Sales start with the ICP: why there is no one-size-fits-all recipe

I have worked in marketing for many years and, no matter how much we think about strategies, creative campaigns and well-produced materials, one truth never changes: at the end of the day, most business owners want to know how they are going to increase revenue.

And that makes perfect sense. Most marketing strategies exist to generate sales. That is why talking about marketing without talking about sales leaves the conversation half finished.

There is no recipe for sales

Sales is a complex subject. What worked for one company will not necessarily work for another. Every business has its own market, ticket size, decision cycle and type of customer.

That is why every sales process needs strategy and a deep understanding of the business itself. And the first step, both for business owners and for marketing departments, is the same: clearly defining who your ideal customer is.

A book that gives great context to all of this is Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. It shows how to turn sales into a structured, predictable process, with well-defined roles in the sales team and a clear understanding of who the right customer to approach is. I recommend it to any business owner or sales manager.

The first step: defining your ICP

The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is the profile of the ideal customer for your business. And the best place to start defining it is at home: in your own customer base, which is often underexplored.

Many companies do not have enough information about their own customers. But it is important to have a broad view of that base and to develop a sense of what makes a good customer and a bad one. Look at the customers who:

• are the best payers;
• require the least work day to day;
• bring the most profitability;
• actually get results from what you deliver.

With this information in hand, it becomes much easier to identify your ideal customer. The same goes for the opposite side: customers who pay late, who demand far more work than they generate in profit and with whom you cannot get results. Those are the customers not worth spending energy on.

Knowing who your ideal customer is matters as much as knowing who it is not.

One important detail: you can have an ICP for each product or service. It all depends on your strategy.

From ICP to personas

With the ICP defined, the next step is to understand the personas, that is, the people who make or influence the decision inside those companies. Is it a marketing director? A sales director? Someone in administration?

For each persona, you need to understand their pain points, where they spend their time and what they consume. Only then does it make sense to think about strategies.

To help with this step, I created O2 Persona, a free tool that helps companies and business owners create personas for their business with the help of artificial intelligence. It is worth trying with your ICP in hand.

Today’s challenge: winning attention

When I started working in marketing, there were few communication channels. The internet arrived and created a whirlwind of information. Digital brought the advantage of being able to measure almost everything, but it also brought a huge number of channels.

For users, this means much more visual clutter and much more information competing for their attention. Your job is to win that attention. And the only way to do it is to know what they like and what their pain points are, so you can show that your product or service solves that need.

Sales playbook: differentiators and objections

Few companies have a good sales playbook, ideally one for each product or service. It needs to make clear to the entire sales team:

• The real differentiators. As I mentioned in the post about authority in the age of AI, a differentiator is not saying your product is beautiful or high quality. That is generic. A differentiator is what you actually solve, in a specific way.
• The possible objections. Map every objection customers usually raise and how the sales team should respond to each one.

With a well-defined ICP and the playbook in hand, then you choose which channels to use to reach each product or service.

To build the right questions and handle objections, I recommend another book: SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham. It proposes guiding the sales conversation with Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions, so that customers themselves realize the size of their pain and the value of solving it.

It seems obvious, but is it in everyone’s head?

All of this may seem obvious. Everyone says they know who their ideal customer is and what their differentiators are. But I am sure your business does not have 100% of what I am describing here.

And it is not enough for it to be in the owner’s head. It needs to be in everyone’s head. The entire sales team needs to be able to answer the same questions with the same answers. If each salesperson explains the product differently, customers receive different messages and the company loses consistency.

It does not matter if it is only in the owner’s head. It needs to be in the whole team’s head.

That is exactly what a documented ICP and a playbook are for: turning the knowledge of a few into a standard for everyone.

What is the best channel for my business?

It is one of the questions I get most often. In general, it is not that hard to answer, but there is no recipe. It depends a lot on the industry and on the particularities of each business. Those who have their ICP, personas and playbook well defined reach that answer with much more confidence.

CRM and the customer journey

To keep all this information organized, a CRM is essential. It is what allows you to track and design the customer journey within your business: what the touchpoints are with each lead and prospect, and what happens at each stage.

And the journey does not end with the sale. When a lead becomes a customer, another journey begins, and it also needs to be mapped and designed so that the customer has a good experience from start to finish.

After-sales is also sales

After-sales is absolutely essential. A customer who is well served after the purchase renews, buys again and refers others. And, going back to the beginning, they also help feed your base with information to refine your ICP even further.

To sum up the path:

1. Analyze your customer base and separate good customers from bad ones.
2. Define your ICP, one for each product or service if needed.
3. Understand the personas: roles, pain points, where they are and what they consume.
4. Build a playbook with specific differentiators and answers to objections.
5. Choose the right channels for each product or service.
6. Use a CRM to design and track the customer journey, including after-sales.

Once all of this is structured, the next step is measuring. I wrote about the metrics every business owner should track, such as CAC, LTV and churn, in the post Sales metrics.

There is no ready-made formula for sales. But those who truly know their customers always come out ahead.