How to create an Ideal Customer Profile ICP for ABM programs


Video Transcript


(00:05) to the new episode of Al live as promise today we are going to chat about um de about ICP ideal customer profile development for the account based marketing programs we’ll try to use less abbrevi abbreviations today or at least explain them and um we collected all the questions you guys asked us uh we saw that there are a lot of um misconceptions about ICP development for for the com based marketing programs and we want to cover the most essential steps today as always I’m G host in this episode with my dear
(00:47) co-founder Wladimir blo which we are broadcasting from Spain and let us know guys where you all joining us from type in the chat where you all tuning in and uh while you are sharing Maybe just V quickly let’s go through the today’s agenda yeah so we have heard a lot about account B sorry about ideal customer profile and when we are thinking about ideal customer profile we want to really stress what is the difference between creating an ideal customer profile for an ABM program account based marketing program which is the topic of today
(01:27) versus creating let’s say an ICP for for the general goto Market strategy so that is the first thing to highlight and then also to really share with you how we create account deal customer profile qualification disqualification criteria uh account tiers one to three and buying committee basically take you through that process as we do it with our clients for ourselves and then answer all your questions so with that out of the way I think we can read start discussing uh the role of ICP and ABM but I think Andre you wanted to mention
(02:07) something before we dive into the content yeah absolutely um one thing that uh you guys asked in the questions we saw a lot uh we saw this repetitive question it was how can we actually apply ICP for account selection right and what technology you will recommend so uh very quick note about uh the tool that we use and we mention it all the time why because these guys they really they really developing their product compan is called dealr so uh what we love about it is that um we basically we incorporated this technology into all our ABM processes
(02:55) why because first of all they have Inn data layer right you can see accounts that are visiting your website you can integrate it with your CRM like in our case with HubSpot right and then you can see all the touch points with these accounts right what uh website Pages they have visited how much time they spent if they booked a call that would be incorporated and now you’ll have known accounts and the second part which is most important and this is what we are going to talk about today right how can you enrich the buying committee how
(03:27) can you know how can you identify potential needs of this accounts and this is basically the second part of uh the insights that this technology provides right so you can immediately see the technographics firmographics criteria and uh you can navigate to the employees right you can select the right people you can get their contacts you can navigate through their LinkedIn profiles and lastly all the account insights right so you can tune in the different signals about hiring press releases uh news this company was
(04:03) mentioned in and basically get a holistic overview of what’s happening in these accounts right you can set up the corporate losses you know there are like 72 different signals that you can apply and the best part is that this company is a product Le grow company which means that you can try this product for free so all you need to do is uh I would just copy that link and put it in the description you can go and trap uh free demo and get a free trial here so that being said uh let’s move forward and uh let’s talk about why ICP development for
(04:42) ABM programs uh is different from the general goto Market strategy approach I think there are two uh two really important examples when we talk about go market strategy development and we’ll touch this a little bit later today right we think about our all our product units right we think about our Global approach where we want to go Etc while ABM is always specific right and we know from practical example that when it comes to account based marketing programs the best outcomes are coming from the programs that are focusing on a
(05:23) specific cluster of accounts by cluster we mean a category a segment if you will of companies with see similar challenges right that’s really important and uh one of the Fantastic examples we have I think L you can describe it how companies are making it wrong when it comes to ABM right one of the companies we used uh to work with and still working is a typical uh example of how companies approach it in a wrong way they think about their product right our product is learning management software hence everybody wants to use it just to
(06:02) upskill their people right but what happens in reality I think you can share a lot yeah I think it’s an interesting example because it’s a an example of a learning solution which can be applied to many different use cases and and this is something that we see you know in some cases very often you will have different use cases for your product especially like your can set up any sort of learning program this learning program can have any you know all sorts of goals and so when you start talking about things like you know okay we want to
(06:41) focus let’s say on Blended learning experiences meaning we want to offer a mix of digital and face-to-face learning programs yeah and that’s very product centered or product oriented right so this is the feature that we believe a lot of our customers need but has nothing to do with the actual Challenge and the reason why customer customers may buy so once we started analyzing their customers and the reasons why their previous customers especially those that led to very high value deals when we started analyzing why they
(07:20) purchased the product we discovered a completely different story well first of all it wasn’t even about learning it was about uh something that was happening in the business so for one example cluster one example use case was [Music] when consumer goods companies are growing by acquiring smaller Brands this is something that very frequently happens in the industry so these consumer companies they grow they acquire internationally different brands and integrate it into the corporation and what happens then is you
(07:59) have basically new employees that are joining from the acquired company and you need to make sure that they’re onboarded on your processes they are integrated in the team you need to make sure that they are not demotivated and leaving the company etc etc so these are the business needs and then it makes sense to organize uh to create a program to help with the onboarding program uh to help with the onboarding process yes it might make sense to have a mix of digital and live face Toof face um to create extra motivation and whatnot to
(08:38) you know customize the the program etc etc but really when you think about how we should Market that product who we should go after how we should communicate about challenges well it becomes clear that we should be talk well we should go after companies that had a recent merger or acquisition and we should be talking about challenges uh that this merger is causing when it comes to onboarding acquired employees when it comes to their engagement motivation etc etc so it’s a very very different way of um messaging is a very
(09:14) different way of targeting is a very very different way in in one word of marketing to those accounts and what is really interesting in that in this example is that if uh you’ll just think about the product right app skill and plus or learning management platform right then literally every company could fit ideal customer profile why because I mean by default every company wants to grow their people right I mean this would be absolutely wrong companies that don’t want to do it so literally every company could be ideal C could fit ideal
(09:51) customer profile now let’s imagine about let’s talk about this Enterprise clients right uh the example that blad just described this company has completely different set of needs and they will not thinking about the I mean if you’ll come and say hey guys for this specific challenge you need Learning Management platform it’s absolutely irrelevant message for the Target buyers and they don’t look for this solution they don’t think in these cases while this platform actually helps with this what does it mean right it means that you have a you
(10:30) need when you develop um AAL customer profile for ABM programs right you need to think in terms of these clusters you pick up that challenge and then you based on the companies that um your clients that have similar challenges right you start developing ideal customer profile based on them why because then you can create relevant content that would educate about potential ways of solving this challenge Right add that would be uh promoting the right let’s say be the the right value of this specific problem you’ll be able
(11:06) to create differentiated events differentiated landing pages Etc right so this is the most important thing while when it comes to marketing strategy right when it when you develop Global IP you take completely different approach right that’s that’s really important so uh that being said let’s move forward to the next part and discuss basically how to um develop ICP and that was a great question for Mariana is this model only suitable for Enterprises uh would it make sense for big medium clients that are not considered Enterprises absolutely yes
(11:45) and we would love to share with you the six pillars of Ideal customer profile the most important elements and show you practical example right so you can see how it look like and um let’s start with is the first one the first one is phog Graphics that everybody is aware of right so phog Graphics are the criteria like uh markets where these companies are based um uh Revenue size uh stack uh whatever could be applied right uh technographic specific technology that these companies use uh you pick up how you can use this
(12:28) data right this would be the basic data that later you can apply for account list building When selecting specific accounts for the ABM program or account qualification right whenever you’ll see for example if you use technology like deal front you see uh you get Inn data right and you want to qualify engaged accounts you apply this this would be the first set of criteria that you apply to Define if you should select this account or you should disqualify this account right so these are the basics again where you get this data from you
(13:05) run the analysis of uh companies that have a similar challenge right so you extract the data from your CRM and uh see these commonalities between them and the next step the next element is account tiers Let’s uh let’s cover this one yes so basically in account based marketing if you you have an account that can generate it’s not actually surprising to have an account that can generate 10x like at least like five 10x even more uh Revenue than let’s say an average account you can’t treat them differently right and you can spend so much more
(13:48) time effort on those accounts that have a much higher Revenue potential than on those that have a lower Revenue potential in fact if we look at what we call the lowest Revenue potential or tier three accounts we consider them not to even be a candidate for account based marketing right and so it again it might depend on the complexity and the deal size Etc but usually uh this is how we would look at it now how do you identify those tiers and I’d like to just share just one quick uh example here because I think
(14:28) it’s always a little bit easier can just give me a second Andre I I like to share it with everybody and I think this just makes it so much easier so if you take your target accounts from the target cluster that you’re looking at so you’re basically looking at your existing customers you make an expert from their CRM and you sort them by revenue and what you see here for those who are looking you will see that the top four accounts are categorized at tier one then the next seven accounts are categorized as tier
(15:06) two and then the rest are categorized as tier three and the reason is or how why did we decide to draw the lines where we through the lines is basically you you can look at it two ways right you can look at it okay what are the 20% of accounts that are generating 80% of Revenue well if we look at this one we see that approximately tier one and tier two are generating about 80% of Revenue right so tier one and tier two are the 20% of accounts that are generating 80% of Revenue now what about uh tier one making a difference
(15:51) between tier one and tier two well if you would apply as again the 8020 principle so you would end up with essentially 20 so you would end up with what is it uh I think 20% of the 20% so 4% of accounts that generate 64% of Revenue or something like that doesn’t really matter the numbers don’t really matter but basically approximately let’s say the first five to 10% of accounts that are generating approximately like 30 to 50 60% of the revenue then that will be the tier one then the next let’s say um up to like 20 maybe 30% of accounts that
(16:38) make up and generate all together another like let’s say 30% of Revenue and then you will cut off and another way to look at it is just like looking at the revenue that is being generated by those accounts and seeing where it drops right in this case there is not a significant drop right but let’s let’s say there is like um definitely a drop between something that is 10 almost 10% or above and then you have below uh almost 10% in this case right so low uh one figures like between three to 5% and then you have 1% two maybe we could have
(17:19) also taken this one 2% and lower right so you’re looking at either the revenue uh that is being generated by those account so when you see a big drop this is where you could draw the line right so this is one very practical way to define those tiers now when we Define those tiers I think what’s also important is that you’re looking at these tiers you’re looking at the accounts that belong to those tiers and you’re studying their firmographics criteria and mapping that to the tier so very frequently tier one accounts will
(17:54) be their largest accounts that doesn’t have to be maybe it’s not about the size in terms of the Revenue that they generate or the employee size in some cases maybe let’s say you’re selling customer support software and your main Revenue like you’ll generate more Revenue if they have more agents so maybe a call center with let’s say more than 500 agents is going to be uh your tier one versus let’s say maybe a huge company that might have just internal whatever 100 agents or or something like that so you will look at these kind of
(18:30) uh firmographics criteria in order for you to be able to later estimate the revenue potential of accounts as your prioritizing accounts for your account-based marketing program so Andre maybe if you could go back and share again the table with let me just stop sharing yeah I just wanted to quickly answer a question from Kristof uh does TI one to three maybe different ideal customer profiles normally no we use tiers to prioritize accounts right and if you guys missed our episode uh I will drop a link about selecting accounts for the ABM program
(19:15) so I’m dropping this link in the chat and you can you can watch the episode and you can read the entire process and philosophy behind account score and and account prioritization right in some rare cases you can create ICP for TI one accounts but I I I I won’t do it for account based marketing program why because it’s not the cluster based it’s not the challenge based right so tier one yeah yeah I just wanted to to add what will be different and what is different very frequently is the buying committee structure so the larger the
(19:50) company you know the more uh buying committee members you will have and also the titles might be different uh the functions might be different in very large companies they may have very specialized functions versus maybe like mediumsized companies that that have uh maybe don’t they don’t even have the target department but somebody let’s say they don’t have like a I don’t know like a big Bank may have a fintech department where like a medium-sized Bank may have somebody from their um from their team like taking
(20:24) care of this uh specific issue right so this is something that could be different so in in our example you know if we are going after like very very large organizations our decision maker might be for example VP of marketing where let’s say a medium-sized organization there that that might be the CMO uh and then in maybe even like smaller organization maybe even some exact other Executives like the co or even the CEO might be might need to approve the deals so these are this is something that can be different between
(21:03) tiers and uh let’s move forer to the thir pillar of um ideal customer profile it’s Bing committee because ultimately we’re not selling to companies we are selling to people that are working for these companies right and traditionally in this case we wanted to simplify the process because with flat we also use six RS but in this case we just want to uh stick to uh what everybody understands but just emphasize on the most important points when it comes to buying committee development right typically we have for RS Champions these
(21:44) are the people and this is this is the this this is the most important person in the organization a lot of companies think that the most important is the decision maker but in reality Champions are those people who are selling your tion to their teams especially if you are climbing right to corporate accounts to Enterprises these are the people that have specific challenge right they in charge of this challenge they want to solve it right uh but they’re not the budget owners so they need to create a strong business case right why they need
(22:19) to purchase as product or hire a vendor and present it to their decision makers typically a lot of companies they want to focus only decision makers right why because they are paying for the solution they budget pay right but these people they I mean first of all they are attacked by all the vendors that’s the first thing right that’s why we usually we kiding saying that these people are wearing you know uh protection helmet just to ignore all the Outreach and ads Etc right because just think about um probably a lot of you are selling to
(22:58) it departments right think about VP of it or C in any Enterprise organization how many spaming messages they receive every single week so it’s just hundreds right everybody wants to sell to the same to the same big accounts so even if you are able to get to the decision makers in most cases they will just forward your message to the Champions right and the problem is that these people they don’t like when vendors are jumping over their heads so uh that’s that’s the most important thing right you need to always build
(23:33) relationship with these Champions think about them and then you have two more roles right influencers and blockers influencers are uh business units or specific CWS that are not negotiating with you they might not be power users of that product right but their opinion is uh always been asked like in our case whenever we mostly we selling to the marketing tips right but sales sales is essential part of successful ABM programs so even if we not engaging directly with sales teams their opinion will be always asked on the internal
(24:13) meeting whenever our champion would come and present hey we want to work with full funnel and this is why right they would be immediately asking a lot of questions and this questions would be all about how that would impact our pipeline how that would impact our workflows uh what is the uh what are the improvements that we can see what metrics we are going to track Etc and if you are not addressing this in most cases this is why the deals might be losen right one of the things that you guys need to know about um and that’s
(24:49) the essence of ABM programs right uh one of the things that you need to be aware of is that you are not winning the deals your champion are closing the deals for you during the internal meetings right when they have your Peach offer whatever right and then they meet with the decision makers and with influencers right presenting Your solution and your goal is to armor Champion with enough arguments why right and so they would be able to answer all these critical questions so that’s essential and that’s why it’s important to know these roles
(25:25) right because whenever we talk about sales enablement and sales enablement is a part of more precisely we need to call it buyer enablement right it’s a part of successful ABM program and to be able to uh help your Champions to sell you need to know whom they are going to talk with right and what typical questions concerns they might hear so they would be able to address it and the last role is uh the blockers people who are not interested in your solution for multiple reasons right or who I mean not interested all who are concerned right
(26:01) typical example again uh you sell technology right you sell any specific product and then the IT team comes and says hey but what about Integrations what about security what about vulnerability boom boom boom you get a lot of questions right if you can’t address them you losing the deal and in most cases the problem is that a lot of companies they are not aware of what’s Happening inside right and who is asking these different questions but the point is and one of the most important things that you need to aware of the better you
(26:38) are aware of the buying committee structure and the typical questions that pop up during the internal meetings the better you’ll be able to prepare and armor your Champions with enough arguments the second reason if you know this people and with more people from the buying committee you will be able to connect and engage with the are the chances that you’ll be able to generate a sales opportunity and as well you increase the chances to close the sales opportunity one of the most interesting questions is how to define this buying
(27:10) committee because companies think again they usually think only in terms of decision makers hey we sell to to a piece of it but uh we have a very good process and if just bad to me just to give you an example if you’ll apply VP of it to any corporate account you might end up with hundreds of potential buyers right and then the question the question is what you going to do next with these hundreds of buyers in one of the accounts normally companies just add this all this contacts to the uh display targeting and put them into the outbound
(27:44) Cadence because it’s not realistic to engage with all of them right so uh let’s uh let us quickly share the approach how you can Define this different by committee members all right so basically what you want to do is remember we are focused on tier one and tier 2 accounts from the target cluster the target segment that we are after the target account cluster that we Define as accounts that have a similar challenge similar use case and basically what you want to do is you want to take the five largest deals there maybe five fastest
(28:27) deals as well you want to study those deals and so that you can basically identify people who were involved in those deals from the buyers this is how you basically look at the history to understand the buying committee now that’s the next step so how do you analyze those deals well if you have a good CRM with a lot of information you can go in there and you can check all the contacts that are in the CRM especially those that were engaged for example people who were on email trads who would who attend the meetings maybe
(29:00) you can do a quick search uh in the calendar with that account domain so you can see whether you you had or your salese had meetings with them and you can also look at things like the signatures on the documents who was signing the documents whether that’s a contract whether that’s another document that will also be helpful for you to understand who is the actual person who was asked to approve the deal and who might be also uh in this case the budget owner and I think another thing to consider as well is okay so you have
(29:37) looked at the CRM but you know that there are specific Sal salespeople that were involved in that deal and maybe there were like in some organizations you might have like three different roles or four different roles like I know one organization when you have uh an SDR who is trying to book the meeting and maybe doing the first call but then they transfer this to some a role specific role called business developer who is more senior in a lot of companies this is an account executive which is then transferred either to Cs and then
(30:10) transferred or account manager right so you actually have all of these different uh people who were involved at different stages of the deal and might had contact with different people in those stages so that’s another uh thing to do is to check with them who else was involved in Deal who was asked for an advice who was attending the meetings or calls that might not be logged in the CRM system and then finally another piece of advice there is also and and we we’ll talk more about the accountant inment and and
(30:45) customer research but once you’re talking to your customers and interviewing them you can also ask them because there will be quote unquote hidden buyers so people that you might not be aware of or your salespeople might not be Ware of especially when they are actually getting in contact with the customer or the prospect at a later stage of the buying process and this is more and more the case you know especially if they are reaching out to you as an inbound lead or otherwise okay so this is how you studi the deal
(31:18) history to understand it but there is another piece of information that is also very interesting and that is analyzing the product usage especially if you have this information um Andre was talking about CH the different roles there there is another role that can really be helpful in understanding the use cases the jobs to be done and maybe also um could be like the the person that actually has the problem are the so-called power users right so who are the people who are mostly involved in using the product uh
(31:52) you can look at product usage statistics if that’s what you have but you might also look at something like you know public reviews uh reviews of your product or like if if you’re doing some sort of MPS scoring you can look at the people who have submitted the MPS uh survey again these are usually people who have the high stake uh at a product it could be an interesting role to Target and the final Point here is that once you have collected these people from the deals you want to go and you want to try to understand as much as
(32:27) possible about those people so let’s say you’re studying one specific role let’s say they’re whatever somebody who is in charge for in compliance and which is like something that you’re selling some sort of a legal compliance solution now you you you you start looking at these different profiles and what you want to understand is what are the different titles that these people have again like different size organizations different Industries may have actually called these kind of people very differently sometimes you might have like in some
(32:58) Industries sometime some companies you may have like one person who has a different title who has also that function so you know it doesn’t have like a spe specialized function and then you what you also want to understand as you’re studying those those people really like studying them like reading their LinkedIn profiles Etc you want to look for common patterns in their profile description and by uh common patterns I mean very specifically they will share things like they’re I’m responsible for XY Z I’ve been you know maybe they will
(33:38) sh share some achievement I was involved in setting up this and creating that Etc so these are let’s say jobs to be done or their their jobs right their jobs and and and responsibilities but also very very interesting and undervalued something that uh Andre did in one project I loved it was actually looking at the keywords and common keywords and this is like in some cases like Andre mentioned like you have a chief of it and then you look for it head of it or chief of it and you end up with hundreds of people it’s not helpful sometimes
(34:16) having these specific keywords could really help you identify those people um what you also want to understand is common connections you have with those buyers um and if those uh have worked uh for customers right so if for example your target buyers are working for uh a former customer if they have worked for a former customer for example of you so this is like the connections that you can then leverage when you’re reaching out to to to the new buyer so with this process you should really be able to go beyond very high level job
(34:57) titles which is larger organization May and and you may you may up nowhere or end up with too many people uh so they can really identify and find the people the right people that are involved in the purchase of your product and uh I would love just to summarize what FL said it’s really important when if you want to go to if you want to sell to tier one tier to accounts right you need to dive and or let’s say dig as deep as possible you need to you as like every corporate account is like a mini market for you
(35:34) there are lot of different business units there could be multiple potential Target buyers so if you’ll go with your generical let’s say with your broad ICP ha we sell Tov pce of it you’ll go nowhere is this we see it all the time this is what most companies do they uh I once asked account executive in one of the recent projects to show me the process how they Define Target B and it was like literally we open sales Navigator we put the piece of it for example and then we have like this hundreds of potential buyers and this
(36:08) and not we are talking about company that is 25k plays worldwide right and then like and then what and uh count executive tells me and I’m just quickly checking and based on my gut feeling experience Etc I’m saying okay that would be the right person so that’s why you you need to nail it down and we’ll show you a practical example how that ideal customer profile for ABM program uh will look like uh in a second but let’s come back to other pillars right uh when you understand this um typical roles right you know these
(36:48) different buying committee members you can run additional research and your goal is to understand responsibilities of these people right or jobs to done what they’re in charge of what are their typical kpis what are their typical challenges right and what are their typical goals so why we are doing this because we want to be relevant right and this is aligned with what we shared so far when when you know the typical buying committee structure and you know who is in charge of what right and I mean not only Champions or decision
(37:22) makers also influencers and blockers you’ll be able to create this entire account ceral for Champions you’re going to educate them about the right ways of solving their challenge right how how to get Buy in from other stakeholders how to get Buy in from influencers right uh also when you know decision makers and you know you understand their kpis and goals right you can align your entire offering with the corporator with the company’s goals right because ultimately when Champion is presenting this to uh presenting Your solution to their
(38:00) bosses right they would anyhow the first question they would hear is how this helping me to hit my targets right so that’s the most important thing the let’s say the key stakeholder the budget holder wants to see that the investment would help him or her to hit their own targets right that’s why you need to align with this next uh when you are aware of uh the influencers and their responsibilities their kpis their challenges you create this collateral so you can prepare your Champion right with the arguments you can engage with these
(38:39) people as well you can explain how that specific solution could help them and ultimately blockers when you know who is in charge of maybe procurement of uh inter Creations whatever right you might understand what are their needs what they want and prepare the entire collateral right so explaining for example that your product is certified that you have the specific Integrations how the migration looks like etc etc so this is uh one of the most important uh things that you need to be aware of and then we have uh two uh more pillars
(39:18) account enrichment and uh account qualification and disqualification criteria I think what makes sense when it comes to account qualification and disqualification criteria we can switch to the Practical example that we prepared for you so you can um see how this criteria look like I might uh enlarge it a little bit right and you can see uh how the ABM or how the ideal customer profile for ABM program might look like right so the breakdown by tiers then qualification criteria then uh accumulated uh buying committee roles
(39:57) right with these different roles and the disqualification criteria I didn’t uh I just made a part of the disqualification criteria but I think you all got the idea uh let’s uh let’s share how to define qualification and disqualification criteria and why BL absolutely so when you’re selling into Enterprise you usually have very long uh deal cycle or sales cycle and you know it’s a lot of effort for your very expensive re resource your account executive so you can’t really afford to spend 9 or 12 or even 18 months chasing
(40:34) a deal that you only have 10% chance of closing so just because somebody or well I mean a company matches your qualification criteria doesn’t mean that they have a need and that you have a reasonable chance of winning and retaining that deal over a long time right so this is really the key here to understand is when you start looking if and if you remember we had this like analysis where we sorted our best customers by revenue and we were looking at tiers well those customers when you start really studying them you will
(41:13) start to identify some patterns that go beyond firmographics criteria so some examples uh that come to my mind here is that are that for example there is a like we work with a customer who were creating let’s say customer stories uh for multinational organizations and they knew that their best longest staying customers are going to be those that are active in at least three different regions like imia North America and Latin America and had at least like 100 100 salese in each of those locations right so it’s like a
(42:01) very specific criteria which helped them understand that okay there we can make the biggest impact with these kind of companies or another completely different example for a fintech solution where we knew that again A solution that helps manage the risk of currency fluctuation when you’re selling into in different currencies is and then you you can basically lose some money if there is fluctuation in currency we obviously knew that we should be focusing on those companies you know even they they might be fitting your uh let’s say
(42:41) thermographic criteria if they’re not doing a lot of exports in if they’re not trading in different Curr currencies that are volatile that change then for them it doesn’t make sense to go after those accounts and they even figure out that um those accounts where the payment terms were the longest like you know typical Industries and typical um types of of products and type of trade where you had like very long payment uh cycle like we’re even more sensitive to those fluctuations and would be even a better fit right so these are examples of
(43:21) qualification criteria now what’s really important to understand that it’s not just about chance of closing but sometimes times if we look at also the five largest lost deals if you look and start studying the reasons why we lost this deal and it’s not something that we can fix or we can change right so maybe there was something where we missed specific integration or you know our solution wasn’t compatible with the specific technology stack well if that is the case we should disregard this or disqualify those accounts in future
(43:59) right um the example that I shared of that fintech product well we knew that for example if you had a CFO that has a tenure of more than two years or a very short tenure of less than three six months that this is not also the right time to sell into that those account because like CFOs with a very long tenure had their Solutions in place and we’re not as open of discussing new Solutions but for example also a new CFO was just like getting on boarded analyzing what’s going on and again wasn’t the right time also to
(44:40) present a solution to them so that was another criteria that we could use to potentially disqualify or deprioritize those accounts so this is how you should be thinking about qualification and disqualification criteria and as you can see in this example once you collect like them you just put all of this information in in like a simple template that that we’re sharing here for those who are watching and uh with that template uh you can uh easily uh share this with anybody who can then use that when they’re building a list for example
(45:18) like taking the accounts from deal front and having to decide okay should I include them in the program yes or no well they can just go through those through those crit IA and and check question to you guys want us to share this template let us know in the chat type plus if you are interested and we can share it with you and let us know how do you like the episod so far helpful interesting insightful any feedback would be great and while you’re typing uh great as always thanks a lot Aon thanks a lot Arana uh arind the good insights
(46:09) appreciate it guys um tomorrow as you know on Friday we started uh our we moved our newsletter to substack so tomorrow we are going to write about this topic and share this topic again in detail with some more example uh so if you guys can help and yeah appreciate your feedback I’m dropping a link to the template so you can make a copy of it uh thanks a lot for coming and yeah for the Fantastic questions um and tomorrow when we’ll share this uh newsletter in substack you have this feature that you can share it um on
(46:52) social media so if you can do this for us that would be fantastic uh we will appreciate it a lot and thanks a lot for your feedback so I dropped a link and um inside you’ll be able to see uh the template itself right the example that we just shared with you and also there would be customer research tab right why uh this is important I will just explain in a second let’s come back to uh our example and the six pillar of um our ideal customer profile right account enrichment so uh uh unfortunately it’s your let’s say your
(47:40) ICP development won’t be full without in depth account research right without talking to this buying committee members you can collect publicly available information but it won’t give you the most important information right what triggered the buying process of this account right what was actually happening in the organization so they decided to look for a specific solution right or engaged with your content and then booked a demo with you the there is always a situation there was always a conversation happening between different
(48:18) units that motivated the champion to start looking for the specific Solutions right next uh how did their research look like like right and uh in most cases they were comparing anyhow you to some other Alternatives sometimes that could be a vendor sometimes it could be a competitor in some cases let’s think about technology products right uh a lot of companies think about their direct competition so let’s say you sell CRM you think about hopspot Salesforce pipe Drive Etc right but quite often your alternative could be Google Sheets right
(48:58) and just doing everything manually sometimes it could be hiring a technology vendor to develop or asking uh it team to create internal solution for the specific right for for the specific challenge so think about this typical Alternatives what was their research right how did they evaluate different vendors and why they decided to talk to you and buy your product and why they didn’t buy why they didn’t proceed with competitors this is how you can understand your competitive Advantage right then the product value
(49:34) the simple example before after right a lot of companies say hey we help with this and that but in reality sometimes they put I mean as marketers we have to ex you know we have to use the numbers and we can put them in we can always put them into our favor hey we were able to increase productivity by 250% but from what right or we were able to grow Revenue by like 600% but if you growing revenue from 100 $100 in monthly recur Revenue then 600% is not is not so impressive right and it’s absolutely different when you are
(50:14) growing from like 100 millions in recuring Revenue right so uh think about before and after talk about this what was happening in the business right what were the challenges what were the costs right and what is happening now then you can see the tangible improvements that’s really important and lastly one of the most important things that you need to talk with your buyers is about their Channel presence we say all the time that whenever it comes to B2B by default everybody thinks that LinkedIn is a silver bullet because LinkedIn is the
(50:52) hugest database of all the accounts right so this is where we need to engage with them this is where we need to run ads Etc but in reality if you are selling to conservative markets to conservative teams think about engineers doctors procurement Etc these people are not active on Le kiding right there are a lot of if are selling to it folks and if we can uh dig deeper because I mean in reality we have a lot of experience of selling it teams there are QA Engineers quality assurance right there are different developers these people as
(51:28) well are not active on LinkedIn but they’re active in different slack communities Discord communities there are a lot of old-fashioned forums right think about healthare associations or Logistics right uh these people in most or Engineers right in most cases you will be able to Target these people only through industry events or through the associations if you’ll talk about them for example are you guys following full funnel are you following refin Labs or Chris Walker no way they’re not following and they have never heard
(52:00) about these people I mean uh I’m just think about the set leaders in their space obviously just to give you an example but if you’ll ask okay where do you get the professional information from they might mention this specific industry Association the specific Community Etc right and for you this would be the most essential chall channels that you must incorporate into your ABM program right so that being said um we have covered everything for today and we have a few Community questions if you guys have questions feel free to type these
(52:38) questions in the chat and we can cover them we we are going to prioritize your questions so feel free to drop them in the chat and meanwhile while you typing we can pick up the first question from our community let’s move to um the first one you Y what are the best ways to figure out buying intern for Target accounts this is a great question and basically it has to do with what Andre just shared uh as he was speaking about account enrichment and understanding the buying triggers I think this is the key once you start to
(53:18) understand the buying triggers and the jobs to be done of your target accounts you will be able to start thinking about the signals that you can use to identify whether your target accounts are in the buying process or not and or to figure out this buying trigger so let me just share one example to make it a little bit clearer so let’s say again we started the session by sharing this example of sales of learning solutions to Corporation corporate learning Solutions where we identify the specific trigger for cons consumer brand for consumer
(53:59) goods companies where they acquire specific Brands and then they have this need of basically um onboarding new employees integrating them you know making sure that they’re they remain engaged etc etc well that’s relatively easy relatively easy is identifying then consumer good comp consumer goods companies where there was a recent acquisition and recent can define whether that’s like between three and six months whatever is relevant again studying your customers that’s one concrete example so that’s also another so when you’re thinking
(54:38) about defining account clusters and that accounts that have a shared challenge a shared use case it’s always very useful if you can link that use case to a specific characteristics that you can identify by searching that account let me give you a quick other example for examp um not sure if he mentioned this today but one of our customers was going after organization so selling specific um software solution software teams right and they knew or the target clusters that we were going after were companies who have compliance
(55:24) requirements so there is like um safety issues or other kinds of issues they have remote teams right so when we had that situation we knew the specific challenges they had Etc this is how we Define the cluster but of course now that we know for example whether they are set whether they have any compliance requirements High compliance requirements uh we could check that based on the products that they are selling or the industries that are in for example Financial Service companies or health uh tech companies would be in
(56:00) would be an example there but then we could also like simply on LinkedIn check whether they have different locations whether they have developers in different locations with remote teams especially if they’re in different time zones that was also another way to identify uh these accounts that will be a better fit and then next to that so these are uh linked to the specific situation that company is in uh and then another way to look at the buying triggers is obviously based on the intent data right and so we shared
(56:34) dfr examples there so when you when you’re seeing suddenly a surge in visits for example to your high intent Pages uh people checking out your product Integrations Etc so very high intent let’s say Pages very high intent Behavior could be used as another signal that when you combine it with other information you could infer that they might be in a buying process and let’s pick up a few more questions I think those to I aligned question from arela how many people in business really understand ICP my impression is that they Define it either
(57:16) to generically as any possible customer to specifically as their favorites who buy more from them than others and uh question from I have a client with seven different dist categories and icps for each I assume starting with just one two icps and and ABM program is a good approach so and but can you speak eventually doing that many icps at one time so uh let’s cover this one uh those two right um first of all you need to distinguish the difference between ideal customer profile for your go market and for the
(57:57) ABM programs that’s why we wanted to start with this today right so when it comes to go to market strategy you think about strategical goals right and uh ICP development always aligned first of all the first level is your strategic goal let’s say you’re going to a new market right you launching a new product you decide to go up Market your ICP might change right while when it comes to ABM program markets verticals they are not or even TI they are not that much important because we think in terms of clusters we think about solvent specific
(58:34) Challenge and I dropped a link to the episode and to post on substack where we described the uh difference when it comes to selecting accounts for the cluster program right the the rest release you have ICP cluster then you have active focus and uh future Pipeline and you prioritize these accounts based on the uh Revenue potential relationship Etc right so this is really important to understand and uh I uh that’s why we described as well uh generical approach comes this is like the most typical situation generical
(59:12) approach comes from uh when company doesn’t really want to put their efforts into defining the ideal customer profiles right uh they just accumulate all the data and then they say hey like in the case in the example that we described we have the Learning Management platform every company is interested in it because everybody everybody wants to Crow their inlo right upskill their their team so as simple as that right and then like arela said they just look at the biggest clients and they say hey we want clients like this
(59:47) and then they can identify let’s say oh I’m on our top five clients that we have we have uh like two big Banks and like three big uh let’s say hospitals I don’t know insurance companies and they don’t really dive deeper into why this accounts bought from them right what challenges we solving for them they just assume by default they bought it because they want to up skill and then they send it to everybody so hence this is how the problem comes um when it comes to going to Pro or prioritizing just accounts that’s uh have the biggest Revenue
(1:00:23) potential right and in this case we even neglect the C cycle lengths win rates with the specific in this specific vertical this accounts belong to Etc right and coming back to question that then asked that uh comes back to um the cluster Philosophy clust by default means as uh just one specific use case one specific challenge that let’s uh think for a second about the example that flat was talking about right uh big Corporation acquires smaller companies right and they want to accelerate the onboarding of people from
(1:01:04) this smaller company so they could accept the corporate values accept the reporting accept the corporate Behavior right the communication standards Etc so that’s that’s the key right and by default this is just one ICP so how uh your question then should be reformulated as how many cluster Pro programs can we run in parallel and then it’s really depends on what are your marketing and sales resources and how ABM mature they are right if you are starting out that should be always a pilot program and we have a Fant I think
(1:01:43) a very good episode about it how to run a pilot program check it uh you always start with a small team one marketer one SDR one cluster and just small list of accounts to validate the program IDE develop skills develop playbooks right nail down the joint collaboration between marketing and sales and uh make sure that you get results when you get this results then you can present it to the rest of the team and start developing ABM operations so you can form manyi ABM teams and start focusing on different clusters right and that
(1:02:19) being said I think uh all other questions uh we somehow cover it during the episode so uh thanks a lot for coming thanks a lot for asking fantastic questions yeah I really happy to hear that it was helpful uh again your questions guys help us to kind of uh adjust program to what you want to learn and make it valuable for you so again thanks a lot for coming thanks a lot for engaging thanks a lot for sharing fantastic questions and see you in one week next next Thursday stay tuned and have a fantastic rest of the week cheers take
(1:03:00) care see you


Summary:

The video delves into the intricacies of crafting an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) specifically tailored for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs. It underscores the significance of differentiating between ICP development for ABM and broader go-to-market strategies.

ABM thrives on targeted precision, focusing on specific clusters of accounts sharing common challenges. The video emphasizes the importance of aligning ICP development with these challenges, rather than solely focusing on product features.

The process involves segmenting accounts into tiers based on revenue potential. Tier 1 accounts, the highest priority, contribute significantly to overall revenue. A detailed analysis of past deals helps identify key decision-makers, influencers, and blockers within these accounts. Understanding their roles, responsibilities, and pain points is crucial for effective targeting.

The video also highlights the value of leveraging product usage data to pinpoint power users who can influence purchasing decisions. By combining these insights with a thorough understanding of buyer personas, ABM teams can develop highly targeted messaging and outreach strategies.

In essence, the video provides a comprehensive framework for creating an ICP that drives successful ABM programs. By focusing on the unique needs and challenges of target accounts, ABM teams can maximize their impact and achieve superior results.

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