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ICP for Sales: The Complete Guide to Sales ICP
How Sales ICP Helps You Win
Selling successfully and hitting the number quarter after quarter is just as much about the opportunities you don’t pursue as it is about the opportunities that you do. Qualification and pipeline prioritization is central to being an effective seller and the key to both of those endeavors is a firm understanding and application of the Sales Ideal Customer Profile or Sales ICP.
This blog will discuss everything you need to know about Sales ICPs from the definition of Sales ICP, to discovery and through to the application of your ICP data to your sales pipeline prioritization.
At the end of this article, you will be ready to create a revenue-driving Sales ICP, or a few, and use that to increase your focus, de-risk your quarter, and hit your numbers so consistently that your teammates will wonder what your secret is.
What is a Sales ICP?
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile, and the true meaning or definition of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can differ slightly depending on the context in which you are approaching the ICP. For example, Sales may view ICP differently from Marketing, which can be different from Product, and Customer Success, and so on. In this article, we are going to focus on the meaning of the Sales ICP.
Sales ICP refers to the common attributes possessed by an ideal potential customer that would not only most likely purchase your product but also realize value, renew, and would be a prime target for a potential upsell. In other words, the common attributes possessed by the accounts most likely to be the most valuable long-term customers.
The specific attributes will depend on your company and product, and they can also be broken down into company-level attributes alongside contact-level attributes. To get started, common ICP attributes include the following.
Company Level Sales ICP Attributes
- Company Size
- Company Stage (funding stage, public or private, acquiring or acquiree, etc.)
- Company Revenue
- Industry
- Geography
Contact-Level Sales ICP Attributes (can also be known as “Buyer Personas”)
- Job Title
- Role
- Seniority
- Buyer or Champion Status
- Identified Pain Point
- Job Mobility
Now, for your company, or for a specific solution that you sell, the attributes that make up your ICP and their relative “weighting” within that ICP calculation will vary. At this point in the journey, it is important to start making educated guesses about which fields will actually shape your ICP.
Is your Sales ICP one or many? How does this affect your planning and tactics?
All of what we have discussed so far has been the basis of what constitutes a single Sales ICP. But depending on your solution, target industries, regional recognition, etc., you might actually have more than one ICP.
Determining how many distinct ICPs you have is crucial to developing effective sales strategies. If you have one single ICP, then you can focus all your efforts around recruiting, messaging, and strategizing about how to demonstrate your value to a certain type of prospect. If you have many, you have to develop a broader array of tactics and playbooks, and you have to be able to quickly identify which prospects map to which ICPs and which don’t map to any.
If this all sounds complicated, don’t worry. By the end of this article, you’ll discover exactly how to determine your ICP, how many distinct ICPs your business has, and how to quantitatively apply ICP Fit to your pipeline to more accurately qualify, source, and pursue the most valuable opportunities.
Why is ICP important for Sales?
The million-dollar question in sales is what separates the best sales reps from the rest?
You know the type. Always seems to be calm and under-control, when everyone else is pressing to hit their number. Manages to find, manage, and close big deals seemingly out of nowhere, while everyone else is struggling to convert leads.
The answer is ICP.
The best sales reps have an intuitive sense of exactly how they should spend their time. They know when to invest their time into real deals and they know when a deal should be qualified out or sent back to Pre-Sales or Marketing Teams for nurturing.
In other words, they have a great sense for when deals match their ICP and when deals don’t.
Feel like you keep getting stuck on pricing? Or losing deals because they want different features than you offer? In short, that’s an ICP problem. And reps with a good sense of ICP can identify these issues early in the sales cycle and make decisions accordingly.
Luckily, understanding ICP doesn’t come down to intuition. When sellers learn how to identify ICP Fit, good things happen. And we’re here to help. By the end of this article, every seller should understand exactly how to identify ICP Fit.
A piece of the sales puzzle. Maybe the most important?
While this article is all about honing in on your Sales ICP(s), let’s pause and make sure we put it into proper context.
As a seller, a manager of sellers, or an operator, you are looking to accomplish the following with every deal you care about in your pipeline:
- You want deals to close.
- You want deals to close quickly and efficiently.
- You want maximum transparency throughout the process.
- You want clear indicators of green flags and red flags up through close.
- You want seamless and effective multithreading.
- You want responsive and honest communication.
- You don’t want your pricing to kill the deal.
- You won’t want unexpected technical or capability hang-ups to derail what you thought was a sure thing.
- Heck, you don’t want unexpected anything to kill a deal or cause it to slide to the next quarter.
- That’s just a sample of what you want, but surely you can fill in the rest.
How does the rest of the organization think of ICP?
Thus far, we’ve discussed the benefits to Sales Teams of the ICP, but the truth is the whole organization benefits from a sharp understanding of ICP. Below, we explain how each department might find value in understanding the ICP:
Marketing
- Develop targeted messaging and account-based marketing campaigns that resonate with prospects
- Create effective messaging based on ideal customers’ characteristics, needs, and pain points
- Find and utilize the most effective channels and platforms to reach prospects
Pre-Sales
- Create lists of target accounts based on ICP Fit
- Use ICP similarity to quickly and efficiently qualify deals
- Tailor messaging and outreach based on understanding of ICP
Product / Engineering
- Understand ideal customers’ biggest pains, needs, and experiences
- Build a product roadmap with ideal customers in mind
- Know who should be testing the product or service for optimal feedback
Customer Service / Customer Success
- Incoming customers sourced with an understanding of ICP are higher quality, leading to less churn and better service
- Greater chance of upselling, cross-selling, and renewing
- Better understanding of new customers’ characteristics, needs, and pains
Sales Management & Leadership
- Align the whole organization behind a streamlined understanding of prospects to target
- Identify trends and market opportunities as ICP is refined
- Improve decision-making on investments, strategies, and tactics
How to Find Your Sales ICP
By this point, we understand exactly why ICP is so important. It’s a crucial framework that can help sellers prospect more effectively, qualify more accurately, target the right contacts within an opportunity, and identify deals most likely to have upsell potential.
But how do we actually go about creating and implementing an ICP?
Below, we discuss the two main methods for creating and operationalizing ICPs at your company:
The Traditional Method of Creating ICPs
Traditionally, ICPs have been generated by a combination of quantitative analysis of existing customer firmographic data, surveys of key decision makers and existing customers, and the gut instincts of those involved with putting together the ICP.
A traditional process might look something like this:
- Gather all CRM data of existing customers
- Gather all customer satisfaction data (if it exists)
- Send a survey to key stakeholders asking about what they perceive to be the key characteristics of potential customers
- Conduct interviews with largest and most successful accounts to learn more about their companies
- Analyze CRM data and customer satisfaction to find commonalities between customers
- Draft ICPs in PowerPoint and share with key stakeholders
- Incorporate feedback into a final draft and recirculate to key stakeholders
- Hold training sessions to train the company on ICP identification
- Revisit in six to twelve months and repeat the process
As you might be able to tell, the traditional method of crafting ICPs was time-intensive, based on a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, and ultimately subject to human biases and errors. Nonetheless, with ICPs serving as a north star for so many aspects of a company’s operation, even this time-intensive process was incredibly important and beneficial.
The Modern, Machine-Learning Powered Method of ICP Generation
As you can see, the traditional ICP generation process was time-consuming, dependent on multiple personnel and their various opinions, and plenty of internal wrangling and politics.
Instead of trudging through a long, manual process, companies can instead use ICP Generation Software to quickly ingest their entire CRM dataset, analyze it using the latest advances in machine-learning technology, and output robust and accurate ICP data.
In the sections below, we detail the frameworks and software that is helping sellers leverage ICP data to improve bookings and reduce wasted time.
Making your Sales ICP work for you.
Traditionally, ICP was the province of Marketing and was handed down like a dictum to Sales. Sellers are busy selling, they don’t have time to craft their own ICPs, nor to inspect every opportunity with a magnifying glass to see if it fits the ICP that Marketing put in a PowerPoint presentation buried somewhere deep in their emails.
Sellers need ICPs that work for them.
The ideal format for storing, viewing, and applying ICPs would have the following characteristics:
- Easy to understand
- Easily and readily accessible
- Visualized and interactive
- Automatically applied against current opportunities to quantify fit
- Constantly updating based on wins/losses without any manual effort
- Predictive of future wins/losses, quota attainment, and closing dates
- Able to offer insights about how to move deals forward
Luckily, Sellers don’t have to look far to find an ICP tool that will help them better understand their pipeline with little to no manual work. In the next section, we detail the tools that are helping Sellers apply ICP to their pipeline today.
Tools to find and apply your Sales ICP in your day to day
The traditional ICP generation process was time-consuming, dependent on multiple personnel and their various opinions, and plenty of internal wrangling and politics.
Instead of trudging through a long, manual process, companies can instead use ICP Generation Software to quickly ingest their entire CRM dataset, analyze it using the latest advances in machine-learning technology, and output robust and accurate ICP data.
Below, we discuss some of the options on the market for ICP Generation.
For Salesforce Users: Patri RevFit AI
Patri RevFit AI is a revenue intelligence platform that makes pipeline management intuitive, powerful, and proactive. Powered by machine learning, Patri RevFit AI automatically analyzes your opportunities and assesses their propensity to win, their relative fit for your company’s selling profile, their likely close date, and provides AI-generated insights about each opportunity.
For All Users: Patri ICP Engine API
The Patri ICP Engine API is a dynamic AI-powered software tool that finds, refines, and monitors your ICP and enriches your CRM, BI, RevIntel, Sales and Marketing Automation, CS Technology, customer base data, and more to enhance metrics and reports at the top level with one of the most business-critical data sets you can discover: the ICP. With Patri’s ICP Engine API, quickly discover your ICP(s) and the quantified ICP fit of every opportunity in your pipeline.
Leverage Automated ICPs to Boost Bookings, Reduce Wasted Time, and Improve Upsell Potential
ICP Fit is a core driver of sales efficiency. But for too long, determining ICP fit was largely a qualitative exercise, making it difficult to operationalize in day-to-day sales activities.
But with the development of a new generation of machine-learning powered sales software, like Patri RevFit AI and the Patri ICP Engine API, ICP Fit calculation is faster, more accurate, and more powerful than ever.
With a quantified ICP Fit of every opportunity in your pipeline, sellers can more accurately target prospects, hone their messaging to boost conversion rates of leads into opportunities, qualify opportunities, avoid unlikely deals, and identify deals most likely to provide upsell potential.
Altogether, understanding ICP Fit promises to help sellers boost bookings, reduce wasted time, and improve upsell potential.
For sellers, time truly is money. ICP Fit is the key metric that enables salespeople to accurately and quickly predict the quality of opportunities in their pipeline so they can best leverage their time to boost their bookings and smash their quota.
Discover the ICP Fit of Your Pipeline with Patri
Globally, companies lose over $200 billion a year by pursuing the wrong opportunities.
Patri was founded to help solve this problem.
Patri RevFit AI is a revenue intelligence platform that makes pipeline management intuitive, powerful, and proactive. Powered by machine learning, Patri RevFit AI automatically analyzes your opportunities and assesses their propensity to win, their relative fit for your company’s selling profile, their likely close date, and the most impactful next steps you can take to move the deal along.
At a higher level, Patri RevFit AI will also predict your likely quota attainment and utilizing a partnership with ChatGPT, provide intelligent insights and next steps for how to move your deal forward.
Patri RevFit AI helps users do the following:
- Clean your pipeline quickly and easily
- Quantify the health and winnability of each opportunity
- Identify low-probability opportunities and flag them for additional qualification
- Produce AI-generated next steps to help you move your deals toward closing
- Generate a visually appealing report that you and your manager can use to understand your progress on opportunities
- Predict likely close dates, helping salespeople make more accurate commitments
- Utilize machine learning to output predicted attainment for the quarter
Best of all, Patri RevFit AI is free for individual contributors.
In addition to RevFit AI, Patri has made the core engine that powers ICP discovery and monitoring available as an API – the ICP Engine API. The Patri ICP Engine API is dynamic AI-powered software that finds, refines, and monitors your ICP and enriches your CRM, BI, RevIntel, Sales and Marketing Automation, CS Technology, and more to enhance metrics and reports at the top level with one of the most business-critical data sets you can discover, the ICP.
With Patri’s ICP Engine API, quickly discover your ICP(s) and the quantified ICP fit of every opportunity in your pipeline. And connect the resulting data to any of your existing systems to enhance your pre-sales, sales, and implementation success. For more information on the ICP Engine API, click here.