Ideal Customer Profile

Product's role is to turn business vision into solutions that create meaningful value for customers profitably for the business. But for Product, ‘customer’ can overemphasize users, and overlook buyers.

In B2B SaaS, it's common for buyers and users to be different people who experience your product value differently.

Translating user experiences into a value story for the buyer, then, often falls to sales. But part of Product’s job is helping everyone in the customer journey—buyers, admins, and users—recognize the product’s value.

Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) create visibility into buyer needs such that product can appropriately prioritize their needs alongside core user needs.

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• Create immediate transparency for whether current product roadmaps solve meaningful buyer problems:
  Friction in the sales cycle could be correlated with misalignment between the product direction and the core needs and priorities of buyers. Mapping current roadmaps to a well-defined ICP can make that gap immediately apparent.
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• Build excitement with your buyers for the roadmap of problems your business intends to solve now, next, and in the future:
  If customers believe you understand what their most pressing are and that your business is committed to solving them, their interest in your solutions skyrockets. Aligning product roadmaps—and proving your teams can deliver them—to ICPs gives customers confidence that what you're doing will matter to them and demonstrates that you can maintain focus on what matters most over time.
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• Keep buyer needs top of mind with the people building the product day-to-day:
  When you're building a product, it's easy to keep focused on the user. It's much harder to keep top of mind how everyone around the user should gain value from the product. ICPs keep buyer's more pressing needs as context for why the business is solving the user's needs in the first place.

• Meet with leadership and sales team members to gather relevant information
• Write an initial Ideal Customer Profile that outlines the common attributes of your most successful customers and the opportunities and challenges of the buyer
• Validate this document with the sales team
• Collaborate with product to align in-flight development and future product roadmaps to the ICP
• Identify gaps and, if needed, re-prioritize product roadmaps to balance prioritization of buyer and user needs as well as existing customer commitments

Assumptions:

• Average Contract Value: $20,000 AAR
• Average sales cycle: 6 months
• Win rate: 50%
• Opportunities that will reach win/loss decision in the next 12 months: 20
• Current customers: 20

Benefits: $150,000 + cross-sell opportunities

• Reduction in sales cycle time: 50%
• Increased revenue over 12 months from faster sales cycles (assumes additional 3 months revenue per sales): $50,000
• Improved win rate: 25%
• Increased revenue over 12 months from improved win rate: $100,000
• Percent of customers purchasing an additional product through cross-selling: 50%
• Increased revenue from cross-sales: $350,000