Dan Martell - November 12, 2018


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

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
David Dalla Mary
How To Pre-Sell Your Software Product Before Building It What To Look For In Your First 10 SaaS Customers

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

192.69

Word count

1,748

Sentence count

63


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how to define your ideal customer profile, also known as your ICP, for your B2B SaaS business so that you can focus on the customers that are excited, ready and willing to buy your solution.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.