How Important is your ICP!?!

Hello Chris Dutton with 6sense!

What if I told you that your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is your life line… You might think I am being a bit dramatic, and you might be right :) But the reality is knowing, and having your ICP defined is the foundation of any GTM strategy. This is what helps align revenue teams, to ensure both sales and marketing are working the same accounts and more importantly TOGETHER. This is one of the first things 6sense does when onboarding our customers. 

At 6sense we have a tiger team that meets bi-weekly to review our ICP, we look at total number of ICP accounts, by industry, profile fit, all the way down to NAICS code. What we're looking for are areas of opportunity. Are we seeing patterns where accounts in a certain verticals, or tech fit, profile fit etc.. are performing better, and on the inverse are we seeing areas that are not, and should we exclude them from our ICP. It is equally important to consider exclusions in your ICP definition, otherwise you run the risk of over inflating your sales team's book of business, sales spending too much time working accounts that are far less likely to convert, or even acquiring customers that are more likely to churn.

We track this in SFDC. (We love data)

Lastly, look to see where you can expand your ICP, do you have an emerging customer profile that is currently outside your ICP, that should be included. We did, we were seeing a certain group of customer accounts that were not part of our ICP that were using 6sense very successfully, and more and more hand-raisers from this make up of prospect accounts. We made the decision to add them to our ICP definition, adding roughly 1,200 net new accounts. Within 3 months, 10% of those accounts become customers.