What industry are they in?
What vertical do they specialize in?
What's their revenue band right now?
What is their percent of growth?
I mean do you want to work with a company that's losing
market share every year? No.
So here's what usually happens is you're gonna get stuck on
this 'cause you're like, "Well, I know who I want to work with
"but who can I work with based on our product?"
Think about it this way, you're always gonna start typically at
the bottom or the mid part of the market and over time you're
product matures and you're gonna be able to grow up.
So where could you really push the limits of the size of deals
and the size of customers that you could work with based on the
solution that you have today that you know have sold really
well into that industry?
That is the firmographic information that you want to use
to apply to the profile.
Number two, demographics traits.
Think of the demographics of
where your best customers hang out.
You know if I was selling to the music industry,
I'd probably be in LA.
If I was trying to the financial industry,
I'd probably be in New York or on Bay Street in Canada so you
gotta ask yourself, "Where is the highest concentration of
"companies that I want to target?"
And then also ask yourself, maybe it's a physical thing.
Maybe they have stores.
Maybe there's a certain part of, you know,
if you're selling farm software. Maybe it's the midwest.
But understanding geography and the demographics is
a huge filter of focus for you to go after
your ideal customer profile.
Number three, technographic tools.
Essentially your ideal customer has a tech stack.
They have a marketing stack.
They have a HR stack.
They have a sales stack.
They have a workflow stack, an ERP solution.
Whatever it is, if you look at your best customers.
You think of what would be true about my best customers,
they probably already use a certain technology stack.
This is the cool part is today there's tools like Built With,
a site that allows you to monitor and build a list of
qualified leads of companies that are
using certain technologies.
There's other ones that can do internal technology adoption and
the way they do that is they analyze the positions that are
being posted from a recruiting point of view to see what kind
of technologies they're asking that the candidates have
experience in and then reverse engineering that for you.
So technographic tools is a huge opportunity for
you to really trim down.
If you have 50,000 potential customers,
trim it down into the best 800 for you to go after based on
your solution and the technologies
they're probably already using.
Maybe some integrations you built
so that you can get those sales done quicker.
Number four, psychographic drivers.
At the end of the day, there are definitely mindset,
beliefs and values that people have that if they have the wrong
ones will make your job ridiculously hard to get them to
adopt your technology.
And if they have the right ones, it's almost like they're pulling
your solution to them.
Just think about like fixed mindset people
versus growth mindset. Early adopters versus laggards.
Now you might be thinkin',
"Well, how can I even validate that when I'm trying to design
"my ideal customer profile?"
It's not that you can do it up front
but you can definitely define it.
My best customers, the people that I love to work with,
the ones that I get the best results for have these values,
they have these belief systems.
These are the things that are true about them.
Just answer that question.
Put it on the list and you'd be surprised how that will inform
your sales people, your marketing people to produce
content that attracts those people,
to have conversation that qualifies the bad people or the
bad prospects out of your list to make it way easier to have
success in your solution.
'Cause to me SaaS should stand as Success as a Service
not Software as a Service because
that's what you want for your customer.
You want to get them results and making sure they have the right
psychographic traits is huge part of it.
Number five, roles.
Think about the buyer in the business.
Now if you sell to mid-market or enterprise customers there's
probably several people involved in buying so you want to define
the roles within the organization depending on who
you put as an ideal customer profile so that you can ensure
that the marketing team or the salespeople are building that
connection and those relationships with the various,
the several people, you know, from your champions,
your internal champions, to the economic buyer to whoever it is
that's gonna be adopting the technology,
they need to be on board.
The complexity of sales right now is almost like there's
always a group of people that are gonna be involved
in making that decision.
If you don't put the list of those roles from the company
you've identified, maybe in the the firmographic information
you've listed, then you won't be able to properly ask questions
and qualifying them to make sure that you reach out and connect
and build relationships with those people to
make the sales process easier.
Number six, name your avatar.
Now one of my favorite things to do with my coaching clients is
to name their avatar and I'm always looking for typically an
industry or a vertical specific understanding or role and then
giving them a name that starts with the same letter.
So Hubspot is famous for Marketing Mary and I know that
Amazon and all the top companies have an avatar.
They've named them.
Some of them put a physical object in a chair in a meeting
room so that everybody knows at the end of the day we're trying
to serve that person.
I have one of my coaching clients,
David, he went so far about focusing on ideal customer
profiles that he put out a whole printed avatar
of his perfect customer and stuck it on the wall.
So like got it printed with a face and a description of what
they are, who they are.
And then to just even nail that even further they put it,
the PITA, the Pain In The Ah, on the other side.
So they kind of have the good guy and the bad guy of who they
love to work with and who they don't want to attract and they
make sure that everybody sees that in the conference room.
That's the level of detail so for me,
I like to work with what I call Software Scaling Sam.
This is typically, and this could be Sam or Samantha,
and these are people that want to scale their growth business.
There's a whole bunch of different characteristics that
I've used and defined just like I've shared with you but
it's really important that you name your avatar.
So the six aspects of an ideal customer profile,
an ICP, one, firmographics details.
Two, demographic traits.
Three, technographic tools.
Four, psychographic drivers.
Five, roles and six, name your avatar.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
I want to share an incredible resource to
help you close deals faster.
It's called my Rocket Demo Builder and in it I talk about
the five key principles that you need to start leveraging in your
sales communication and the nine box model and really
conversation flow that you can use to start not giving a boring
demo and get people to buy way quicker
than you're doing right now.
So you can click the link below and download that.
If you liked this video,
be sure to click the like button,
subscribe to my channel, and be sure to share this video with
anybody you think it might serve.
As per usual, I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business.
I'll see you next Monday.
Pop collars.
Dollar, dollar.
Gonna keep your pop collar.