CEOs: Want More B2B Opportunities in Your Pipeline? Know Thy Customer

Bam! This hit me right between the eyes. Aaron Ross (author of "Predictable Revenue") and I have been teaching how to build an Ideal Customer Profile for a while now to some awesome CEOs and mini-CEOs (sales professionals) and have witnessed tremendous transformations (more revenue) in the companies who have mastered this single skill in the framework we teach. In a nutshell, creating an Ideal Customer Profile, or, for you acronym folks out there, ICP, is similar to creating a persona. You blend together everything you know about your customer or your wanna-be-customer and create a composite profile. To emphasize the importance of iteratively honing this skill, I want to tell you about a recent conversation we had with one of our expert clients. I call them expert because they: -- studied our framework, -- synthesized the steps, -- systemized it into their Customer Relationship Management system (“CRM”), -- sold a ton of new clients in one year. In our Quarterly Business Review session, our client wanted to share how their CRM data was showing significant changes in their Ideal Customer Profile. "Funny thing about the ICP", the CEO said. "Meaning?" we asked. "Well, we discovered after all this time that our sweet spot represents an entirely different profile. Our CRM data clearly shows that if we sell to this type of prospect, they spend 10-times more with us per month". One skillset & step mastered – ICP. Imagine if you start stacking the skills all together, and you systemize them strategically? Whoa! Teaching Tip: Take out your ICP (there should be one for each product & service you sell) and review it against data you've been tracking for: -- current opportunities -- current clients (highest revenue producing) -- sales cycle timeline (fastest closing) -- decision process -- decision makers (titles, pain points) -- regulatory/compliance changes -- competitor changes -- outliers Make adjustments to your ICP and create an A/B test for your next outbound CRM campaign to test your new profile. If you're like our client, you'll be so happy you’ve made the commitment to persistently fine-tune this step of your sales process.