Key Takeaways
- If you are a multi-solution company, consider separating each solution into its own Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will allow for more targeted and effective marketing and sales strategies.
- Be mindful of relying exclusively on historical data, as it could be biased. Instead, consider a mix of historical data and predictive analytics to identify potential customers.
- Don't limit your ICP to basic company data like revenue, industry, and employees. Consider how companies present themselves to the world, as this can provide valuable insights into their needs and potential fit with your solutions.
- Separate the attributes of your ICP from the triggering events that indicate when they might be ready to buy. This will help you avoid wasting time on high-scoring prospects who may not be a good fit for your product or service.
- Balance your time between investigating and creating insights about your prospects, and taking sales actions like calls and emails. Avoid paralysis by analysis, but also avoid focusing solely on activity levels. The right balance will ensure you're talking to the right people at the right time.
Summary of the session
The webinar, hosted by VWO, delved into the process of identifying and understanding the ideal customer profile (ICP) for businesses. The speakers, Zsuzsanna and Hans, emphasized the importance of both qualitative and quantitative research in defining the ICP. They encouraged businesses to break down their target audience into manageable segments, starting with the first 10, then 100, and so on. They stressed the need for businesses to invest time in understanding their context, the problems they solve, their unique value proposition, and their customers’ needs.
The speakers also highlighted the importance of differentiating between potential customers who may not yet be ready to buy and those who will never be customers. They concluded by discussing how to translate these insights into actionable data and validate them through customer conversations.
Webinar Video
Transcription
Disclaimer- Please be aware that the content below is computer-generated, so kindly disregard any potential errors or shortcomings.
Welcome, everybody. Come on in. So there’s still some room here in this room. So you can still find your seat. Relax. Grab yourself a cup of coffee. 12:30 is quite a tough time for starting a webinar. Say, I don’t know. I mean, you either are just coming from lunch, but this would probably apply only to Switzerland where people tend to have lunch very, very early, or you are totally hungry, but you didn’t want to miss it. So this is a special thanks to you guys who postponed your lunch, to join us today. Alright. Let’s get started, I would say.
As I said, I was very much looking forward to, today’s webinar, in VWO’s webinars. We have, sometimes some guests that are, not easy to find, not easy to get, not easy to get some time in their agenda. Today, we are with Hans Bunes and Zsuzsanna Ferenczi, a company that is actually, showing us how data analytics and insights can be used in marketing to actually drive customer acquisition.
And this is very, very, important to say that we’re gonna talk a lot about the ideal customer profile at its special meetings. And and also, important to say that anybody, like us, for instance, like VWO, will learn quite some interesting stuff to be more effective and more efficient in their customer acquisition. Very warm welcome, Hans, and, Zsuzsanna. Thank you for being with us.
Hans Bunes:
Thank you for having us. I think maybe it’s the most appropriate thing to do is to do a bit of an introduction. So I’d like to start with the ladies first, Zsuzsanna if maybe you wanna start off with your introduction.
Zsuzsanna Ferenczi:
Thank you, Hans. Thank you, Ian, for, making this opportunity for us, leading this opportunity to be here with you. And, and all the people welcome who gave their lunches to, to be with us or their afternoon tea. So my name is Zsuzsanna. I have 26 years of, growth experience. If you may want to call it, 6 years in Citibank where I, that was sort of my first big step into building a business from scratch. I almost feel like I was the first developer 30 years ago. And then, in HP, HPE, which was sort of, I’ve seen all kinds of stages of growth, in my career, the hard ones, the easier ones. But, you know, I mean, there is beauty to everything, and I’m really passionate about, seeing the potential for businesses and, also in humans, I actually believe in human-centric, growth along with the data-centric growth that we represent. Thank you.
Hans:
And, my name is Hans Bunes. You’ll find me in, the suburbia Stockholm Sweden today, in my home. Like, most people working from home still, I have I’d say my career is divided into 2. It’s 12 years in big corporations and big tech. In this case, the old Hewlett-Packard company. I spent my first 12 years there. And in the past, 13, or 14 years, I’ve worked in much smaller organizations, including for myself, essentially, mostly in management consulting, but also in various degrees of B2B Tech Companies. In my last 7 years, Zsuzsanna and I decided to start our business, about 18 months ago, it was an advertising technology ad tech at the intersection of advertising technology, marketing technology, and data analytics is where and that’s where Zsuzsanna and I met. Okay. And the reason why we started our business is that you know, after many years of being in this business, you know, we’re looking at B2B Tech and looking at how what was happening especially in terms of how we looked at customers, there were 4 things that we were seeing, both from the inside of an HPE and I had a variety of clients, where I created account-based marketing programs for them.
And we felt that there had to be a better way of doing things than what was being done traditionally in tech companies, whether it’s legacy tech, you know, your classical Fortune 500 legacy tech companies or more, you know, earlier stage companies in there. Because of everything we looked at, we saw a few things, that, the world is where it is.
The first thing was that anytime you wanna do something, we go and get a new list. We look at customers as a list of some sort. Okay? And, so I’m just gonna move something here from my screen. So are you using a hit list? Are you using a wish list, right, when we’re acquiring new customers? That was the first thing that we saw everyone was doing. Then one of the things also was this element of timing. We spend a lot of time and dollars looking at, and chasing potential customers who don’t buy from us. And it’s mostly either a timing-related issue, or it’s actually the fact that we’re going after someone where we can’t really solve their problem. Okay? But we still go after them. This assumption that everyone is our potential customer doesn’t fit the bill. For most companies out there today.
The other thing that we realized that we saw more and more people doing was that we were driving this customer engagement from the inside out. This customer should be ready to buy now. Well, why would they be ready to buy now? And the conversations we had with them were all about us, our products, instead of about the problems these people have, and what will be the benefit and the value of solving this. And the final thing that we saw was, if you’re in B2B, sales and marketing today, this is probably one of the biggest things, biggest issues we see, this sort of a misalignment between the sales and the marketing, because they may be driven by different key KPIs. And, you know, after 26 years in tech, there’s one thing I’ve learned is that the measurements or KPIs drive behavior. And we saw that a lot. And so this is our why. These are the problems that we work with our customers. Okay? And, Jan, I think in order to move that forward in the sense of wanting to know what the audience is doing, we have some questions for them, don’t we?
Jan:
Yes. We do. We have prepared some polls to get your point, and your answers to a, pretty simple question. Customer profile, when you think of your ideal customer, so let’s, roll this little poll here. Select 1 or more of the following. Take your time. I’m really curious, what is your point of view on these answers?
Hans:
I think this is multiple-choice. Right? Yeah.
Jan:
It is.
Hans:
Yes. And if anyone believes it’s anything other, feel free to add a comment in the chats in, in the webinar.
Jan:
Absolutely. Okay. I still see some people in the audience who haven’t voted, which makes me think that they are actually having lunch while we are in the webinar. That’s strictly prohibited. We see more votes coming in. Thank you very much. Thank you. Still, a couple of votes missing. I want everybody to vote on this one. Okay. We’re getting there. Not quite yet. Okay. Hold on. I don’t know how many are missing, but I think results are getting more and more stable. Okay. Let’s close that. And, let me share the results. This is what we’re seeing.
Over to you, Hans. What does this tell us?
Hans:
So I cannot see.
Jan:
Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for that.
Hans:
No. That’s okay. It’s it’s not it’s not that you can maybe comment because I’m, it’s more about my presentation notes.
Zsuzsanna:
So what we see on the chat is that a lot of you think of, the ideal customer profile as, as a buyer persona, which, of course, is part of the picture. But imagine a company where you have the right kind of buyer, and decision maker at the same time for the reasons that your offer is maybe, only, possible or brings value to large customers. The same persona in a smaller company may not be the right buyer in the end. It may not be the right customer profile in the end. Then, very few of you selected the lists and databases from vendors. I mean, I think rightly so. I mean, just because you buy a list from somebody doesn’t mean that That’s the definition of your ideal customer profile. Hopefully, you find your ideal customer profiles within a set database but, obviously not everybody in that database will be your customer.
Then around 20% of you selected thermographic, which is also a very vast part of the definition of, an ICP absolutely is related to the fact that which industries they’re coming from in certain cases or what is the revenue or what is the employee number? So it’s an absolutely, important part of the ICP. And then good for all of those who selected all of the above because indeed there are some elements that, from each of these categories are relevant. And I don’t know what some of you say in the chat, but maybe Jan can give us some insights there. So very good start. Thank you very much for sharing your ideas.
Jan:
Not yet. Not yet. People to shine the the the the ones that choose other, please, feel free to share your thoughts in the chat. We can get back to that later on.
Zsuzsanna:
But I really like what you guys are saying because, you know, it’s it’s sort of you getting there. It’s a combination, right, of all of these things and more, which we hope we pass on today in a key message to you. What else could that be?
Jan:
Thank you.
Zsuzsanna:
Good. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then I think we have a when we have a second question that we want to know your answer to, which is how we rated more to your definition, and now we wanna talk about you know, your business, in your business, how relevant is it to you to know your ideal customer profile? So let’s bring up the second poll There are and this is yeah.
And in this case, it’s just, 5, alternatives. It’s a single single choice, not multiple choice. So let us know, which one of these would be applied to you. If you say none of the above, again, I invite comments in the comments field, if there’s anything you think is missing from a scale here.
Jan:
Just thinking, what do I I’d say it’s a pity as a moderator. I can’t choose. But, yeah, we’ll do a after the show.
Zsuzsanna:
Yeah. We’ll do a session. Yeah.
Jan:
We’ll do a separate one on 1, session. That’s cool. Thank you. I would definitely like that. Okay. Still coming in. That was faster than the last time. Come on. Still a few ones. How relevant is it to your business to know your ICP? By the way, the other day, I had a conversation with someone. We were talking about the ICPs and ICPs and ICPs. And at the very end of the conversation, there was one guy at the end who said I feel so ashamed, but I was not, not sure if I should ask you, what exactly is the ICP. So it’s sometimes I think that looking into the room, we have to see it. So, it’s the Ideal Customer Profile. Alright. There we are. We’ve got some answers here. I would say 10 more seconds. Come on. One more vote. It’s not coming in. Obviously. So let me close that here and share the results that we see.
Zsuzsanna:
Okay. Let’s see here. So sales and marketing jointly target only defined ICPs. Fantastic. So 62% of the cases You’ve got it. It’s absolutely important that you have a joint definition of who your ideal customers are and make investment campaign marketing sales decisions in that respect. But I’m really curious how you actually do that. So hopefully we’ll we’ll have a chat or a question when we go into QnA to discuss this a little bit. Then some of you say that, we have not defined our ICP, but we should. So that’s also good. You have an intention to to do so, and hopefully, today’s webinar going to give you some insights into how you can do that. Some beginning. Or none of the above, so in that case, again, I’m curious. If none of these, then what else is going on in your world that is related to ICP? But I think we’ve got a little bit of characteristics of the group, which I think is very good because we can make the next couple of minutes or the next 20, 30 minutes very tailored to this comprehension.
So we see that there is a lot of ICP, knowledge already in this group, and it’s important for for you as a group, in 62% of the cases that you do it jointly with marketing. So with this, I’m gonna hand over to Hans to, shed the light a little bit in terms of the context of ICP and and, you know, what is it that it could bring into your businesses. Good.
Hans:
So, one of the things that we like to talk about when we have these sessions is if we wanna take those out and self out of theoretical sooner, and then we wanna give you some scenarios. And I want you to think about these are real-life examples. Actually from Fortune 500 sophisticated companies that we have worked with. And I want you to think about when I go through these examples, what would what would happen to your business if this was you? Okay.
Jan:
I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I think we have an issue with the presentation. Can you share your screen once again? Cause I still don’t know. I still see the results of the quick poll.
Zsuzsanna:
Yeah. Yeah. Same here.
Jan:
So can you, okay, can you just share and share again eventually?
Hans:
Yeah. Hang on. Let me just try. How about now?
Jan:
Ajit, if you can hear me, any technical help with the go-to webinar control panel would be highly appreciated, I would say. Otherwise, it will be a real challenge, and we would see the speakers’ talent of how to operate, and how to deliver a presentation without sharing the screen. Wait a second. We’ve been trying. I’m talking to talk to our tech guys here. They are working on it. Can you stop sharing? Can you stop sharing? Okay. No worries. Alright.
Hans:
And now I’m gonna, try it again. Yeah. How about now? There it is.
Jan:
Yes. Okay.
Hans:
Okay. Let’s move on then. Okay. So they are sales and marketing people. What if, we with 95% confidence can tell you that your total addressable market in terms of the accounts, not the personas, but the accounts is off by 50%? And we can prove to you that 30% of the accounts that have been assigned to your salespeople never buy from you. Think about that for a second.
What would that mean to you in your business? The second example I’m gonna go through is that what if we jointly came up with the fact that 25% of your current customers and 25% of your current pipeline is not a good fit at all for you? And what would it mean to your business if you, after integration of a new ideal customer profile, realize that your current sales and marketing that you’ve spent millions of dollars, euros, pounds, whatever your currency is to promote is wrong? What would that mean to your business? Let me give you 3 examples of real-life examples.
So we were working with a technology company at Fortune 100 technology company in a country in the Northern European region. And what we were essentially doing is we were looking at their total addressable market model, and we were trying to find out within that existing addressable market model they had, how many of those would actually qualify as an ideal customer to them? Okay. And the way we do it is we’re using a fairly advanced machine learning model to look at online and offline data, creating a good example, and a bad example, Here are good customers.
For those who are familiar with machine learning, machine learning is really about training a model, using data, and you do it typically through iterations. So we would feed the engineering model with good examples and bad examples, and we do 3 iterations until we feel that the human feedback and the machine feedback are about 95%, given the same result.
So here’s what we had. We had a customer who was going after, the market in in a specific country. They have there’s about 8000 legal entities or accounts in that country, and we took a cutoff in this case at $10,000,000 of revenue and above. The enterprise market, mid-market, and attended mean in this particular case, whether or not there is a salesperson within the company that is assigned to that account or not. Unattended means that they don’t have someone assigned to it, and or they rely on channel partners to completely do the sales for them to those customers. So we have about out of this, get roughly 8000 entities. They have about 2000 of them that they have salespeople covering to go after them.
When we then ran this lookalike model, our model was at 95% confidence. And then when the model came back, it told us that what they considered to be their addressable market, that only 50% of that had a good to great fit. And about 50% of it had a low to no fit. And you could say, oh, that’s fine. Well, what does it matter? Well, where it started to matter much for this client is that they realized that 30% of the accounts that they had their salespeople sell to sat in the low to no fit, which means that 3 out of 10 calls you make as a salesperson, as you’re prospecting, is going to someone likely to never buy from. Okay?
That’s a big waste. And if you multiply that up with, in this particular case, you know, probably 30 to 35 salespeople, You know, it’s, there’s there’s a lot of waste in that. So was that was, you know, one example that we did of how important it is to create an ideal customer profile and then run a model to see how many companies fit this model for us. The other example I have is another, client that we’ve been working with, another Fortune 500, client that is in the software space. And, one of the things that they were doing when they created a look-alike model, right, which is to look for the next best prospects to go after is that they were doing an old one only on the basis of historical data.
This organization, that’s every tool that you can imagine in terms of data insights and analytics. They have their machine learning and AI engines in-house, all these bits and pieces. But the one thing that they were doing, which we’re seeing more and more, is an issue for us, Zsuzsanna will explain to you why this is in more depth later on, is that they were basing everything on historical transactional data only. Assuming that the ones that we transacted with in the past have all the attributes and conditions of someone we would transact with in the future. So as we were creating this good example of customers to take into a machine learning model, it consisted of one-third of current customers, one-third of the pipeline, and one-third of what they have identified as a bit of a dream list. We qualified all these 150 and realized that 25 percent of current customers should be rejected, and 25% of the pipeline should be rejected.
And you could ask yourself, okay, that doesn’t seem like a lot. Well, if you’re gonna run a machine learning model that is looking for attributes to create a look like, that’s gonna skew the data tremendously. And so you have 2 things that happen. One is that you have a negative impact on your look-alike model, for your ideal customer profile look-alike model. And the second thing you have is that you have sold to the wrong customers in the beginning. And so they’re likely to churn on you. If you’re a SAS company, of course, that’s what we wanna avoid. We wanna avoid churn. So the customer-recognized system itself was very interesting. So think about this in your own context, does it make sense to include your current customers in the profile and does it make sense to consider all of them to be good customers?
And my 3rd real-life example is moving your narrative. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So the so I got ahead of myself here. So what we did with this, by the way, just this input is we now took in this European country, we took this input and we now ranked, and I didn’t have a chance to update this slide yet, but we ranked about 25,000 accounts in this European market, between 1 and 25,000. But what was very interesting as well in this exercise is that this customer did believe that all 25,000 were potential customers for them. But when we were done with the model, we realized that about one-third, the one-third at the bottom, of this 25,000, is unlikely to ever buy from them, which leaves us to 70% on the top, and we’ve given that to them in percentiles. And that’s what they’re gonna now business develop and forget about the 30 center doesn’t match. Okay.
And then the same client, during our work, one thing became very evident because they had written their narrative to their customer base from a product marketing angle. Everything they’d done was written for product marketing. And when we were done looking at this ideal customer profile from every angle that we possibly could, from a 360-degree view, they themselves realized one thing, their entire narrative that they have been spending tens of millions of euros on promoting was wrong. Because, actually when you looked at their ideal customer profile and the value they were getting from deploying their solution, it was about enabling that business to grow. It was not like they were promoting to these customers, the benefit of solving them or saving them money. So if you truly look at this from an outside-in, from a value perspective, you’re gonna find quickly that it’s gonna help you to design the narrative that, that, you can use as a baseline in your sales and marketing effort. Using it coming from the customer’s point of view, not from your internal point. So, hopefully, you’ll recognize yourself in some of these scenarios that, these some of the things that you recognize that may be going on in your business. Jan, I’m gonna pass it back over to you.
Jan:
Yeah. I mean, I do recognize it. I was at and it’s a bit, unfortunately. So having worked in business development, sales, and marketing, we all have faced the same problem. So we do have unfortunately, we know this afterward that, when we see sales conversations don’t go through that. We see, okay, they can never buy it from us. So it is a matter of, how can we get better at targeting our ICPs, understanding our ICPs, and then actually also that’s what we’re actually just now working on and changing our narrative to to create a better fit there. But, who am I to give you the answer to this question? What can we do about this? So, your point on that, sounds very sad, but there is hope that we can do something to get better at this. Right?
Zsuzsanna:
Yeah. Hopefully, we can give some insights. So as Hans said, there are three major problems that we see. I mean, one is around what is my customer? Who are my customers? The other one is around what is my potential. Really sort of there is the unit of 1, who my ideal customer is, and then the unit of the market, where do I play? And then underneath, in terms of, what we see is you, as who is going to the market. Because at the end of the day, what is growth?
What is business development? I have a solution to your problem, and you need to meet halfway on the bridge, right? So when you think about your growth and you think about the potential, you have to start with yourself. What are my capabilities? What is the problem that I’m in love with? Where am I headed? I mean, where do I see this problem that I’m an expert on going forward? Do I have an aligned organization? And if not, then how can I be better aligned? So growth, although it sounds a bit counterintuitive, it starts with you.
It starts with looking and doing an introspect and introspection within yourself. And then, you know, on one hand, you have your strengths and then your capabilities and then, your potential. On the other hand, you have your uncertainties which is okay. If you are a SAS company, you think, okay, I have a certain runway. I have a certain budget constraint. I have resource constraints. I have, maybe you are in a market that is extremely competitive. I mean, there are a lot of things you need to self-assess. And only after that, you can go to the other side of the horizon, which is who am I in front of, right? Sort of who are my customers and what is the market? And really, we’re looking at 22 major elements in that, the who and the when, right? Sort of, I mean, it’s about understanding really who I’m after, and then how many they are, and then understanding how do I get them and when is the right time to get them.
So that’s really the, way we we start the the ICP driven go-to-market strategy, creation. So if you go to the next step, then we, what we’ve seen, I mean, as you guys have noticed maybe that, you know, we’re talking about 20 years, 26 years, 30 years. I mean we’ve been around for a while, and sometimes I think it’s so easy to just say that whatever happened in the past is not relevant anymore, but sometimes what you realize is that you need to go back to the basics.
And that’s what we’ve seen over the number of years in our B2B tech careers I think this time we need to go back to the basics and understand how to define your ideal customer profile. And the way we define it is that we consider the organizations that get the most value out of your solution, the highest value out of your solution is the right fit for you. And then there is another element. So not only that they get the right solution from you because you’re solving a problem and you’re bringing them value, but it’s also that you solve it in a profitable way.
So we had a quick case in which, we knew that the company that we were working with, had only been able to profitably solve the problem above a certain employee number. Okay. So, let’s say above 1000 employees because it was a SaaS solution. It was a lot of heavy uplifting at the beginning. so if I implemented a solution for 20 people, obviously, the profitability of the solution is not gonna be the same when I implement the same for 1000 people. So in the beginning, it was very important for this company to say, okay, my customer has these kinds of problems, and they have more than 1000 employees because otherwise, I’m not gonna be able to solve the problem in a profitable way for them. And then later as the product developed they created a self-service model and they learned from intelligence and data exactly how customers could be assisted to do the self-service model, obviously, the ideal ICP has changed in their particular case.
And then, so that’s more or less the 3rd point that ICP is not a one-time decision. Right? I decided this was my ICP and then I left at that point with my, defined potential or with a defined market. But as you grow, as the context changes, as your product evolves, as the problem evolves, then you have to constantly relocate your ICP and say that in the context as I am today with my internal capabilities and how the market is changing, who is my ICP? So really, that’s what we suggest with every organization to work with. Let’s just go back to the basics and look at the context, your value creation, and then who fits that bill.
Okay. Alright. So I think I almost gave you a bit of the insight hint, in terms of when we start to work, so when we start to work with our customers, we start with the qualitative part, and it’s very, very important to start with the qualitative part because that gives you a story that is so much richer than just saying that, okay, we in our campaign software company that we worked with, they said, anyone above, 50 million revenue is our customer.
And it’s not true at all because once we realize that the context of the customer in which they make that 50 million is very different if I have a consulting firm with 5 consultants and they all work for a given large enterprise, and then we all sitting in the same office, that’s a very different customer context from a 50 million company who has consultants in 3 or 4 different countries with multiple smaller accounts or bigger accounts. So they both earn 50 million right, and the context of the customer is very different in one case versus another.
So this is why we always start with your context as a company that is providing a solution to a given problem and the customer context of who they truly are and what context they’re sitting in that makes that fit very reasonable. Then we look at your capabilities on one hand, on one side of the bridge, and then the impact your customer is seeking. So what is the outcome that they’re looking for, and how they’re looking to solve the problem? There are many ways customers can solve the problem, including the extremely manual way. Right? I mean, you can just hire 500 people and then the problem is solved. But maybe this is not the impact that they seek because the impact is much more complex. So we’re looking at your capabilities and then what the impact is from a customer point of view, and that’s when we find, again, the bridge, in the middle.
And finally, we obviously have to look at your uniqueness in this work. Why Because there is a way you solve this problem that’s unique. And maybe that’s when it comes down to the narrative. Right? Sort of when you look at your narrative and then you look at I’m solving this problem in a unique way to my customers. This is when it makes it very, very interesting because that’s how you can overcome the barriers on the other side. Right? So that you understand your uniqueness and you know exactly how to help your customer to overcome some of the barriers in your unique way.
So when we look at the 360, these are the elements that we’re looking at, and then we say that, okay, by the way, when we look at the attributes all of these because we’re translating all the knowledge into attributes, is there anything that’s thermographic? And in some cases, yes? And in some cases, no. So the answer could be both. Your thermographic can be very important, but not in all cases. Your history data can be very important, but not in every case. So I think when we’re talking about this 360, that’s what we mean by ICP. Alright. Jan, any questions so far before we go to the nitty gritty?
Jan:
No, not related to this app, but we’re now seeing, coming in there with the people who had checked other when they were talking about their ICP, what they were referring to, just to share this one very interesting. Who has the need, the urgency, and the budget for your solution? That defines a good ICP. Yeah. That’s that’s a simple sentence. I think it’s very true. And then there is, a question, coming in, how can a small B2B sales team with a limited sales budget, rank your TIM? Any tips, or tools to do this in a dynamic manner? Well, we can eventually leave this for the Q&A session later on.
Zsuzsanna:
Yeah. I mean, yeah. So maybe I’ll weave it in as I’m going through what we do. So, I mean, if you add a small B2B company and then you have maybe 1 or 2, salespersons, you probably don’t need a sophisticated machine learning model to come up with your first-time customers or the first 100, or I would even challenge you to come up with the first 1000. Because, I mean, the example that I mentioned was an early-stage, B2B tech company, And, you know, we literally sat down. We did the qualitative work. We understood the quantitative side of that work, and we literally sat down and said, okay. Everybody needs to come up with 100 accounts like this. And then together, we come up with the first 500, and we go for the first 10. Right? So you you also need to sort of, we do talk sometimes in a very abstract level that when you 25 dash under 40 dash and obviously for a smaller B2B company. I urge you to break it down into very real and say, very pragmatically, who is my first 10? And then who is my first 100 after that?
But, this work that I’m suggesting on this canvas right now is what you would be able to do. Also, even if you don’t have a lot of resources, you need to invest some time in it. Right? I mean, you need to invest maybe a day or 2 in really just reflecting on this, but I always say that If you wanna go fast, okay, go. Right? Action, action after action. But if you wanna get further away, you know, you wanna get far away and you want to do it in a sustainable way. You sometimes need to slow them and really strategize exactly where you fit and then what you need to do. So as I said in the previous, slide, we always start with the context, who you are, where you’re sitting, what is the problem you’re solving, and where you headed, right? If you are headed to your next 1000 customers, if you are headed to the next five countries, versus if you’re headed to your first-time customers, your aspiration is very different and what you do is very different. Right? Then once we understood that we really went deep into what the other participant just said, you know, they have a problem.
They have a need and they need they’re looking for the solution. Indeed, this is what we’re going through in the next section of our exercise, the value creation map. What is the problem you’re solving? What is the value of solving that problem? Why is it relevant to the customers? And then what’s your uniqueness? Why are you in a position to solve that problem? And then we turn it to the other side, what is your customer looking for? What is the impact, the change, and the barriers today that make it possible for them to overcome their problems? And then what is the trigger? So that’s very important that Hans always says that we need to differentiate between, and it’s a reflection also on the budget that you mentioned, that just because they don’t have the budget yet, I always say it, they have not yet the budget to allocate to you, right? Because maybe they have not yet been educated that they have a problem. They have not yet started looking to solve their problem. So it’s a very important, piece to remove the when from the who. So once you understand your who, not everyone is going to be your customer now.
Of course. I mean, there has to be some triggering event. There has to be some compelling event as we used to call it to make the customer move. But it doesn’t mean that they are not your customer. They’re going to be your customers at some point. Yeah? This is how I like you to think about it. It’s an opportunity to start converging with that customer and educating that customer that they may or may not have a problem.
And then, you know, once you’ve done that, then comes the work of how do I create data about this? How do I turn it real? And that’s what we call the translation to attributes You know, sort of typically, this customer has a hierarchical organization. This customer has more than one facility. This customer has a business side of the country. Whatever it is, your ICP or this customer has, multiple blue color workers, not attached to an office. I mean, whatever that is, you’re translating these into attributes. And then the final piece is to look at the validation, meaning, what did you learn from a conversation point of view? What is your narrative? And then how does your narrative change as a result of this work? So that’s that’s really how it looks like. And then when we show you maybe a real canvas, from a real customer then you can see that.
Hans:
And maybe one thing to point out is we’ve done this in that seed level, and we’ve done this at Fortune 500. And it’s just slightly different details. So I think this canvas that Zsuzsanna Ferenczi has developed is actually applicable to go back to the question from the audience, Jan, about, what do I do at a small organization? That you do the same thing. There’s just a level of depth that you do at it. Yeah. And and so sorry, Susanna. Let me bring that up for you.
Zsuzsanna:
Yeah. So you can see that, it’s you know, you have the customer and then we’re looking at operational maturity. We’re looking at organizational maturity. And to start with, underneath, we’re looking at the tech maturity of the client. Maybe there has to be a tech maturity that is required for your solution. And then there is an external context that they’re living in, right? They may be, subject to M&A. And only when they’re subject to M&A is an interesting client to you, or they may be, clients who have to have a certain number of, product development teams or large dev ops teams or whatever that is, I mean, the organizational, operational and tech maturity of the client is the underlying piece. And then you say, okay. If that’s the underlying, please, they have these problems, and this is the value that they’re looking for. So that’s really the 360 that we’re looking at.
And of course, I mean, in some cases, we’re doing constant research about the psychological element of this because you may say that this all applies, and that’s when we come into a little bit of the persona, but here is an IT director just making this up. I mean, I came from HPE, let’s say that I was facing a client where the IT director was an ex-IDMR. Obviously, the client is perfect, that has all the problems in the world, and we can absolutely solve the problem as an HP organization. The client’s IT director comes from IBM. No. It’s ideal, but not yet. Right? So the IBM CEO needs to go first, and then I can enter into that conversation. So it’s very, very important to look at that psychological aspect, but then it’s only at that individual level, right, not necessarily at the organizational psychology. Unless they have certain really cultural elements, in their organization that make it very different or very difficult for you to engage in that conversation. But I always say that it’s a yet. It’s a power of yet that we use. It’s not yet your customer, but it will be at some point. Okay. I think we are more or less done with, the how do we do where do we get? And then we can cement it in a minute or 2 so that we can leave 10 minutes for discussions, if possible.
Hans:
Yeah. There there there is just a couple of things in terms of, sort of a best-sharing practice and what we’ve seen over the years that we’ve done this. So just the way we operate and the way from recommendation The best source of information is always directly from your customer’s mouth. Somehow, right, a qualitative aspect. Call them, ask them, open the question. If you don’t do that, anybody, if you have salespeople, go through, an opportunity, you know, opportunity discovery. What does a good opportunity look like? What’s a bad opportunity What what does an engagement look like when it’s good? This is gold mine data, qualitative data, not to be underestimated. We talked about how you need to understand what are the cadence and the governance of updating your ICP. You need to think about this if you are a multi-solution company, you may have to separate each of the solutions into its own ICP. And then the things to be more mindful of, as I said, is we’ve already touched a lot of this, is to rely, exclusively on historical data. This could be biased.
The other thing, and I’m gonna stress this with a care point, is the assumption that the ICP is only thermographic, company data like, you know, revenue industry and employees. I think we’ve sort of debunked that myth, but I’ll give you a perfect sample. In this big exercise, we recently did, in a big country in Europe with 25,000 accounts, 70% of the predictive power came from the online data, which was all about how these companies present themselves to the world. Okay. And then the other thing is that if you’re buying off-the-shelf propensity models through ABM platforms and so forth, they mix what I would consider the ideal customer profile attributes versus the triggering events. This is on a set about the when. And we need to separate these 2 things that you have to define. This is my good customer, and I have to understand when are they in the market to buy something. We need to separate those 2 things. We shouldn’t do it because you may have someone with a high that’s scoring. They are very high on the when. But it was an awful customer for you to have, and you’re gonna waste your time pursuing them. Okay? I think we’re gonna pause there, and then, I’ll hand it over to you.
Jan:
Okay. Thank you, Hans. I’m trying I’m doing my best in the chat room to get some, some questions from the audience, but, obviously, as I said, lunch kicks in Everybody’s either chewing or whenever there’s no question that can mean that, everybody has a clear picture, and there is no question here, which is normally not true. I think it’s, from my end, since I am in the audience as well, and I am part of your ICP, I would say. I could be at VWO. I think it’s, a very interesting exercise to use your canvas on our organization. So in your organization, I think I understand the approach. I understand the importance of, distinguishing between the who and the when, that’s in most sales organizations, I think, well, it should be at least a clear understanding that we have a good idea of the who and then try to find the context to answer the when, properly. But still, I think I would really, talk about this later. I would really like to have a one-on-one session with you on that one.
And there’s one question that came up. Probably from a very experienced, salesperson. How to find the right balance, in your time budget, and balance the time for your investigation, getting data, trying to find out the contacts, and so on? Time for investigation versus time for, sales actions, calls, emails, and so on. So this is a really interesting question because it reminds me of that at some point, I heard, one of another keynote speakers say you can spend endless time finding out more stuff about your prospect and be very, very sure and so on and not not take calls or not do calls. So then the other extreme is that you have people just who just look at the activity level of your Salesforce of your salespeople, and they say, how many calls did you make?
And then how many emails did you send out and so on and not spending at all, not considering at all. So how to find the right balance between investigating and creating insights and analyzing to make sure that you talk to the right people at the right time and, versus without, let’s say, professionalizing this and ending up in paralysis and, and not not running your calls. What’s your take on that?
Hans:
So I would do the, let’s call it the ICP process, and then let’s call it the assignment process, right, of assigning a sales territory to someone. I would do that as a part of my regular process, whether that’s an annual quarterly semiannual process in terms of of of doing this. Right? So you have a process where you create my model and you assign this. And then I’m not talking specifically from a sales perspective. Right? So, we were dealing with a Series-C client in the US. They do assignments quarterly, which is because they hire so many people. So they reassign accounts on a quarterly basis. We go out there. If you’re looking at a more mature company, they would do either annually or or twice a year as a part of their, quota and budget-setting processes. So what I would do is I would build that I build that portion into my planning process, of when you do the assignment.
And the way I would do that is to say that, do all of my attributes, when it comes to what is my ideal customer, still hold true? Right, in terms of, is there any major contextual changes type putting in a market that will change it, or have I done something internally completely new features and benefits in my solution portfolio that would change that value in that sense that I need to do that?
So I think that that’s one part of it. The other part that I would look at then is as you do your assignment, then you get your assignment of, of, of your accounts that you’re prospecting as a salesperson. Right, and I’m assuming you’re doing that, then you almost have, like, that attributes matrix. Right? So I have my assignment. Let’s say that’s 200 accounts. And I haven’t missed it out. And you knew what the attributes are of their ideal. And you can almost like have. Almost like I hate to say Excel, but I hate to say something else, but it’s alright.
So I have 10 attributes, and I know that they clicked in. They checked off these attributes. So when I prioritize my outreach and my prospecting, I look at that as a part of part of my unit. So I think it’s about preparation within a natural, planning cycle. You do it, and then you go and execute. But the one thing which is, and this is my experience, probably from larger corporations, is that make sure you capture the feedback somehow, the qualitative feedback. Right? So if it’s not if it’s not a fit captured somewhere, and not not up here only, but capture it somewhere through the because the one thing that it that should be a gold mine, the best source of our qualitative data should be our CRM system.
Jan:
Yeah. Oh, I can underline that. I can’t tell you how upset I am if I don’t find data because I end up meeting someone, and I spent hours trying to find out why this account churned 2 years ago. And, and and all the qualitative data is somewhere in Salesforce, somewhere.
Hans:
Yeah. Yeah. So so so because it should be the repository of your qualitative aspect of it. But just think about reassignment. Right? Do you agree to assign 50 accounts to someone else? Someone else comes on board. You want that log. You want those bits and pieces to be in there. Right? I mean, I was awful as a salesperson as well to keep my Salesforce data. So operate plan execute, but create the feedback loop. That is the critical element, I think. Zsuzsanna, did I miss anything?
Zsuzsanna:
No. I was just going back to the example of when we did, the work with this big software company. And then as we created what we call the golden basket sort of, we based on the attributes. We took their CRM data. We took their, final data. We took their wish lists. And then I sort of sorted out 30% and then I said, no, this is not your customer. And then I had a validation call with the sales team and they confirmed every single case that, yep, this is not our customer and then we excluded it. We rejected it.
So I think what’s important is that, imagine if, as a salesperson, you spend 10 minutes on this qualification. Just 10 minutes. Because that’s what I did. I spent 10 minutes on each of the accounts, and I said, yes. This is an ICP and all this is not an ICP. You save yourself hours and hours of hope, right? That, oh, this may be an opportunity. This may end up in a win, right?
And you save yourself hours and hours of talk and then solution architect and the presales and documenting it in Salesforce. And then let me not least all of the things that you guys do, in the sales teams, to make sure that the account is sort of well qualified. So I promise that if you do the ICP work well in the planning section, then whatever is in your assignment is your right customer, and then just spend 10 minutes before you make a call to say that, yes, I can validate that this is in line with the ICP that we agreed on between sales and marketing, and you can save yourself a number of hours per client.
Hans:
Yeah. Essentially, Jan, if you do this right, you remove, as a salesperson, you remove account qualification on your sales process. You should never pick up the phone and dial someone who is not a qualified account. Your role is to qualify for an opportunity at this point.
