Indicators of Your Ideal Customer

Today's smartest and boldest brands are unafraid to niche down their audience — hard — to connect deeply with a focused and very specific ideal customer persona (ICP) that they know intimately. Most ICPs start with demographics — measures such as age, gender, marital and family status, education and income level, and so on. This is how we traditionally categorize people. But demographics only scratch the surface in identifying your ICP. What plays an even more important role are psychographics: How people think and behave. Psychographics include such factors as values and belief systems, personality types, motivations and aspirations, and challenges and pain points. Psychographics also include what I call Ideal States of Being: 😃 Ideal Emotional State: How do people want to feel? 💪 Ideal Self-Expressive State: How do they want to be seen by others? 🪞 Ideal Self-Actualized State: How do they want to see themselves? These truly drive our buying decisions. For example, a 28-year-old soon-to-be bride is likely to have different motivations, aspirations, pain points, and Ideal States of Being than a 28-year-old setting up her own solo apartment in the big city for the first time. Both are going through major life changes — but those life changes may look very different: 👰 The soon-to-be bride is likely thinking about throwing a big party for friends and family; potentially planning a dream honeymoon; merging homes, lifestyles, and/or bank accounts with a new spouse; and maybe even starting to think ahead to buying their first home in the right school district. 🙋♀️ The self-empowered singleton is taking charge of her own life and asserting her independence, outfitting her very first all-hers apartment; juggling work, social life, and the responsibilities of solo living; planning her first international vacation with a friend; and figuring out how to live life large on a budget. Both women are likely brimming with hope and optimism for what comes next. But their motivations, aspirations, pain points, and Ideal States of Being likely look very different — with one grounded in a new level of togetherness and sharing, and the other discovering a whole new level of independence and strength. Simply put, winning at life looks different for each. When you're articulating your ICP go beyond demos and dig deeper, to what really counts: motivations and aspirations, pain points and challenges, and Ideal States of Being. 😃 How does your ICP want to feel? 💪 How do they want to be seen by others? 🪞 How do they want to see themselves? 💡 How can your brand help your ICP to make that happen?   #brandstrategy #customers #branding #leadership #digdeeper

Want to know the $300k lesson I learned about ideal customers? Here's a story that changed how I think about finding the right customers: At a previous company, we had what looked like a perfect customer paying us $100k every year. But there was one small problem... They never used our product. Not even once. A sales rep had bundled it with another tool they actually needed. It took them 3 years to realize they were paying for something they didn't use. That experience taught me something important about finding truly ideal customers. Your best-fit customers aren't just the ones who pay you the most. They're the ones who: → Have a big problem you can actually solve → Get real value from your solution, fast → See clear benefits in what you offer → Stick with you for the long run → Make your team happy to work with them Here's what I've learned works better than just looking at deal size: Watch how quickly they get results. When customers see fast wins, they become your biggest fans. Look at how much they use your product. Usage tells you more about fit than contract size. Notice how the relationship feels. The best customers make your team excited to help them. When you find the right fit, everyone wins: They succeed. You succeed. Everyone grows. This simple truth changed everything about how I help clients define their ICPs. What do you look for in your ideal customers? #ICP

Assumptions can lead to costly mistakes. My first SaaS company didn't go anywhere. I thought I was so smart, but going after the wrong people + building for wrong people cost me everything. Lots of hours put in, very little output. Most marketers think they know who their ideal customer is, and they think they know them. But until you validate your assumptions, you’re operating on guesswork—and guesswork is expensive. When I launched the first version of Wynter, I targeted copywriters... after all, who cares more about copy than them? Turns out most of them did not want any messaging validation work ("I don't like people judging my work" lol) + they didn't have any money. There was no pain they felt on their end regarding messaging validation. The pain was all in-house, felt by people hiring the copywriters: will this work? What does my ICP really care about? How can we make this copy stronger? My ICP research work had been lackluster, and I paid the stupid tax (six months of wasted efforts). A strong ICP (ideal customer profile) is built on real insights—validated, actionable, and directly tied to your audience’s needs. Avoid my mistakes and continuously refine your ICP: 1. Interview your customers: Talk to recent buyers or lost deals. Learn why they chose—or didn’t choose—your solution. Focus on the specific triggers that drove their decision and the language they use to describe their needs. 2. Survey your target market: Use target market surveys to dig into pain points, priorities, and decision-making processes. If you're in B2B, Wynter will deliver responses in 48 hrs. 3. Analyze sales conversations: Dive into sales call transcripts using tools like Gong or Chorus. Spot patterns in objections, common themes, and recurring questions your prospects raise. 4. Test your messaging: Use tools like Wynter to test key website pages with a vetted audience that matches your ICP. 5. Study competitor positioning: Analyze competitors’ messaging to uncover what they emphasize and where you can stand out. For example, if their messaging focuses on efficiency, can you carve a niche around customer experience and support? 6. Audit internal data: Review internal resources—support tickets, chat logs, and retention data. Who uses you the most, who gets the most value out of you? 7. Create iterative feedback loops: Insights aren’t static. Use tools like Wynter and Gong regularly get a pulse on your ICPs changing needs and perceptions. Building a strong ICP isn’t about guessing; it’s about listening—through tools, conversations, and data. The payoff? Better targeting, clearer messaging, and avoid paying the stupid tax.

If you are not hitting your revenue targets, do this today. 100% of founders miss this simple and important step. After helping over 100 startups transition from founder-led sales to scalable revenue engines, I've noticed a common pattern: the most successful companies aren't the ones with the broadest market appeal — they're the ones who know EXACTLY who their ideal customer is. Here's how to get specific: 1. Start with your happiest/most successful customers who: • Renewed without hesitation • Expanded their usage • Became vocal advocates • Had the shortest sales cycles (Aren't tracking? You're not alone. Start now) • Required minimal support What patterns emerge? Industry, company size, tech stack, organizational structure? 🎯 Don't forget psychological characteristics. 2. Follow the pain, not the features Your product has features, and your customers have pain points. The strongest ICPs are built around solving specific, acute problems for specific people. Interview your best customers about their pain points BEFORE implementing your solution. What language do they use? What metrics matter to them? 3. Map the buying committee 💡 In B2B, decisions rarely come down to one person. Who influences the purchase? Who has budget authority? Who implements? Who uses day-to-day? Your ICP isn't just a company — it's the specific roles you need to win over. 4. Quantify your impact What tangible ROI do you create for your best customers? The most compelling ICPs include clear metrics: 📈 "We help mid-market SaaS companies with 50-200 employees reduce customer churn by 30% within 90 days." 5. Validate through deliberate testing Create hypothesis-driven experiments targeting your proposed ICP. Set clear conversion metrics at each funnel stage. A true ICP will show significantly better performance across the entire customer journey. 🔥 Remember: Niching down feels uncomfortable because you're deliberately choosing NOT to pursue certain opportunities. But that discomfort is the price of focus. And focus is what transforms struggling startups into category leaders. Niche to get rich.

It's crucial to understand your Ideal Client Profile. The problem is that it gets too brainy and wonky really fast. You need a simple way to convey to everyone from SDRs to department heads what a "good" client looks like. An effective paradigm is "the Bullseye." It is easy conceptually and emotionally to connect to, which leads to easy company wide buy-in and adoption. * Vertical Focus - In this example, I'm imagining a fictitious software company that is really good at helping reduce customer returns. The software has some pretty powerful tools that track complex processes, so it really stands out in the manufacturing vertical. As it moves towards more simple operations like ecommerce, simpler (and less costly) competitors can be tough to beat. * Employee size - This is just an easy gauge that can be easily sleuthed on the internet, or asked in an early qualification question by an SDR. You can substitute other simple measurements (company revenue, page rank on internet, positioning on G2, etc). The point is to find an easy analog that allows you to ask a simple question and get 80% "right" in your determination of fit. Here, I'm imagining that we do really well with mid-market companies. Below that, they may not have the resources to take advantage of what we're doing. Above that, we start losing business to more advanced enterprise companies. * Operations - In this example, we do best with companies who own their own logistics (because we can make them better). If they outsource to a 3PL or Amazon or something, we can still add value, but a major value proposition that we offer becomes less relevant. Easy to ask "how to you handle logistics? * Ability to Influence - In this example, our ability to walk a warehouse floor and demo our product live is important. So, I added a "how easy is it to be in person" vector here. If it's in our geo... bullseye! If it's a direct flight, ok... still may be good. If not... perhaps qualify out. * Who is feeling pain? - If an individual contributor is bummed about customer returns, you're probably not going to make much progress, no matter how enthusiastic they are. If the CEO has mandated a fix, you're probably barking up the right tree. What we're painting is an easy visual that every member of the team can "get." Evaluating trade shows becomes easy b/c you can ask "are a lot of manufacturers going to be there?" A C-level mtg w/ a small retailer in rural Idaho... right target in terms of role, but poor selection of company and geo. A lead w/ 75 employees (middle), in manufacturing (bullseye), in your state (bullseye), and with a Dir of Logistics (middle)... probably worth meeting with, but not building a new feature for. You get the drift... (ps - if your org is running in 1000 directions on Ideal Client Profile, and making chaotic decisions, dialing in ICP is one of the service offerings that my consultancy, Prediktiv.io offers. Just DM me if you'd like to chat).

Five years ago, Warburg Pincus LLC invested in BetterCloud and urged us to work on a project to narrow our ideal customer profile (ICP). It's the most impactful thing I've ever done to improve conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, increase deal size and ultimately transform the company. A big mistake many CEOs make is believing their product is for everyone. It’s tempting. More potential customers should mean more sales, right? But in reality, chasing too broad a market drains resources, distracts your team, muddles messaging, confuses your product roadmap, and kills go-to-market efficiency. Being laser-focused on your ICP drives alignment across product, messaging, and the go-to-market motion. When the right prospect engages, they’ll feel like you built it just for them. Anyone who has built a product or service knows that the things a small business needs are very different than what a huge enterprise needs. A company is different from a school. An IT buyer is different from a security buyer, a sales buyer is different from a marketing buyer, a director level decision maker is different than a C level decision maker… but we still believe we can sell to different segments and personas as the same time. The process to define and use your ICP is relatively straightforward but does take time. The larger your business, the more data you have, the more resources you have to crunch that data the more time you should spend to do it as scientifically as possible. The high level steps are: 1. Build a Customer Dataset: Gather all your customer data. Current and churned customers, won and lost opportunities. Enrich it with firmographic, business-specific, and buyer demographic data. 2. Engage Your Team: Your best sales and customer success people hold invaluable insights about your most successful (and worst) customers. 3. Analyze & Identify Pockets of Gold: Identify common attributes of high-performing accounts and avoid the traps of poor-fit customers. 4. Communicate the ICP to the entire company with the “why” behind the attributes that make up an ideal customer.  5. Rework your messaging to appeal to your newly defined ICP and narrow your growth initiatives to be focused only on the accounts that matter.  6. Assign the right ICP accounts to your reps and ensure they’re focused on the right buyer personas. 7. Product Development: Reassess your roadmap to align with the needs of your ICP. You should see impact fast. GTM funnel metrics will improve. Conversion rates should rise, with better leads turning into stronger opportunities. You may not get more leads, but their quality will increase. I’ve been discussing this with many Not Another CEO Podcast guests, so don’t just take my word for it. I wrote a deep dive on how to “Narrow Your ICP and Transform your Company”, with real examples from other companies. You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/e5EN3XSR

Michael Margolis has been a UX research partner at GV (Google Ventures) for nearly 15 years, and through his hands-on work with over 300 startups has developed a unique approach to helping founders identify their “bullseye customer”—the specific subset of their target market who initially is most likely to adopt their product. In our conversation, Michael shares: 🔸 The step-by-step process of running a bullseye customer sprint 🔸 Practical tips for conducting effective customer interviews 🔸 The most common mistakes founders make when picking their first customers 🔸 The power of “watch parties” in aligning teams around customer insights 🔸 How to apply these methods beyond typical tech startups 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gwJ6vMfm - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpZgzVfc - Apple: https://lnkd.in/g493bRqG Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Eppo — Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ 🏆 Paragon — Ship every SaaS integration your customers want: https://lnkd.in/geirC2qS 🏆 Enterpret — Transform customer feedback into product growth: https://lnkd.in/gjz_mCJt Some key takeaways: 1. Instead of a long, drawn-out research process, you can identify your ideal customer by doing a one-day sprint with your whole team. The process involves five qualitative interviews with your bullseye customers and watching them as a team in real time. This speeds up learning and ensures that the whole team gets aligned around the same insights. 2. The bullseye customer is more specific than a typical ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s an even more narrow subset of your target market most likely to initially adopt your product. Focusing on this narrow group helps you prioritize product development, align teams, and accelerate learning. 3. When validating your ideas, don’t get stuck on perfecting a single prototype. Instead, create at least three different versions to test. This helps you see what resonates most with your bullseye customer and allows your team to avoid getting too attached to one concept. 4. One of the biggest advantages of doing the bullseye sprint is learning how to recognize rejection early. Pay attention to signs of indifference during customer interviews. When you hear, “Oh yeah, I guess that would be nice,” or something similarly noncommittal, that’s your cue to move on. You’re looking for customers who are ready to say, “Take my money—where do I sign up?” 5. The way you approach customer research should differ from sales. Practice humble inquiry—ask questions as if you’re learning, not selling. Be vulnerable and embrace the fact that you don’t know everything. Your goal should be to learn, not to pitch. 6. Before diving into interviews, get everyone to predict what they think they’re going to learn.

Want to fix your sales process in 10 minutes? Start here. Most service businesses think they know their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—but few actually write it down or base it on real wins. Here’s a quick way to check yourself: Step 1: Write down your last 3 clients who paid quickly and gave positive feedback. Step 2: What do they have in common? Look for patterns: age, industry, business stage, attitude. Pattern = direction. Use those shared traits as your focus filter for the next month. Ditch the scattershot—get specific. Not sure what this looks like? Check out the example below (names and details are illustrative—this is not a list of my real clients, just a template to show what to look for). Who are your top 3 best-fit clients? Make that list today—then go after more just like them. (Image below: Notepad example for inspiration.)

Consider putting a page on your website that's called "Our Ideal Customer". Why? Here are three reasons... 1. You'll waste less time in conversations with companies that aren't ever going to buy (or will just be commodity buyers). 2. People from companies that ARE the right fit will be that much more excited to talk with you. 3. You'll build credibility and trust by not BSing your prospects about who you are (and also who you aren't). The "Our Ideal Client" page on our Gorilla 76 website has been a key piece of our marketing and sales mix for years. Below is how it reads (and I've linked to it in the comments for a closer look). ___ Our ideal client If you don’t check all the boxes, it doesn’t mean that we can’t help you. But a majority of the following ring true in our most successful client engagements. Our best-fit clients... ✔️ Are midsized B2B manufacturing organizations ($10-200M in annual revenue) doing business in the United States ✔️ Are comprised of individuals who collectively possess deep expertise in their lines of business ✔️ Sell customized solutions (rather than commodities) that require a consultative sale through often-long and complex buying processes ✔️ Want to align their business development strategies with an industrial buying process that’s rapidly shifting online ✔️ Don’t face geographic constraints to where they can grow their businesses (conduct business nationally or beyond, rather than locally or regionally) ✔️ Are interested in long-term strategy (not quick, cheap fixes) for growing their top and bottom lines with ideal-fit customers ✔️ Are ready and willing to invest in strategy before implementation (investigation of the problem and diagnosis of the solution before execution of the tactics) ✔️ Are prepared to commit the time and attention of their Executive and Sales teams both at the beginning of the engagement and throughout the marketing process