The Ideal Customer Profile

Who is your customer? 🧐

If your answer is an enthusiastic "everyone!" I can tell you two things.

1. You have high ambitions! 🚀
2. You're in for a world of trouble! 😳

The trouble comes from a lack of focus.

If you're trying to serve everyone, you're implicitly serving no one.

You have nothing to make you stand out.

This is where the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in.

The ICP is one tool you can use to hone in on exactly who would benefit the most from your services.

As you might already have realised, this is not only useful to the sales team.

It can also inform product decisions, being used when choosing which features you should build next.

Or help Marketing find the right channel and message.

Or help Customer Success anticipate customer issues.

With me so far? 😇

Good!

So how do you create an ICP? 🤔

Let's go through a real case and define an Ideal Customer Profile for Nyblom-as-a-Service by answering the following questions:

1. What are the business objectives (goals) of my customers?
2. What are the pain points or challenges my customers are facing?
3. What are some common traits of my customers?
4. What is the current state (number of employees, revenue, funding, etc)
5. What is a good trigger event that signals to me that I should reach out?

There are a lot more questions that you could try to answer, but this is usually enough to get you started.

First a short description:

My ideal customer customer is a founder of a technology startup. At least part of their team is used to working remotely, and they have launched a product that is generating some revenue. They need to make some form of transition to be able to scale (not just grow).

And here is how I answer them for NaaS:

🎯 What are the business objectives of my customers (one or more)?

• They want to take their business from one stage to the next (need to go through a transformation)
• They want to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their tech org (ship more and ship more of the Right Things)
• They want to reach Product Market Fit

😰 What are the pain points and challenges they are facing?

• They are struggling with retention
• They have trouble finding the right developers or the right CTO
• They feel like they are often in firefighting mode with the tech (critical bugs)
• Their CTO feels overwhelmed, but features are still not shipped fast enough
• They want to transition from

👥 What are some common behaviors and traits?

• First-time founders OR first-time founders build tech
• Technology company (ecom not tech)
• Tech is the bottleneck (this is a good thing!)

⚖️ What is the current state (three or more of)?

• More than 10 employees (most problems are people problems)
• More than 10 m sek yearly revenue (sales is not a bottleneck)
• More than 10m sek in funding
• Main product B2C mobile app (this is where I have an edge)
• Ready to scale operations
• Health tech

🚨 What is a good trigger for me to reach out?

• Change in management
• Funding event
• Acquisition or merger
• Article in Breakit (something to prove)

As mentioned, this is not all the questions.

Nor is it all the answers.

But it's a start!

By now I also know some of you are already thinking "This is me! He's describing my problems and my state"

If that is the case stop reading and slide into my schedule. Right now! 😉

If none of my answers resonate with you I've just saved us both some time.

Either way, I hope you've got a better idea of how you can find your own Ideal Customer Profile.

If you want to read more about what I do you can find the link to Nyblom-as-a-Service and HERE

And as always, let me know what you thought about this post.

Feedback is a gift!

// Viktor