ICP and persona management

An ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the kind of company you sell to best, for example accounting firms with ten to fifty staff in the Netherlands. A persona describes a person inside that company, such as the finance manager who signs off on software. ICP and persona management means the tool stores these definitions as proper records instead of leaving them in a slide deck.

Most wasted sales and marketing effort comes from chasing people who were never a good fit. A written profile gives everyone the same test for whether a lead is worth a call, and gives writers a clear reader to address. You need it as soon as you have more than one person qualifying leads or writing campaigns, or when results are uneven and nobody can say why. You need it less if you serve a single, obvious type of customer and every enquiry already looks the same.

• Ask which attributes a profile can hold, such as industry, company size, role, pain points and objections.
• Test whether leads or contacts can be scored or tagged against a profile, or whether it is reference text only.
• Check whether you can keep several profiles side by side if you sell to more than one market.
• Find out how the profile is used elsewhere in the tool, for example when drafting content or building lists.