- Industry: The vertical channel you're targeting.
- Company Size: SMB. In my example, the ideal companies I want to work with have about 50 employees and less than $10 million in ARR.
- Department: Marketing. I know that marketing professionals in the financial services industry can benefit from my product.
- Responsibilities: The marketing department's team members who are tasked with doing display advertising on various channels, such as mobile ads, social media, and video.
- Role: These marketing professionals fit various levels within the organization. They have titles from coordinator, associate manager, manager, and director up to the vice president or CMO. Because I'm targeting SMB companies, the titles vary according to the number of team members in the marketing department.
Examine your CRM to see the titles of the contacts who are your current customers. Knowing the titles of your existing customers who have proven to be successful with your product is helpful when creating your ICP.
Your ICP becomes the qualification criteria for identifying the best-fit contacts for account-based marketing. This figure shows what your ideal customer profile looks like as an ID card.
At the company Terminus, they refer to this process as "Finding Nikki." Nikki is the marketing technologist. She's responsible for managing all of the marketing operations tools from the CRM and marketing automation systems to social media platforms. Nikki helps discover and purchase these tools that help drive the success of our marketing activities. If your business needs to reach Nikki, you need to know her role and responsibility within the company to find whether she fits your ICP.