Dan Martell - November 12, 2018


How to Define The Ideal Customer Profile For Your B2B SaaS Company


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

192.69493

Word Count

1,748

Sentence Count

63


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor
00:00:02.360 and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.800 In this video, I'm gonna share with you how to define your
00:00:06.440 ideal customer profile, also known as your ICP for your B2B
00:00:11.320 SaaS business so that that way you can focus on the customers
00:00:14.580 that are excited, ready and willing to buy your solution.
00:00:17.860 Be sure to stay at the end where I'm gonna share with you my
00:00:19.920 Rocket Demo Builder.
00:00:21.280 Essentially, it's a process for doing demo calls that will
00:00:25.520 allow you to close twice as fast and not do a boring demo.
00:00:30.000 So recently I was working with a coaching client and one of the
00:00:45.480 struggles they were having is really getting the market to
00:00:48.020 resonate with their solution.
00:00:49.320 They have an incredible technology that allows agencies
00:00:53.020 to connect their project information with their financial
00:00:55.200 dashboard to show them profitability but it wasn't
00:00:58.460 resonating as exciting as they thought it would with the
00:01:00.700 market so what we did is we went through the six core aspects
00:01:04.000 of an ideal customer profile that I'm going to share with you
00:01:06.300 to make sure that we could find not only a focused customer
00:01:09.740 segment but also the geography.
00:01:11.440 If you think about even just compression in a market or
00:01:15.140 awareness, focusing on a geography is going to allow you to
00:01:18.720 kind of build a mini brand in a location because if all the
00:01:22.760 customers that are similar start using your solution,
00:01:25.760 they're all going to talk about it.
00:01:27.080 They're all going to be raving fans and it's going to allow
00:01:28.940 you to kind of expand, expand, expand.
00:01:30.680 The way I think about it is like air pressure in a tire.
00:01:34.680 It's really those last few pumps that give it the definition
00:01:39.060 of the tire but it's all that focus and work of pumping,
00:01:42.260 pumping, pumping up until that point and that's what we want
00:01:45.060 to do by nailing a customer profile is so that you can
00:01:48.560 actually start to make the job of marketing and sales easier
00:01:52.440 on yourself.
00:01:53.440 six key areas that I look at when working with a client.
00:01:57.480 Number one, firmographics.
00:01:59.520 The firm, the business, what's true about them?
00:02:02.640 What industry are they in?
00:02:03.960 What vertical do they specialize in?
00:02:06.220 What's their revenue band right now?
00:02:09.060 What is their percent of growth?
00:02:11.960 I mean, do you want to work with a company
00:02:13.420 that's losing market share every year?
00:02:15.020 No, so here's what usually happens is you're gonna get
00:02:17.940 stuck on this because you're like,
00:02:18.900 well, I know who I want to work with,
00:02:20.300 but who can I work with based on our product?
00:02:22.500 Think about it this way.
00:02:23.800 You're always gonna start typically at the bottom
00:02:26.500 or the mid part of the market and over time
00:02:28.940 your product matures and you're gonna be able to grow up.
00:02:30.840 So where could you really push the limits
00:02:33.580 of the size of deals and the size of customers
00:02:36.620 that you could work with based on the solution
00:02:39.280 that you have today that you know have sold really well
00:02:42.820 into that industry and that is the firmographic information
00:02:48.020 that you wanna use to apply to the profile.
00:02:50.000 Number two, demographic traits.
00:02:51.920 Think of the demographics
00:02:54.360 of where your best customers hang out.
00:02:57.260 So, you know, if I was selling software
00:02:59.360 to the music industry, I'd probably be in LA.
00:03:01.860 If I was trying to sell to the financial industry,
00:03:03.800 I'd probably be in New York or on Bay Street in Canada.
00:03:06.660 So you gotta ask yourself,
00:03:08.240 where is the highest concentration of companies
00:03:11.180 that I wanna target?
00:03:12.480 And then also ask yourself where,
00:03:15.240 maybe it's a physical thing, maybe they have stores,
00:03:17.420 maybe there's a certain part of, you know,
00:03:19.840 if you're selling farm software, maybe it's the Midwest,
00:03:21.920 but understanding geography and the demographics
00:03:24.760 is a huge filter of focus for you to go after
00:03:28.720 your ideal customer profile.
00:03:30.300 Number three, technographic tools.
00:03:32.260 Essentially, your ideal customer has a tech stack.
00:03:35.160 They have a marketing stack, they have an HR stack,
00:03:37.000 they have a sales stack, they have a workflow stack,
00:03:40.100 an ERP solution, whatever it is,
00:03:42.180 if you look at your best customers
00:03:44.480 or you think of what would be true about my best customers,
00:03:46.480 they probably already use a certain technology stack.
00:03:49.820 This is the cool part is today there's tools like Built With,
00:03:53.260 a site that allows you to monitor and build a list of
00:03:56.500 qualified leads of companies that are using certain
00:03:58.820 technologies.
00:03:59.700 There's other ones that can do internal technology adoption and
00:04:02.960 the way they do that is they analyze the positions that are
00:04:06.000 being posted from a recruiting point of view to see what kind
00:04:09.140 of technologies they're asking that the candidates have
00:04:12.540 experience in and then reverse engineering that for you.
00:04:15.640 So technographic tools is a huge opportunity for you to
00:04:19.620 really trim down, if you have 50,000 potential customers,
00:04:23.400 trim it down into the best 800 for you to go after based on
00:04:27.360 your solution and the technologies they're probably
00:04:29.500 already using and maybe some integrations you built so that
00:04:31.860 you can get those sales done quicker.
00:04:33.560 Number four, psychographic drivers.
00:04:36.200 At the end of the day, there are definitely mindset, beliefs,
00:04:40.240 and values that people have that if they have the wrong ones
00:04:44.220 will make your job ridiculously hard to get them to adopt your
00:04:46.680 technology and if they have the right ones it's almost like
00:04:48.980 They're pulling your solution to them.
00:04:51.240 Just think about like fixed mindset people
00:04:52.920 versus growth mindset, early adopters versus laggards.
00:04:56.860 Now you might be thinking well how can I even validate that
00:05:01.660 when I'm trying to design my ideal customer profile?
00:05:03.800 It's not that you can do it up front
00:05:05.620 but you can definitely define it.
00:05:07.000 My best customers, the people that I love to work with,
00:05:09.700 the ones that I get the best results for,
00:05:11.360 have these values, they have these belief systems.
00:05:14.100 These are the things that are true about them.
00:05:16.340 Just answer that question, put it on the list and you'd be
00:05:19.440 surprised how that will inform your sales people,
00:05:21.840 your marketing people to produce content that attracts
00:05:24.180 those people, to have conversation that qualifies the
00:05:26.740 bad people or the bad prospects out of your list to make it way
00:05:30.460 easier to have success in your solution.
00:05:33.920 Because to me SaaS should stand as success as a service, not
00:05:37.120 software as a service because that's what you want for your
00:05:39.200 customers, you want to get them results and making sure they
00:05:41.260 have the right psychographic traits is a huge part of it.
00:05:44.840 Number five, roles.
00:05:46.380 Think about the buyer in the business.
00:05:48.780 Now, if you sell to mid-market or enterprise customers,
00:05:51.480 there's probably several people involved in buying.
00:05:54.620 So you wanna define the roles within your organization
00:05:57.480 depending on who you put as an ideal customer profile so that
00:06:00.760 you can ensure that the marketing team or the salespeople are
00:06:04.260 building that connection and those relationships with the
00:06:07.260 various, the several people, you know, from your champions,
00:06:10.340 your internal champions to the economic buyer to whoever it is
00:06:13.660 that's gonna be adopting the technology,
00:06:15.420 they need to be on board.
00:06:16.900 The complexity of sales right now is almost like
00:06:20.440 there's always a group of people that are gonna be involved
00:06:23.140 in making that decision.
00:06:24.140 If you don't put the list of those roles
00:06:26.080 from the company you've identified,
00:06:27.840 maybe in the firmographic information you've listed,
00:06:31.020 then you won't be able to properly ask questions
00:06:34.440 and qualify them to make sure that you reach out
00:06:37.760 and connect and build relationships with those people
00:06:39.920 to make the sales process easier.
00:06:41.880 Number six, name your avatar.
00:06:44.680 Now one of my favorite things to do with my coaching clients is
00:06:47.420 to name their avatar and I'm always looking for typically an
00:06:50.720 industry or vertical specific understanding or role and then
00:06:54.260 giving them a name that starts with the same letter.
00:06:56.860 So I'm, you know, HubSpot is famous for marketing Mary and I
00:07:00.540 know that Amazon and all the top companies have an avatar.
00:07:04.000 They've named them.
00:07:04.600 Some of them put a physical object in a chair in a meeting
00:07:08.640 room so that everybody knows that at the end of the day we're
00:07:10.540 trying to serve that person.
00:07:11.840 I have one of my coaching clients, David.
00:07:13.780 He went so far about focusing on ideal customer profiles
00:07:17.580 that he put out a whole printed avatar
00:07:21.820 of his perfect customer and stuck it on the wall.
00:07:24.980 So like got it printed with a face
00:07:26.580 and a description of what they are, who they are.
00:07:29.120 And then to just even nail that even further,
00:07:31.760 they put it, the P-I-T-A, the pain in the,
00:07:36.460 on the other side.
00:07:37.440 So they kind of have the good guy and the bad guy
00:07:39.560 of who they love to work with
00:07:41.100 and who they don't want to attract and they make sure that
00:07:43.440 everybody sees that in the conference room.
00:07:45.400 That's the level of detail.
00:07:46.580 So for me, I like to work with what I call
00:07:49.100 Software Scaling Sam.
00:07:50.740 This is typically, and this could be Sam or Samantha,
00:07:54.820 and these are people that want to scale their growth business.
00:07:57.380 There's a whole bunch of different characteristics
00:07:59.020 that I've used and defined just like I've shared with you,
00:08:01.920 but it's really important that you name your avatar.
00:08:04.560 So the six aspects of an ideal customer profile on ICP,
00:08:08.360 one, firmographic details, two, demographic traits,
00:08:12.660 three, technographic tools, four, psychographic drivers,
00:08:17.740 five, roles, and six, name your avatar.
00:08:22.740 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:08:24.140 I want to share an incredible resource
00:08:25.980 to help you close deals faster.
00:08:27.740 It's called my Rocket Demo Builder
00:08:29.920 and in it I talk about the five key principles
00:08:32.380 that you need to start leveraging
00:08:33.960 in your sales communication and the nine box model
00:08:37.320 and really conversation flow that you can use to start not
00:08:41.260 giving a boring demo and get people to buy way quicker than
00:08:44.500 you're doing right now.
00:08:45.600 So you can click the link below and download that.
00:08:47.360 If you like this video, be sure to click the like button,
00:08:50.540 subscribe to my channel and be sure to share this video with
00:08:53.340 anybody you think it might serve.
00:08:55.180 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
00:08:56.840 life and a bigger business.
00:08:58.280 I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:59.680 Pop colors.
00:09:01.820 Dalla, dalla, gonna keep your pop color.