Introduction
In the world of B2B marketing, the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is often treated like a sacred blueprint—a carefully contoured sketch of a mythical customer, a perfect target audience for your product or service, ready to buy at the quoted price. Essentially, these are the folks you're interested in. Companies spend significant time and resources doing lead generation basis ICP, believing it will show the way to their most profitable customers. Marketers find surprising solace in this defined pattern.
But what if those folks aren't currently interested in you? And what if others who might be interested are being ignored because the ICP is too ‘well-defined’?
What’s Getting Missed?
- Buying Intent
A common mistake when defining an ICP with overly strict criteria, such as company size or revenue, is overlooking key factors like buying intent. For example, a cyber-security company focused only on enterprises might miss startups urgently seeking solutions due to regulatory changes. Market dynamics, news, and industry developments make ICPs inherently fluid. While knowing the segments you sell most in is important, being too rigid can result in missed opportunities. An adaptive, iterative ICP is crucial for staying agile in a constantly shifting market. - Brand Behavioral Insights
Behavioral data tracks how prospects engage with your brand across channels like your website, LinkedIn, and more. Traditionally, tools like Google Analytics monitored traffic, while SEO/SEM drove engagement. Websites often relied on form fills to capture interest, but many visitors may explore product and pricing pages without completing forms. By unifying data from all sources—LinkedIn, G2 listings, emails, ads, and websites — you can get a clearer picture of your ideal customers. Sometimes, highly engaged prospects, even if they don’t fit the traditional ICP, are the real target audience. - Insights from Diverse Interactions
B2B purchasing decisions typically involve multiple stakeholders. Expanding your ICP to target a broader buying group within each account increases your chances of closing deals. By engaging key decision-makers across departments, you ensure your message resonates with all those influencing the purchase.
Solving with AI
Thus, the question arises: how do you find the right set of prospects? Do we need to define it well, gather enough data points to create a pool of accounts to target, and continuously optimize? And, of course, there will always be the question of scale.
Today, a Smart GTM Platform powered by AI-first features can help solve these challenges. It creates smarter, real-time ICP profiles that are more efficient and effective—at scale — eliminating the usual pains of manual enrichment and constant updates.
How Does It All Come to Life?
- Broadening Your Criteria: AI can help you identify buying intent for ‘in-market’ prospects. You can even start with a blank slate! By analyzing public data and tracking buying behavior and engagement levels, a real-time tracker across different channels can provide a unified ICP and deeper insights into whether a prospect is a good fit for your product. This broader approach can help uncover new opportunities that were previously overlooked.
- Leveraging Behavioral Data: While AI helps identify buying intent, tools today can also faithfully track 1st party intent - such as lost visitors—those who visited your website, interacted with key product or pricing pages, but didn’t sign up. Once identified, these prospects can be retargeted with tailored marketing and sales strategies, leading to higher conversion rates.
- Account Research: A key element in personalization is the ability to go deep into the needs of your target accounts. These are very specific questions which best performing salespersons answer manually today. You can either spend hours researching each account manually or use the power of AI to scale account research and create micro-segments.
- Expanding the Buying Group: B2B decision-making often involves multiple stakeholders, and you must pitch the product or service while also addressing the question of ‘what’s in it for them.’ AI solves this scalability issue—whether it’s engaging more people or facilitating more interactions—by helping you influence a greater number of stakeholders.
- Test and Iterate: A/B testing is widely understood as a valuable way to gather data on which segments respond best to your outreach. Yet, it can be costly, complex, or simply impractical at times. AI helps by simulating different scenarios and automating research and outreach efforts. This enables sales and marketing teams to focus on building meaningful relationships, without getting bogged down by repetitive manual tasks.
Conclusion
An ICP isn't a one-size-fits-all formula, nor is it a one-trick pony. There will always be a dynamic element to determining who is currently in the market to buy. While organizations have traditionally relied on isolated information systems to define their ICP, modern technology can unlock the full potential of data.
By synthesizing data from various sources, analyzing it to create executable work streams, and transforming it into actionable intelligence, AI can ensure you're targeting the right audience.
Knowing who wants to buy your product or service today, will always be the first step toward building a winning business. After all, it is this knowledge which is the critical difference between a good product and a successful one.
