Read the qualified advice from an expert lead generation business by Belkins on how to facilitate lead generation efforts with an Ideal Customer Profile.</description>
Stepping up B2B Lead Generation with the Ideal Customer Profile
The ultimate factor that conditions success in B2B realm is the satisfaction of customers. This core truth also applies to the lead generation business by Belkins or any other B2B sales lead generation company that obtains and offers enterprises to buy business leads. Can you envisage whether the client will be satisfied with B2B leads that you find for them? Of course, you can if you know your customer inside out. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a second-to-none tool to understand the audience at which you direct your lead generation efforts.
Ideal Customer Profile Explained
What customer would you prefer to deal with? Naturally, the one that has the greatest need in your product or service, can appreciate what you offer them, and has the potential to buy it. Picture such a client and you would understand what B2B Ideal Customer Profile means – an imaginary company that gets the most value from your offer and can provide the most value for your organization.
By the book, such a profile contains two kinds of client data which are here called attributes: standard and unique. The former embrace demographic, social, behavioural, and geographic statistics as well as product use data. The latter includes information that is specific to the industry or niche you work in.
How do you get all this information? Using specialized software you can run through your current client database to identify the best customers of yours and see what common features they have. Once created, such a profile is highly instrumental both in improving the product or service you produce (in our case, business lead generation) and in fine-tuning your marketing and advertising practices depending on how much each real customer matches this idealized image.
Given the importance of the ICP for companies that offer to buy B2B leads it is crucial to know how to approach its creation.
The Nitty-Gritty of Building an Ideal Customer Profile
The experts of lead generation business by Belkin’s have developed a foolproof algorithm following which turns creating an Ideal Customer Profile into a cakewalk.
Step 1. Zoom in on One Market Segment
A customer who is an ideal lead for one industry will be inadequate for another. That is why you should determine what field you would work with and take into account its peculiarities to build an ICP for it.
Step 2. Apply the Rule of Top 10
Since your goal is to picture an ideal customer you shouldn’t look into every client’s dossier. Instead, you must select only those who bring your organization the highest value. These are customers who yield the most revenue, have the shortest sales cycle, or cooperate with your most readily. If your list of customers isn’t that extensive to include more than 10 organizations, pick fewer customers but make sure they are the top ones.
Step 3. Look for the Common Denominator
At this stage, you should collect data on the selected customers from all available sources (CRM, social media, Google search) and amplify it by interviewing the best clients (via phone or email). Although email marketing in B2B lead generation is one of the major practices, this media channel has a considerable drawback – spam filters that will route your messages to the spam bin. Unless you employ an email spam checker to forestall such a development. Spam checker software will ensure the deliverability of your letters so you get a greater chance to have your questionnaires answered.
The purpose of this research is to discover their opinion of your product/service, how they learned about you, what channels they get their information from, what experts they listen to, etc. Among the heap of this information, you should look for the common features and answers.
Step 4. Fill out the Template
When all the relevant data is singled out, you should enter all of it into an Ideal Customer template dividing it into standard and unique attributes (see above).
Step 5. Sieve the Attributes
When you have several dozen shared attributes making the head or tail of them would be a job of work. So try to prioritize 5 or 10 of those that really matter.
Step 6. Shape Your ICP
Now when you have all input data at your fingertips, analyze the repeated entries that would describe who your Ideal Customer is.
The Ideal Customer Profile shouldn’t be viewed as an end in itself. Rather it is a powerful tool to be used in your business lead generation efforts. Employing it, you can gauge the quality of leads you have collected and direct your nurturing endeavours to those whose indices are higher. Moreover, such benchmarking can be automated by setting a minimum revenue threshold for the obtained leads.
Alongside lead generation, the ICP can be instrumental in a number of other business processes.
More Ways to Leverage the ICP
B2B companies can make use of the Ideal Customer Profile in:
- Targeted advertising. When you possess a complete dossier on your customers you can segment your audience according to certain criteria and shape your advertising campaigns accordingly.
- Personalized sales. Customer segmentation is helpful in personalizing sales as well since each customer group or even individual company can be approached piecemeal depending on their needs and preferences.
- Content modification. When you know your customers’ tastes and pain points as well as see their reviews on Inktel your marketing materials you will be able to fine-tune your content strategy to meet them halfway.
- Pricing. If your ideal customer is a loyal client you should focus on long-term pricing schemes. But in case an ICP turns out to be a startup or small/medium enterprise it makes sense to opt for monthly- or quarterly-based price models.
The Chief Perk of the ICP for Lead Generation
Building an Ideal Customer Profile isn’t a finite action that is over once you get it done. Instead, it must be viewed as a continuous process that should be revisited and updated once in a while because of the dynamic nature of the contemporary business environment. Thus, by modernizing your Ideal Customer Profile annually or even biannually you will be able to constantly keep in the know of the most efficient lead generation channels, the most valid lead quality criteria, the most engaging content type for each lead group, etc.
Summing It up
Creating an ICP is not an easy task that requires thorough analysis and meticulous implementation. However, when you have a clear vision of a B2B organization you would like to deal with, you will be able to promote lead research, pick better accounts, and, at the end of the day, generate more qualified leads.