Recently we’ve talked a lot about how we think through finding higher quality leads using things like demographics, firmographics, technographics, and psychographics. Today, we want to take you behind the scenes of our process at Intro CRM as we put these data sets into play for our users every day. In particular we want to talk about how we define an ideal customer profile and how it relates to outbound sales.
How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Documenting in the Sales Playbook and getting feedback
How we increase your lead quality
When new users start with Intro CRM, the process begins with crafting an ideal customer profile (ICP). This ideal customer profile is at the core of our work together. You may have heard of similar concepts, like a persona or an archetype, commonly used in marketing.
An ICP is specifically used in sales. Ideal means it can both reflect your current customers and also be aspirational to where you want to go. Customer spans both the company and the person you’re selling to—or the lead and the contact, which are our preferred terms of art here. And by profile, we mean an encapsulation into a single set of data that will be both repeatable and transferable across different channels. In other words, a set of traits that don’t limit you to just one way of finding opportunities like this.
We start with basic things they are looking for in a lead which includes: the geographical region, company size, company revenue, sector they want to target, a position to target within a company, management level needed to target, any specific niche like the technology they might want us to focus on or use.
Along with all the information on what they want, we also ask them to list their competitors. This way, we can analyze the people their competitors are selling to and make suggestions based on the list we generate.
After we get this baseline information regarding the kind of leads they are looking for, we get to work creating a unique sales playbook for each customer. In this playbook, we aim to list the criteria that qualifies that lead when it comes to meeting your ideal customer profile criteria. We’ll create some sales scripts and fill out that playbook as if it were our own too, but the first thing we want to nail down is the characteristics that indicate we should pursue them as a lead.
Next, we’ll do some digging. This is the easy part for you – we do all the leg work! Using a number of different sources—to ensure our information is up to date and relevant across all our data categories—, we’ll produce a batch of leads we think will work for your company.
Once we have our first completed lead list, the fun starts! We ask you to review the batch and rate each lead and contact. We use a 1-5 rating system, with one being not a fit and five being a perfect fit. After you rate your leads, we ask for feedback on any lead rated three or less – this way, we know how to create better lists for you in the future.
The lead list completion and rating go on as we continue our work together – the best part? Our lists get better over time as we incorporate more feedback from you.
Whether you are doing this work on your own, hiring an employee, relying on a virtual assistant, or some other way of doing it, keep in mind that iterative improvement over time is the goal here. It doesn’t need to be perfect from the get-go. We want to achieve repeatability rather than a single and one-time exceptional outcome.
There are many companies out there that will sell you lead lists, but what makes this one worth investing in? At Intro CRM, our ideal customer profile definition process is focused on repeatability. We are not a fly-by-night operation. Instead, we grow with our customers. In the long run, we want to see you grow your inbound sales operations and help support those too.
We believe in the power of feedback. That’s why we use a regular rating system to ensure we’re getting more of the right leads in your hands. Your feedback helps us enhance our filters to find you the perfect leads.
We use iteration as leverage for fast improvement. If it’s broken, we want to fix it! Our team is quick out of the gate when it comes to acting on the feedback we receive. We rely on small batches so that you don’t get too many of the wrong leads—leads that aren’t a fit.
We are committed to the details. The sales playbook we’ll build for you will be actionable and tie directly to the ideal customer profiles that you are pursuing in your sales process.
We believe in quality over quantity. Our data sets revolve around the most advanced levels of segmentation you can achieve. We look at technical requirements and have even been known to rule leads out for our users based on the programming languages or frameworks they use to build their website.
Yes, we do help deliver you high quality leads. But our overarching goal is to use developing an ideal customer profile to create a repeatable process for you to increase sales.
If you want fresh leads delivered to you on a regular basis and develop the perfect ideal customer profile at the same time, get in touch to learn what we’re building at Intro CRM. Leads are just the beginning.
After you get your perfect leads, we work with you to make the most of them by supporting your outreach campaigns. We are helping customers close deals right now and we’d love to walk you through how it works.