Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) focus on the company or organizational level, describing the characteristics of businesses that would be the most valuable and successful customers for your product or service.
They include attributes like company size, revenue, industry, geography, and business challenges, helping teams identify which accounts are worth pursuing and likely to have the highest lifetime value.
ICPs are particularly important for B2B companies in determining where to focus their sales and marketing efforts.
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Buyer personas, on the other hand, are detailed representations of individual decision-makers and users within those target companies.
They dive into personal characteristics like job roles, responsibilities, goals, pain points, and buying behaviors of the actual people who will be evaluating, purchasing, and using your product.
While ICPs help you target the right companies, buyer personas help you understand and communicate effectively with the specific individuals involved in the buying process.
Ideal customer profiles vs buyer personas
| Aspect | Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) | Buyer Personas |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Descriptions of fictional companies that derive value from your product while providing value to your business | Detailed representations of individual decision-makers and users within target companies |
| Focus | Company-level characteristics (size, revenue, geography, business challenges) | Individual-level characteristics (roles, goals, pain points, behaviors) |
| Advantages |
• Helps identify valuable leads and save sales team time • Enables better operational alignment with audience needs • Assists in defining specific problems to solve • Helps improve future offerings • Identifies customers likely to have high lifetime value and low churn • Can help identify potential brand advocates |
• More detailed and specific to individual roles • Useful for targeted segmentation • Helps understand individual decision-makers within organizations |
| Disadvantages |
• Very broad descriptions that might miss nuanced customer needs • Focuses primarily on company-level characteristics, potentially missing individual decision-maker insights • May be too restrictive if applied too rigidly |
• May not capture broader organizational fit • Could miss company-level value propositions • Might not identify which companies will provide the best return on investment |
Why you need both an ICP and a buyer persona
Ideal customer profile vs buyer persona? Do you have to choose one or the other? As mentioned, your ICPs are the companies you should target, while a buyer persona refers to the people who buy from you.
Your ICP may be a business-to-business company while your buyer persona will be the people who work there, from the sales team to the marketing managers.
In addition to this, ICPs tend to be more focused on the numbers (such as revenue), but buyer personas include more qualitative and subjective elements, like your audience’s challenges and fears.
You need both because it helps you to understand all your customers’ and audience’s challenges, goals, and characteristics, which you can then use to build a strategy that draws people in.
It’s also important that you regularly update your ICP and your buyer personas since the industry is always evolving and the business needs to reflect those changes. That way, you can keep tweaking your offerings, improving your messaging, etc.
How to create an ICP
There are some elements inherent to ICPs that you may want to include when creating your profile.
While you may have a good idea of who your ideal customer is, don’t rely solely on your hunches – they might be in the ballpark, but you’ll only get accurate data without missing any key details if you do some research first.
1. Specify the problem you’re solving
This is key because you need to know how you can help your customers.
- Does your software resolve an issue developers have been having for a while?
- Does the tool shave off time in their daily tasks?
- Is the tech designed to cut down the number of steps for a certain task and, therefore, makes devs’ lives easier?
If you fully understand what you’re solving, you can better define your ideal customer profiles, since you’ll know exactly what they’re looking for – i.e., who can benefit from your product the most.
2. Figure out the characteristics your best customers share
Analyze your existing customers in-depth to find out the attributes they have in common, whether that’s the type of business, the technologies used, the revenue of the companies, etc.
You can use an existing database or tool for this, if possible, or conduct interviews and send out surveys to your happiest customers and ask them questions like, “what made you choose us?”.
A good ideal customer profile will also include questions that give you data about the company’s behavior and attitudes, like:
- What are its biggest challenges?
- What tech does the company use?
- What are its goals?
- And its pain points?
You can also include negative characteristics, so you're aware of the companies that aren’t a good match for your product.
3. Evaluate customer feedback
Accept the good and the bad – customer feedback is a fantastic way to learn what your target audience thinks of your business and product, and provides you with the perfect opportunity to improve your offerings.
While data is crucial, so is feedback. So, ensure you know exactly what your customers like about your company and what could be done better. And, by acting on that feedback, customers will be happy they’re being listened to.
4. Define your ICP
While each company will have different traits, every ideal customer profile should have basic information like the size of the organization, its budget, and its location.
Once you’ve got all the data, you’ll want to document everything in the same place for quick reference. Make sure other stakeholders in the company can use the framework and review it to keep it up to date and useful for everyone else, including the sales team.
The information you get from your ICP vs buyer persona is also useful for your marketing strategies, so that you’re not only targeting the right audience, but also have the right messaging and how to best position your product.
How to create a buyer persona
Buyer personas help you to think like a developer and, by doing that, you can better get your message across to your audience. But, how do you even start? The process to build developer personas is similar to the creation of ideal customer profiles:
1. Research your target market
Buyer personas are based on research, just like ICPs. You may have a pretty good idea of who your audience is but, without this research, you might not be able to develop the right messaging or tailor your marketing efforts as accurately as you would with a solid, well-researched persona in place.
To perform this research, you can ask your customers questions. Talk to developers, send out a survey, try to identify their motives and challenges, etc. If you have a developer relations (DevRel) team, they can help you to gather this information as well.
The questions you should ask developers should be about the job they do, the specific market/industry they’re in, what they’re looking for in a product (as in, the problems or challenges they have), their personal background, any training and development they do, and so much more.
2. Jot down your audience’s demographics
This might be the simplest step, since you probably have access to this information already, be it on your CRM (customer relationship management) tool or your developer community.
For example, if your main demographic is developers in their twenties, they’re likely starting their career and, therefore, their goals, challenges, and motivations will be a lot different than someone with years of experience.
3. Add their goals
What motivates your developer audience? What issues do they have? What are they looking for in a product?
Make sure to include developers’ goals when creating your buyer persona, since this can help you to better understand how to interact with them – and how to approach them when it comes to promoting your product’s features and benefits.
4. Create messaging for your buyer persona
As developers are such a unique audience (as well as practical- and technical-minded), you’ll want to get your messaging right when you interact with them. So, you must get the tone of voice right as well, which includes being factual, straight to the point, and avoiding the fluff.
Create content that resonates with your persona, such as elevator pitches, that also help other stakeholders in the company understand your audience better – and speak the same language when communicating with devs.
Final thoughts
While ICPs help you target the right companies and ensure business alignment at an organizational level, buyer personas enable you to communicate effectively with the actual decision-makers within those organizations.
For optimal results, companies should develop and utilize both tools in tandem – using ICPs to identify the most valuable target companies, and buyer personas to better understand and engage with the individuals who will ultimately make the purchasing decisions.
This dual approach ensures that your marketing and sales efforts are both strategically focused and personally relevant.
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