Level up your ICP with Demandbase ICPaaS!

The concept of the “ideal customer profile” (ICP) exists to help marketing and sales teams answer two basic, inter-related questions: “Who is most likely to buy from us? Who should we market our products to?”

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is similar to Buyer Persona, but it’s an actual prospect with a specific job title or company that fits a script for your business to sell to. An ICP answers the question of who wants to buy from us and who we should market to.

An ICP considers:

• firmographics attributes
• buying patterns of existing customers with similar firmographics attributes
• optionally, intent signals
• rarely, some kind of high potential (HiPo) account definition which are accounts that already prefer particular vendor/s

But does your ideal customer profile help you achieve the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS), Actual Contract Value (ACV) or Total Contract Value (TCV), retention rate and other key metrics?

And do you know that there’s a better solution than “just” an ICP? You can go a step further by customizing your ICP with data-driven ICPaaS. Before we describe a more evolved approach to building ICPs with ICPaaS, let’s discuss some common problems or gaps with ICPs..

What Are 3 Typical ICP Gaps?

Businesses frequently draw up ICPs but make them too broad and unfocused to deliver much value. ICPs outline the general attitudes, needs, and desires of the type of accounts you’re interested in working with. While these general and fixed attributes may help to inform your ICP, they also make your ICP essentially useless as a practical guide for understanding how accounts (and the people within those accounts) actually behave, and how they relate to your business, in the real world. ICPs cannot be theoretical, but need to support account engagement actions that drive real revenues. Here are three of the most common ICP gaps:

1. Companies defining their ICPs typically confront low-quality customer data and other  customer data deficiencies. Lack of high-quality customer data in customer databases (and sometimes a lack of customer databases to begin with) results in the inability of businesses to create ideal customer and buyer profiles which are genuinely useful. As the saying goes: “garbage (data) in, garbage (ICPs) out.
2. Firmographic data is incredibly helpful for creating your ICP, but it isn’t enough. Firmographic data, even when it’s accurate and up-to-date,  is just a starting point to help develop a more comprehensive view of target accounts.
3. Businesses usually forget to update their ICPs. It is important to note that ICPs are not static tools, but must be updated over time to reflect changes. What a client needs today doesn’t necessarily reflect what they’ll need or want a year from now. 

What is ICPaaS by Demandbase?

Demandbase ICPaaS is a customized “data as a service” to help companies identify the best accounts within their ideal customer profile (ICP). It also addresses the common ICP gaps we described above. ICPaaS draws on insights from installed technologies, intent, skills, job openings, renewal dates and other attributes to identify the right accounts to go after. The domain context comes from environmental, behavioral and business space research around the offering.This is high-quality and dynamic data that can be fed into your ICPs and ABM strategies to drive revenue growth.

Conclusion

Do you want to improve your ICPs by building them with higher-quality data, in order to build a strong ABM strategy? If so, it’s extremely important to level up with ICPaaS.

Surveys conducted over the past 3 years suggest that approx. 70% of marketers consider generating quality leads as both their top priority and challenge. An ICPaaS is a perfect starting point for an ABM strategy that seeks to deliver highly-targeted, personalized campaigns based on high-quality data and the particular attributes of an account, especially the account’s likelihood to purchase from you.

Demandbase developed an improved version of ICP via its ICPaaS as a custom offering. Demandbase also offers in-house offerings like sales intelligence cloud, intent and data cloud that complement the ICPaaS offering. In the end, ICPaaS generates a ranked list of high potential accounts who are the most likely to buy from a given vendor. That’s what sales success looks like today.