Customer Base Profiling

Your best customers are the blueprint for your next 100 deals. Most SaaS companies chase new lead sources while ignoring the pattern recognition goldmine sitting in their CRM. Here's how to weaponize your won deals: 1. Select your top 10 customers by LTV, not just logos - Extract firmographic data (industry, size, tech stack) - Document the buyer's exact role and reporting structure - Note which problems they explicitly mentioned solving 2. Identify the messaging that converted them ↳ Which specific pain points resonated? ↳ What language did they use to describe their challenges? ↳ Which offer finally moved them to action? This customer profile becomes your AI agent training manual. Feed this dataset into your lead researching agent with clear instructions. Using a directory of 70m+ accounts, we pull companies that most closely match their exact parameters. Do the same with your copywriting agent: "Generate messaging that mirrors the words and phrases used by prospects from our sales call transcripts." The results? Your automation starts working with a proven playbook instead of generic assumptions. This approach consistently outperforms "best practices" because it's based on your unique success patterns—not someone else's.

Five years ago, Warburg Pincus LLC invested in BetterCloud and urged us to work on a project to narrow our ideal customer profile (ICP). It's the most impactful thing I've ever done to improve conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, increase deal size and ultimately transform the company. A big mistake many CEOs make is believing their product is for everyone. It’s tempting. More potential customers should mean more sales, right? But in reality, chasing too broad a market drains resources, distracts your team, muddles messaging, confuses your product roadmap, and kills go-to-market efficiency. Being laser-focused on your ICP drives alignment across product, messaging, and the go-to-market motion. When the right prospect engages, they’ll feel like you built it just for them. Anyone who has built a product or service knows that the things a small business needs are very different than what a huge enterprise needs. A company is different from a school. An IT buyer is different from a security buyer, a sales buyer is different from a marketing buyer, a director level decision maker is different than a C level decision maker… but we still believe we can sell to different segments and personas as the same time. The process to define and use your ICP is relatively straightforward but does take time. The larger your business, the more data you have, the more resources you have to crunch that data the more time you should spend to do it as scientifically as possible. The high level steps are: 1. Build a Customer Dataset: Gather all your customer data. Current and churned customers, won and lost opportunities. Enrich it with firmographic, business-specific, and buyer demographic data. 2. Engage Your Team: Your best sales and customer success people hold invaluable insights about your most successful (and worst) customers. 3. Analyze & Identify Pockets of Gold: Identify common attributes of high-performing accounts and avoid the traps of poor-fit customers. 4. Communicate the ICP to the entire company with the “why” behind the attributes that make up an ideal customer.  5. Rework your messaging to appeal to your newly defined ICP and narrow your growth initiatives to be focused only on the accounts that matter.  6. Assign the right ICP accounts to your reps and ensure they’re focused on the right buyer personas. 7. Product Development: Reassess your roadmap to align with the needs of your ICP. You should see impact fast. GTM funnel metrics will improve. Conversion rates should rise, with better leads turning into stronger opportunities. You may not get more leads, but their quality will increase. I’ve been discussing this with many Not Another CEO Podcast guests, so don’t just take my word for it. I wrote a deep dive on how to “Narrow Your ICP and Transform your Company”, with real examples from other companies. You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/e5EN3XSR

I've seen reps burn through 6 months of quota chasing the wrong accounts. All because they thought "bigger is better." Then I did the math on my wins. ✓ 91% had certain sales tools ✓ 74% were actively hiring for revenue roles ✓ 67% had recently raised funding or gone public in the last year This wasn't luck. There was a clear pattern. Enter: the power of Ideal Customer Profile meets intent data. Here's a framework you can live by: 𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗜𝗖𝗣 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 (𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗴𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀) * What's the average deal size of your wins? * What industries close fastest? * What technologies predict success? 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗖𝗣 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 * Are they researching your category? * What's their buyer committee doing? * When are they in active evaluation? 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 * High ICP + High Intent = Chase hard * High ICP + Low Intent = Nurture * Low ICP + High Intent = Qualify fast or pass We use Demandbase to detect intent, orchestrate plays and engage the right accounts - at exactly the right moment. Result? No more wasting time on "exciting" logos that would never close. Started focusing on accounts that fit the profile AND showed buying behavior. Bottom line: Spray and pray is dead. Precision targeting wins.

In my last post, I wrote about why nailing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the single most important move for any SaaS go-to-market motion. Here’s the nuance that often gets overlooked: Your ICP is not just “mid-market companies in the UK, 200–1,000 employees, in Financial Services.” That’s a starting point. But it’s not enough. If you stop there, you’ll end up with broad lists, noisy pipeline, and sales teams asking, “Why are we even talking to this account?” The most successful SaaS companies dig deeper. They add layers to their ICP definition. Some examples include: 1️⃣ Firmographics (beyond headcount & industry) 🫡 Org structure (centralised vs. decentralised decision-making) 📈 Growth stage (high-growth, PE-backed, IPO-track vs. stable/legacy orgs) 💰 Budget patterns (are they already spending in your category?) 2️⃣ Technographics 👩💻 Current software stack (what are they using that signals readiness for your solution?) 🧩 Integration needs (are they on platforms you integrate with?) 🧓 Maturity of their tech adoption (innovators vs. laggards) 3️⃣ Demographics (at the persona level) 👑 Job title, seniority, and role in the buying committee 💱 Change-readiness (are they problem-aware and motivated to act?) 🏅 “Champions” profile—what kind of individuals consistently back your product internally? 4️⃣ Routes to Market 🏇 Direct Sales: Which accounts are easiest to break into with outbound? 👯♂️ Partnerships: Which ICP segments are best accessed through resellers, agencies, or ecosystems? 🎁 Product-Led Growth (PLG): Which customer types are most likely to self-serve and expand? When you overlay all of these, you move from broad targeting to sharp clarity. Instead of 10,000 “possible” accounts, you end up with the 1,000 that are probable—and the 100 that are probable right now. That’s where sales efficiency spikes, marketing CAC drops, and product adoption sticks. 👉 The takeaway: ICP isn’t a static profile—it’s a multidimensional map. The companies that master it, win. What other criteria might be useful to determine your ICP? 🤔

If my CEO asked me to book more meetings with our ICP, here's the first thing I'd do: Build a proper target account list. I know, hear me out The biggest difference between winning and loosing GTM teams? Prioritization. Most B2B companies don't have an ICP, they have an ACP (average customer profile). They sell to too many verticals or personas Knowing with SURGICAL precision your ideal customer (pays you the most, stays the longest, easy to sell into, needs almost no support), allows you to do things your competitors can't Here's what I'd do: 1. Get CRM access & export a list of all of our existing and past customers 2. This list should have this info, broken down by customer: - Industry - Company size - Geography - Annual contract value - Sales Cycle Length - Job Title of our champion - Anything else you deem important, like tech stack, funding, department size 3. Add to Google Sheet 4. Group them by segments and calculate win rate by segment. I'd probably segment by industry and/or company size THE IMPORTANT PART: 5. Give this list to my CEO and have them rate each customer 1-5 from worst-fit to best-fit. 5 being “I’d want to keep this customer at all costs” & 1 being “If that customer canceled today, I’d almost be happy” 6. Next to that score, have my CEO fill out a “Why?” field to explain why they gave that customer that score. Can be just one sentence 7. Sort the list by score, best on top, worst on the bottom 8. Find the patterns. There’s no shortcut here. Look at the data, play around with it, form hypothesis and test them Eg. “my CEO thinks the best customers are those who pay us the most while having a short sales cycle, which tends to be mid-market companies in non-regulated industries where we have a VP champion” 9. Express & validate the criteria. Repeat it back to my CEO. I'm looking for a "that's it". Cross-check with Sales and CS 10. I'd use Sales Navigator (or whatever l have access to, ZoomInfo, Ocean.io) to make a complete list of ALL the companies who match this exact criteria. Could be anything from 50 - 20k companies 12. Next I'd pull a list of all the relevant stakeholders within these account. If we sell to SMB, it might just be 1 person per account. If we sell into enterprise, it might be 5-10 people per account 13. This list is now the basis of our GTM. I would for example: - Create content that's hyper-relevant for this newly defined person (focusing on the Champion), leveraging internal Subject-Matter Experts at our company - Build a custom feed in Sales Nav so we can track whenever one of our ICPs posts something and I'd send this to my CEO so they can engage - Run our best Linkedin posts as Thought Leader ads towards this list - Run Conversation Ads to book demos (highly underutilized) - I'd use a tool like Keyplay to score the accounts to feed to my sales team - I'd track signals like hiring, tech stack changes, content engagement to run warm outbound

Let’s set the record straight. Your ICP is not a one-time exercise. I don’t care if you’ve already “done the work.” If you haven’t revisited your ICP in the last 90 days, it’s already stale. The best companies treat Ideal Customer Profile like product or pricing, something that gets refined continuously based on real data, not gut feel. Why? Because markets shift. Personas evolve. Economic climates change. And what worked 6 months ago might already be irrelevant today. When we partner with companies, it’s one of the first things we look at… and almost every time, it’s either too broad, too outdated, or too aspirational. Your ICP isn’t who you wish would buy from you. It’s who actually does… consistently, profitably, and with high retention. The smartest CEOs I work with make sure this is done quarterly: – Analyze win/loss trends – Reassess segments by margin and churn – Interview both happy and churned customers – Validate assumptions with frontline sales and CS feedback – Refine outbound and marketing to match You don’t need a brand new strategy every quarter. You need to pressure test the one you have. If your pipeline’s soft or your CAC’s climbing, start with ICP. When you nail who you’re for, everything else gets easier.

The best gift your RevOps team could give you this Christmas is a clear view of account segmentation within your business. It’s a somewhat confusing topic, so let me break it down a bit. Most B2B companies can rattle off their Total Addressable Market (TAM). But far fewer have a clear definition of their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—and that’s where the real opportunity lies. TAM is everyone you could sell to. ICP is who you should sell to. Getting specific about your ICP means focusing your time, energy, and resources on the right customers—the ones who bring the most value to your business and who benefit the most from your product. Once you know your ICP, the next step is account segmentation: breaking down your customer base into tiers or personas to refine your approach further. Think of it like sorting through a pile of gifts to find the perfect ones for the people who matter most. This is where metrics come into play. You need to analyze each segment to understand how they behave, how much value they bring, and how costly they are to serve. Here are a few to focus on: • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Which segments are the most expensive to acquire? Are they worth it? • Lifetime Value (LTV): Which segments bring the highest long-term value? • Deal size: Do certain segments tend to bring larger deals that justify more investment? • Sales velocity (sales cycle length): How quickly do segments move through the pipeline? Faster cycles mean faster revenue. • Churn rate: Which segments are the most likely to stay, and which ones churn out too quickly? Based off these metrics, you can prioritize the segments that deliver the best return on your time, energy, and dollars. You’ll be able to craft sharper messaging, target more effectively, and focus your resources where they’ll have the biggest impact. Yes, account segmentation takes time. It requires clean, reliable CRM data and a clear strategy. But the payoff? Massive. You’ll target better, lower churn, and build stronger relationships with the customers who matter most. As you wrap up the year, consider making account segmentation a priority for next year. It’s not the easiest gift to give your business, but it’s one that keeps paying off, year after year. Merry Christmas—and here’s to a successful 2025! 🎄🎁

Last yr, I went to Joshua Tree and saw a 70-year-old grandma driving a Harley-Davidson. Why does this matter to DTC?   Most DTC brands blindly focus on the demographics and lifestyle profiles of their customers.   (Grandmas, young, male, household income.)   . . . When what is more predictive is their behavior.   "Who are our customers?" Think actions: ➝ Acquired through Google. ➝ Visited our site 3 times before purchasing. ➝ Haven’t been back in 4 days. The more you focus on behavioral segments first, the easier it will be to grow your business. Three reasons why behavioral profiling gives you an edge:   1️⃣ More predictive. Who is more likely to buy from you in the future: The person who last visited your website yesterday or the person who last visited two years ago?   Recency matters.   Who is more likely to buy from you in the future, the customer who bought from you once before or the customer who bought from you ten times before?   Frequency matters. This is why at PostPilot, we build most retention campaigns on a Recency Frequency (RF) basis.   2️⃣ More helpful in selling to your existing customers. Two guys: Steve (household income of 20K) and Joe (household income of 200K).    Poor Steve’s bought from you before. Rich Joe hasn’t.   In Steve’s case, he bought a jump rope from you before. You want to sell more stuff to your customers. Based on what you’ve seen from your customer base, people who buy jump ropes ultimately buy kettlebells.   So your next offer to Steve is a kettlebell. And maybe a warm-up band.    Like many of your customers before, Steve buys the kettlebell as the natural second purchase.   And Joe still hasn’t made a purchase yet.   The behavioral record will help us increase our CLV from Steve, where demographic information won’t do that. 3️⃣ Behavioral segmentation is WAY more actionable. It doesn’t help me to know that the typical customers on my website might read Time magazine or live in New Jersey or are an average age of 51.   But if I know... ➝ Products they’ve purchased before ➝ Last time they opened an email ➝ How they were acquired . . . And all kinds of behavioral factors, I can act.   I can set up rules in tools like Klaviyo and PostPilot, and I can market to them differently and sell to them differently. It’s much more actionable. And automate-able.   BTW. . .    I’m not arguing that demographic segmentation is useless.    Certainly, it’s helpful.    (Really, the Holy Grail is when you can combine behavioral with demographic segmentation.)   But RF(M) behavior should be your first and consistent focus.    And direct mail can help there. We build all the following campaign types around RF: ➝ Winbacks/VIP winbacks ➝ Second-purchase campaigns ➝ Cross-sells & upsells ➝ Subscriber reactivation ➝ Replenishment reminders   Set yourself up and drive repurchases from your own Harley Grannies. 

Ideal Customer Profile for B2B Companies: the 7-step guide & templates. 1. Market Segmentation ICP is a list of attributes that your BEST customers from a SPECIFIC market segment have in common. And here’s the most common mistake B2B companies make: blending data from different segments. As a result, they end up with:  - Broad ICP - Spray-and-pray targeting - One-size-fits-all positioning with no differentiation 2. Identify your best customers and capture their firmographics criteria Identify the top 20% of customers responsible for 80% of your revenue. Then, identify common firmographics and technographics criteria. 3. Win-loss deal analysis and account (dis)qualification criteria When selling 6+ figure deals, you cannot afford to spend 9-18 months chasing a customer with a 10% chance of closing. That's the role of account qualification in disqualification criteria. Study:  - Largest and fastest won deals, and identify the common patterns (e.g. low margins, do multicurrency exports).  - Largest lost deals to identify red flags, criteria that can make you loose a deal even if they're a perfect ICP fit (e.g. CFO with 2+ year tenure) 4. Define and enrich the buying committee The biggest difference between B2B and B2C is the buying committee (multiple people who are influencing the deal). Here is how to identify them: - Check CRM contacts from top deals  - Talk to sales and ask who their main contact was, the other people they spoke with, and people mentioned - Ask your customers about who was involved, or asked for a feedback 5. Analyze the buying process Define the buying triggers, and WHERE, HOW and WHY your best customers learn, discover, evaluate and buy solutions like yours. 6. Deep-dive customer interviews Ask them about:  - Buying triggers - Research process - Decision making process, their purchase criteria, and why they chose you over competitors - Value they got from your product - Where they hang out and learn 7. Summarize all your findings Combine the data and fill in the ICP template. Next, present the ICP to senior leadership and sales, and get an alignment on it. --- An actionable ICP should help you answer these questions: - How do we replicate our best deals?  - How do we build a target account & buyer list?  - What do we need to know about them to create relevant content & messaging?  - How can we stack the odds in our favor that we are marketing to the top tier accounts that we are more likely to win and retain over the long time? - How can we can market and sell to them the way they actually buy? If you want to see this framework in action, join Andrei Zinkevich a new episode of Full-Funnel Live. P.S. We'll also share a few of our ICP templates, and more info about the upcoming ICP deep dive. #b2bmarketing 

Market segmentation is often more about you than the market. Traditionally... we choose to cluster groups of people or companies based on some combination of their demographics (age, gender), psychographics (values, opinions, interests, behaviours) or firmographics (industry, company size, org structure). Personas and ICPs (ideal customer profiles) are often the output of these exercises. For example, on the B2C side your target persona might look like: Thrifty Tiffany the 34 year old mom with two kids, a cat, drives a 2014 jeep Cherokee who lives in the Northwest. On the B2B side your ICP might look more like: CFO Sam the 45 year old executive with a mid-market ($10M - $1B) aerospace company based in Virginia. While these personas might accurately represent specific niche audiences within the market, it's very likely that you'll end up lowballing the size of your potential customer base with them. Here's a better alternative. First: segment the market first by their needs. Tony Ulwick has published a lot of great content on this. By first understanding the jobs customers are trying to get done and how well their needs are being met, we can more accurately estimate the size of our market. The benefit to the business is that we then maximize the number of potential customers we have to serve. In a recent interview with Mimi Turner and Jann Martin Schwarz, Vassilis and I got to hear a related idea being born. In B2B, these needs, or jobs to be done (JTBD), are very often emotional. In B2B buying, Jann & Mimi discovered the top 5 emotional (JTBD) are 1. I felt I would be able to defend the decision, even if it went wrong. 2. I feel confident that the thing we are buying will do the job 3. I knew there would be downsides but I felt they could be managed 4. The Buyer Group were more or less aligned 5. The buying process was easy-ish No matter the product or service, using the emotional JBTD is a legitimate way to first understand and segment the market. This has massive downstream application as well when it comes to execution through the 4Ps and especially in the promotional creative & messaging. Think about CFO Sam - traditionally, we'd use his profile to mirror the creative so that it looks familiar to his workplace. We might use a picture of a guy with an airplane engine in the background and talk about the features of the product. But if we knew that creating confidence in the buying group of 15 people was the main job to be done, than the creative could appeal to all buyers in the decision making process rather than just targeting CFO Sam with the feature / benefits of the widgets. For more on this, check out our new episode on the complexities of B2B buying, our post-pod discussion or the interview on JTBD with Tony - links in the comments below.