Ideal Customer Profile for ABM programs (w/new template)
We cover 6 pillars of the Ideal Customer Profile, how to define account qualification criteria, how to segment accounts by tiers and how to define the buying committee.
Here is a standard mistake that kills all ABM programs:
Developing a broad ICP and targeting a sales wishlist.
This approach is like a lottery.
You target hundreds of accounts, praying that at least one of them will convert.
Why is targeting sales wishlist and broad ICP doomed in the ABM programs?
Here are a few reasons:
1. 𝐇𝐮𝐠𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 & 𝐮𝐧𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐬.
Nobody will be fired for bringing IBM, McKinsey, etc., but that's completely different for small unknown vendors.
2. 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐜𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬.
Doesn't matter if the company has a challenge your product solves if that challenge doesn't fit the key initiatives (which can occur in several years in a few years).
3. 𝐍𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭.
Everybody wants to have Apple's logo on their website, but if Apple has 0 interest in your product, you're going to waste your budget.
Instead of building wish lists, you need to:
define clusters of accounts with a similar challenge
segment them by revenue potential, vendor awareness and product need evidence / buying signals
define account qualification and disqualification criteria to focus on accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities.
In today’s newsletter we’ll cover:
Why taking your broad ICP is a fast way to fail
6 pillars of ICP for the ABM program
How to set up account qualification and disqualification criteria
How to define the real buyers inside the buying committee, not generic VPs of…
FREE ICP template for ABM programs (in the bottom of the post) and the recording of the recent episode of Full-Funnel Live where we show how to use it.
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Why broad ICP targeting doesn’t work in ABM
Here is a real example.
Product: Corporate learning experience platform.
Broad ICP: Enterprise organizations (industry-agnostic)
Target Buyer Personas: L&D managers and HRs.
Broad ICP challenge: These buyers are in charge of growing their employees, hence they need a platform that will enable upskilling.
They ran ABM for one year.
Here are the results.
Why did the program fail?
Well, after a quick analysis of the key accounts, we saw 3 clusters of challenges. Which means that if you want to run an ABM program, you have 3 different ICPs.
ICP 1 AND THE CORE CHALLENGE.
A corporation actively acquires smaller companies and needs to decrease the onboarding time, corporate policy, and standards implementation at the acquired companies.
ICP 2 AND THE CORE CHALLENGE.
A company regularly changes leaders instead of growing internal managers. That leads to talent disengagement (no career opportunity) and turnover.
They need an internal leadership program.
ICP 3 AND THE CORE CHALLENGE.
A company has aging leaders who have been working for decades. Their market is going through disruption, and it's clear that the old approach is not working anymore.
They need change management.
In all 3 cases, firmographics criteria and the buyers remain the same.
The only problem is that these buyers have completely different needs and challenges.
What happens instead?
Marketing doesn't dive deeper into different ICP clusters. Instead, they create generic content and messaging that should be appealing to every buyer.
The content and messaging is based on the product value, not on the needs or challenges of the buyer persona.
Results:
Decreasing marketing-sourced pipeline
Higher CPL (cost per lead)
Low win rates
Ghosting leads
Better copy or AI won't prevent the issue.
You need to define different clusters of ICP.
Research their challenges and the buying process.
Adjust your messaging to the cluster.
Develop cluster full-funnel programs, including how to solve specific challenges and required change management.
Below I’ll share the 6 pillars of a cluster ICP.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with a full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
6 pillars of ICP
Here are 6 pillars of ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) marketing and sales MUST work on when preparing an ABM program.
𝐚. 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐬.
Geo markers
Segments/verticals
Stack
Other important criteria
𝐛. 𝗧𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗲𝗴𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
Not all clients were created equal. If one company can generate 10x more revenue than others, why should it be prospected and marketed the same way?
Segment all accounts by three tiers:
Tier 1: Highest revenue potential
Tier 2: Medium revenue potential
Tier 3: Lowest revenue potential
Here is how.
Your goal is to define companies that generate the highest revenue and create 3 tiers and firmographic criteria based on your insights.
Analyze data and ask yourself:
- Are there a few customers that have a significant share in the total revenue?
(e.g. <10% of top customers that generated 65% of the revenue).
- Can you notice significant drops in the revenue between the customers?
(e.g. customers #2 and #3 generate 17% and 15% of the total revenue, while customer #4 generates 4%).
Define two areas where the drop is evident and underline it. You'll end up with three groups of customers (or tiers).
𝗰. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮.
1. 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐫 1 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐫 2 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞.
What makes an account a good fit?
ACV (average contract value) is above $50k
Actively hiring data analysts or data engineers
Raised >$10mln in the last 3 months
Checked high-intent pages on a website and spent >1 hour
Have a good connection with one of the buying committee members
3. 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨𝐩-10 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞.
What makes the account a bad fit even if it fits firmographic criteria?
Examples:
CFO is in the 1st year in a current position
Massive layoffs in the past 6 months
No funding in the past 12–24 months
4. 𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚.
Both teams should accept the criteria and apply them to list building.
d. Buyer personas inside the buying commitee.
Most B2B companies tell us they know their buying committee. They immediately name VPs of / C+ roles and forget one fact.
The buying committee ≠ target department + VP/Chief of title.
If you open any enterprise account in Sales Navigator, select target department and apply VP role, you’ll end up with hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of potential buyers.
How are you going to approach them and define who is the right person?
Most teams take the easy way: put all of them into ads targeting and automated outbound cadence :)
How to define the buying committee in your target accounts.
1. Deal history analysis.
Analyze email threads and events in the calendar:
- Who was the main contact and who was in CC in all email communications -> Champions
- Who attended the meetings alongside Champions -> Influencers
- Who signed the documents -> Decision-makers
- Whose budget was used -> Decision-makers
2. Buying committee enrichment.
Enrich all contacts with LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
- What are their exact titles?
- What are their responsibilities and jobs-to-be-done?
- What are the repetitive keywords in their bios and job role descriptions?
- What common connections do you have? -> They can make intros
- Who worked for your existing customers?
The bigger are the accounts you are targeting, the more people are involved in purchasing decisions.
Make sure you understand who is your exact buyer.
Leverage common connections to get insights about the buying committee structure, key initiatives and challenges.
Become relevant with your nurturing and engagement.
You land bigger sales opportunities that way. Not by spamming and targeting everybody with VP title.
𝗲. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀-𝘁𝗼-𝗯𝗲-𝗱𝗼𝗻𝗲.
Define jobs-to-be-done, KPIs, goals, and challenges of a typical buying committee member. You'll use these insights for marketing messages, content, and buyer enablement.
f. 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐄𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭.
Your ICP won't be complete without understanding how your customers are buying and why. Here are 4 points you need to know:
Buying triggers
Research and vendor evaluation process
Value they got from your product
Channel presence: where do they get industry information? Whom do they follow?
*Check this post and watch this episode about running a customer research.
ICP template for ABM programs
Below is the recording of the recent Full-Funnel Live episode where we explain how to use it.
How to create an Ideal Customer Profile ICP for ABM programs
In a new episode we show how to use an ICP template for the ABM program and answer community questions:
What are the best ways to figure out buying intent for target accounts?
How many ICPs to create for an ABM program
What’s the difference between ICP for enterprises and SMBs
OUR SPONSOR - DEALFRONT.
What sets DealFront apart?
It has intent data, data enrichment, social signals, and data verification. You can identify the right accounts for the ABM program and quickly define target buying committee members.
DealFront meets Europe's strict standards, ensuring GDPR compliance competitors can't match.
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