As mentioned earlier, your ideal B2B prospects are your ICP.
A very general characteristic of the ideal customer is that they will deliver high value while generating a lot of profit. But do you go about creating your ICP in the first place?
How do you define your ideal customer profile?
Defining your ICP is done by asking questions about your target group. Take a look at your most valuable customers so far and try to identify patterns that connect them.
You can start by asking questions such as…
- What is the size of the company?
- How many employees does the company have?
- What is the average revenue of the company?
- What are the titles of all their employees?
- Where are they located?
- What kind of social media platforms do they make use of?
- What is the average deal size that you get from them?
- How did they know about your business? How did they become your customer?
- How long have they been in business?
- What is their industry?
… and you will get valuable information.
And don't just answer the questions above internally, but also check in with your existing customers. Ask them about how your product helped them to solve their problems, who made the final decision to collaborate with you, or where did they first learn about your product or service.
This is invaluable advice directly from your target audience. And as they say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
And remember, these types of questions help your customers just as much because it allows them to provide you feedback you can take and use to better their experience with your product or service.
Once you start receiving feedback and answers, make sure to collect all the information so that you can analyze and study it. It will help you find the patterns that define your IPC.
Who do you reach out to now? You don't stop building a house once the foundations are done.
Similarly, you're not done just because you've defined and created your ICP.
The ICP is going to help to identify the right accounts like companies or organizations. But much information about who the decision-makers and buyer's persona are is still missing.
You can't get to know every single customer or prospect.
What you can do is create a customer persona to represent your buyers. Considering that there are different types of customers that may purchase your products for various reasons, you may need to create more than one buyer persona.
You will give this buyer persona a name, demographic information, interests, and behavioral characteristics. And you'll be aware of their objectives, pain points, and purchasing habits.
As part of their tasks, the sales team will research the accounts they are aiming for and identify the people who best match the buyer persona.
Researching prospects can take many forms, but one overarching feature is the need for the right tools.
Tools to get further information First of all, working with a professional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the key to collecting and analyzing data about your customers.
CRM refers to the technology and processes that are used to interact with customers in the sales, marketing, and customer service functions. They will support building, nurturing, and managing relationships with current and potential customers.
According to a recent report, approximately 82 percent of the companies surveyed use their CRM systems for sales reporting and process automation.
And 72% say it gives them better access to customer data.
Looking at the benefits that a CRM can bring you in sales, it is very much worth considering investing in one to keep your prospecting organized. A CRM will allow you to manage your leads, accounts, and your pipeline in one system and will make a huge difference to boost your sales.
Social media is a huge database where you can find prospects A great place to find prospects is online. Research on social media like LinkedIn to collect information about employees and companies.
You will find that LinkedIn in particular provides a lot of useful information about your target group. After all,
80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
Things you can look for on LinkedIn:
- Language
- Company size
- Location and time zone
- Challenges
- Interests
- Who is the decision-maker
Doing research on company profiles and analyzing their employee's posts can give you valuable information and insight into their concerns and pain points, which in turn helps you come up with a prospecting strategy to approach them more effectively.
LinkedIn itself has its own research platform called
Sales Navigator. This platform allows you to take advantage of the social network's user base of over
830 million professionals with a variety of tools. These include creating lead and account lists, doing very specific searches, and saving these searches so they self-update.
Sales Navigator also gives you crucial updates about target accounts, such as job changes or press releases, which can be used when it's time to do outreach.
After researching your B2B prospects Once you have identified your ICP and buyers persona. It's essential to collect all your information to create a list of prospects. This list will prove crucial and help you when it comes time to do your outreach.
All the prospects in your list should be buyers' persona or decision-makers.