ICP Sales: A Complete Guide to Ideal Customer Profiles in Sales

What is an ICP in Sales ?

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ICP: Definition

The ICP acronym stands for Ideal Customer Profile. In sales, it refers to a detailed description of the type of company that is ideally targeted by your sales team. It’s the type of company that is most likely to benefit from your business's products or services. The characteristics that typically define an ICP include demographic, firmographic, and behavioral traits. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the information you could be looking for:

• Industry
• Revenue
• Geographical Location
• Number of Employees
• Key Challenges

The idea behind the definition of an ICP is to target only (or to give priority to) the customers that you are most likely to close.

What is the Difference Between ICPs and Customer Personas?

If you’re confused about the difference between ICPs and Customer Personas, it’s quite simple: ICPs refer to companies while Customer Personas refer to people.

To define your Customer Personas you can look at characteristics such as:

• Job title
• Role-based objectives
• Needs

Basically, your Customer Personas are the people you want to talk to. But these people typically work in companies that you are targeting in your ICP.

What is an ICP Used for ?

If you’re working in a sales team, defining your ICP is crucial. It has several key benefits:

Adapted Communication

By knowing the characteristics of the companies you target, you can easily adapt your sales speech for it to be more impactful and better resonate with the target audience. It helps build strong relationships and convince your prospects to move forward.

Improved Lead Quality

Defining your ICP helps you target only the best profiles for your company and then find high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

Higher Conversion Rate

By prioritizing companies that need your product, it becomes easier to close the deal. That’s why building your ICP leads to higher conversion rates and more effective sales processes.

Better Customer Retention

For the same reasons I mentioned before, targeting companies that correspond to your ICP allows you to have higher retention rates and long-term customer loyalty.

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How to Define your ICP ? A Comprehensive Guide

Create your Template

The first step to build your ICP is to create a template. For that, you need to define the categories of your ICP. I already mentioned that before but let’s make a little reminder. Here are some relevant categories to define your ICP:

• Industry
• Revenue
• Geographical Location
• Number of Employees
• Key Challenges

You can also add more specific categories, like the Tech Stack of the company (which software they use).

You can create a very simple template on Excel, that could for instance look like this.

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Analyze your Customer Data

The second step to define your ICP is to look at your customer data. For that, you can look at your databases on your CRM for instance. 

The objective will be to find the highest value accounts by looking at data points such as contract length, company revenue… Then, you need to find what these companies (that you consider as your ideal customers) have in common. For instance, you could find that they all have more than 500 employees, or more than $5m revenue.

Define your ICP

Once you’ve understood what are the characteristics of your best customers, it’s time to complete your ICP. For that, you have to prioritize the categories. For instance if you’ve found that all of your best customers have more than $5m revenue, you can consider it an important criteria. If only 80% of your best customers have more than 500 employees, it will have a lower priority. To complete your ICP, you’ll also sometimes have to define scores (if you’re looking at non-numerical categories such as Geographical Location for instance). You can take the order of priority into account by associating coefficients to the different categories.

Once you’ve done so, you’ve defined your ICP! Now, you just have to fill your template up and share it with your sales team !

It could look like that:

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Discover Claap and Increase your Sales Team’s Performance

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What is Claap?

Claap is an audio and video transcription tool. It also has a recording feature to make sure you don’t miss anything. No note taking anymore, and no need to summarize your notes as Claap also does it for you. And it’s not only that.

Claap Changes your Way of Communicating

Claap is an asynchronous meeting tool. It allows you to work without traditional meetings while maintaining the same efficiency (actually you’re even more effective). How do you do that? By recording claaps: 2 to 5-minute videos in which you present your findings synthetically. Using Claap’s interface, you can record your screen while having your camera on so, in 10 minutes max (assuming you have to retake it) you have your claap ready to be sent. You can use claaps for many things. For instance, you can replace prospecting emails with claaps. And it works:

“Every time I was doing that I had like 40% conversion rates compared to like 3, 4, or 5% with normal approaches.”  (Guillaume De Nacquard, from Surfe)

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Claap Increases your Efficiency AND your Results

The best news is that you no longer need traditional synchronous meetings if you use Claap. Instead of trying to find a slot that fits your agenda and your prospect’s and then discussing 30 mn with your prospect/client, you can just record your claap, send it and your prospect/client can watch it whenever they want.

If you’re not convinced yet, let me add a few points:

• Numerous Ways to Share your Claaps: Your prospects and clients will always be able to access your Claaps as there are so many options to share them. You can attach them to an email, embed them on a website, or simply share them via your Claap workspace.
• Enhanced Collaboration and Interaction: You might think you'd miss the live interaction of a synchronous meeting, but you won’t. Your prospects and clients can view your Claaps in your workspace at any time and leave comments or feedback on specific parts of the video (even on particular sections of the screen). They can even send video replies to your Claaps if they prefer a more traditional approach.

Our clients have actually stopped doing synchronous meetings and they regret not having done it sooner:

"I've managed to shorten my sales cycle because I replace 30-minute meetings with prospects with three five-minute videos. I've literally seen ten days just fall off of that process and allow me to go quicker. " (Alejandro Salinas, from Surfe)

In short, if you’re looking for a way to improve your productivity, you need Claap. And if you’re not sure about committing financially, you can test Claap’s features for free for 14 days ! Start now, and see its effect for yourself. (Free plan available with no credit card required)