Ideal customer profile template for B2B — Part 3

You develop a client avatar to drive sales. Yet, teams rarely implement ICP in their daily work, while the document is useless with the stage missed. At the same time, similar materials about ICP and buyer persona (BP) usually skip the step. 

This article ushers you in developing the B2B ideal customer profile and BP as a usable tool and then taking the most out of it. 

The material is made up of 3 parts. We went over why to change your attitude to ICP and BP in the first part. Have a look at the steps to take to collect the right info for the audience persona in the second part. 

Ideal customer profile template for B2B

An ideal client profile template is the method to put together the found clients’ details and help you carry out an analysis of the intel. Mind that you take only the top row with ICP attributes in the marketing and sales work.

The sheet covers a B2B buyer persona template too. You will feed the central roles in the buying process and their descriptions into the document. Take the job titles, you figured out in the prior part of the material and add exact names from the CRM. Avoid B2B buyer persona examples, since to be practical they need to come from your organization’s data.

Tip: with the Google Sheet extension installed, you can enrich your list of clients with a part of the missing data right in the document.

How to fill the ideal customer profile framework

Choose top clients around how extensive the customer database is and add them to the sheet. For instance, if you have a database of tens of thousands of clients, you will add >100 customers to the table, while with about 100 clients, you will choose 10. Here is an example of ideal customer metrics and characteristics.

Metrics to consider customer acquisition cost, sales cycle length, revenue (from the client), customer health score, customer relationship (in years), customer retention сost, customer satisfaction, number of renewals, number of referrals, customer lifetime value, number of expansions. 

Company basic attributes cover simple details you can use for searching databases and LinkedIn. Examples are client’s revenue, industry, number of employees, location, technologies employed.

The B2B ideal customer profile template might also have non-standard attributes unique to the target sub-industry. For instance, web or mobile tech (for software development business), hiring speed (for recruiting agency), hedging experience (for fintech enterprise SaaS), or complex automation objects in the portfolio (for the installation platform).

Tip: in the GetProspect B2B database, you can leverage the «Keyword» filter to search for almost any attribute. Our system looks up your keyword in LinkedIn profiles. Typically, people have full descriptions of what they do, so you have high chances to unearth what you look for.

What is the example of buyer persona basic attributes: 

• Region — time zone, regional events

• Demographics — cultural and religious specifics of the region

• Job features — regular trips, typical schedule, daily pace, and many meetings. So you will call in the evening instead of the morning or send a short message on LinkedIn instead of attaching a detailed PDF

• Preferred news sources and online activity — places they go for new work-related information online (social networks, blogs, news portals, content curation platforms); whether they are engaging online and on what mediums

You will get a ton of intel from your resources and open sources. While surveying your clients makes your audience persona template more realistic. Avoid B2B buyer persona examples because, as you see, they should be based on your organization's data and will be useless otherwise.

Buyer full attributes (why they buy):

• objectives and KPIs. How does your service fit in their top priorities? 

• success factor. What metrics do they expect to improve with your product?

• work pains. The challenges buyers expect to alleviate with your solution.

• triggers. What events turn your offer into their top priorities? 

• objections. Reveal why they may leave the deal, like price or missing key components.

• decision-making criteria. The questions they ask about solutions comparing the options 

How to gather the info for the buyer full attributes section: 

- interview your prospects, leads, and customers. Besides 1:1 online calls, you can simply message them about their struggles with specific processes.

- reread and relisten your emails and calls’ recordings. You might overlook some meaningful insights for the audience persona. While selling, you focus on the exact client and deal. When you revise it you have the ability to consider buyers’ words from different angles. With extra breakdown, you’ll be able to identify way more objections, concerns, and doubts. 

- request customer reviews. You will kill two pigs with one bird by this: get info about their buyer journey and serve as a brag book to demonstrate to coming prospects. The important point is to motivate them for public feedback. Make it engaging and effortless for them. For instance, add sample answers to questions. 

Implement the final client avatar in your daily work

Here we offer you several tips to smoothly embed the ICP and BP into your work. 

Make a Google Doc (Notion or other easy-to-reference document formats) of the ICP and BP key attributes. The B2B customer profile template suggested above perfectly goes for the purpose. Copy it to the GoogleSheet and share it with your team.

When you update the client avatar, just notify your colleagues in a chat to recheck the document. All teammates can comment with their insights during their daily processes.

Add the ideal customer profile in a lead generation tool. With basic attributes of your best company and buyer profile, if possible, save the filters on the platforms you usually search for new leads. The screenshot below is how it looks in the GetProspect B2B email database. The saved ideal customer profile template applies to organizations as well as buyers’ search.

Collect and evaluate the data about how effective the ideal customer avatar is. Register the initial figures of how much time you spend to find hot leads, how many leads become clients, etc. After several months of using your client avatar, compare the results. If you observe minor positive shifts, it is better to revise the ICP. Then turn it into regular practice and carry out the analysis every 2-3 months.

Revise the document every 6-9 months. Just like you, your companies and their products are evolving. What defines the right prospects now may dramatically modify tomorrow. 

With our ICP and buyer persona guide, just add new clients to the sheet and refresh the description in the upper row accordingly. Besides, summarize the industry news, data, and insights during the period. If you are preparing the doc for a new product, be ready to tweak the description along the way (often less than six months :). 

Choose channels based on your client avatar preferences. Yes, some prospects may prefer other platforms than LinkedIn. It may turn out that it is better to focus on offline networking events or online niche forums.

Prepare personalized templates for sequences in advance. For instance, mention one pain point of your audience persona in each email/message; create separate templates for each industry (in case of several personas); or for each purchase trigger of the B2B buyer persona.

Set notifications based on timing attributes of the client avatar so that you can reach them at the exact time. We are talking about the time of the year and the month when your offer becomes highly relevant to your prospect. For example, when they hire new team members or try to hit the quota. It is also related to the time of the day when the prospect is more open to your offer. In the LinkedIn post, we mentioned that C-level leads might be more open to cold calls on Friday afternoon or weekdays till 10 am. 

Develop the educating materials with an ideal customer avatar in mind. With ICP, you know what they care about, what problems they encounter, main objections, criteria buyers use to make purchasing decisions, etc. The info helps to uncover better arguments for the narrow group of leads and create persuasive speeches and materials.

Summary

• Make your final decisions based on individual cases. The client avatar attributes are a good place to start. Keep in mind that each person and company you are reaching out to differ from each other. They have unique needs and expectations. 
• The main idea is actually to use the ICP and buyer persona you have prepared. So build them helpful and handy from the very beginning. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how elaborated your audience persona is. You’d better skip developing an ICP at all and try to win by volume.