You don’t know your ideal customer, yet

Nailing down exactly who your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are is one of the most important challenges in marketing.

But strangely enough, many companies and marketing teams seem to either set this extremely early or just treat it as a theoretical, almost psychological exercise.

"Our ideal customer is Dave. He shops at Bass Pro, is in his 40s, and loves football."

Defining customer profiles is not a test of your imagination.

Unless you have specific experience in behavioral psychology or a very strong intuition for people (even then - be careful, as people tend to overestimate their capabilities to read and understand others), your psychological assessments are going to be overly generalized and unhelpful or even obstructive.

Rather than focusing on personality traits, which are often subjectively assessed (just ask Dave - he says he doesn’t have an anger problem), it’s better to focus on specific characteristics that your customers may possess.

For example, we’re looking for engineering executives who want brainstorming software:

They’re introverted <—> They’re deep thinkers <—> They spend a lot of time in their head

They’re nerdy <—> They love tech the most <—> They have well-defined hobbies

Notice how each of these operates on a different level of human experience and character.

With an exercise similar to this, you can even include confidence and probability scores.

They have a minimum of 2 free hours a day in their work schedule (I am 50% sure that 70% are like this).

Notice how when you are confronted with your own assumptions and generalizations that are not backed up by data, and you’re forced to rank them with numbers, you will discover that you are most certainly less sure about the individual qualities you are assigning to your target profiles.

By doing this exercise, you are also confronted with the inverse of your scores. This means that for the above example, you are saying that 3 out of 10 have less than 2 free hours a day in their work schedule.

Therefore, we can conclude that those people either do not meet the standards for our product, or simply fall within a different customer profile and therefore might require a different marketing approach.

Or not!

Maybe you realize that the standards and requirements you set were arbitrary - people are simply too complicated.

Dividing your customer profiles into groups according to a mixture of lead scoring using adjustable and iterable mathematical functions like the ones above allows you to prioritize the people you will reach out to first.

Generally speaking, you will want to reach out to the easiest-to-get customers first.

However, there is an extremely important caveat here.

If you focus only on the easiest-to-get customers, you are hyper-focused on the short-term.

There are many industries where you will eventually saturate this segment, leaving you stranded without the systems and pipeline for the long-term acquisition of customers.

A simple example exists within SEO. One of the main factors for ranking on Google is building authority over time to land on the first page with keywords. Even with the most fantastic content, you will be outranked by people who have been doing it for longer.

So, if you only prioritize cold email outreach to the easy prospects, you never build up the reputation to gain organic search traffic years down the line.

You will be scrambling for any channel.

Defining the ideal customer profiles is not a job that can be limited to marketing alone.

Very rarely does marketing have the direct exposure to customer conversations that allows them to sit down and ask all the questions they have over a significant sample size.

Rather, noting that our ideal customers are simply the “market” side of the eternal product-market fit equation, we need to pool all the resources we have in the company.

This is where the saying “There are as many opinions as there are people.” actually comes in handy.

A fatal flaw is when a Founder or CEO assumes that they instinctively know the ideal customer profile simply because they are the ones who came up with building a solution for the problem in the first place.

This ignores that over time, people in your company will, on aggregate, accrue more and more untapped knowledge that you need to explore.

Do not let knowledge go to waste by just living in people's heads.

One of the most powerful processes that you can implement in your company today is by creating a feedback loop between marketing and sales specifically directed at reworking the ideal customer profile.

If you are able to use no-code solutions, for example with Retool, to make salespeople feel more involved in shaping the pipeline that comes to them through marketing - you are going to leverage those who see and communicate with your customers every day.

I would recommend that you always keep a focus on quantitative data, but do not forget about the value of qualitative data.

If several of your salespeople tell you that every time they get on a call with someone, they are brash, this can give you a great indicator of how to shape your messaging.

Of course, you will also want to take the personalities of your salespeople into play.

You can make the best decisions with the most information, built by the sharpest intuition.