Startup 101: What's an ideal customer profile (ICP)?

Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a crucial yet often overlooked step for any business, especially for those in highly competitive industries like business banking and startups. An ICP outlines the key traits and characteristics of your best-fit potential customers, serving as a guide for your sales, marketing, and product development efforts.

For startups and smaller banks trying to gain traction, having a clear ICP enables you to better target prospects that are more likely to become long-term, high-value customers. It helps you avoid wasting time and resources chasing after leads that are unlikely to convert or won't provide much return on investment.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk through a step-by-step process for creating an ideal customer profile tailored specifically for companies in the business banking and startups space.

## Steps to Create Your Ideal Customer Profile

### 1. Identify Your Best Existing Customers

The first step is analyzing your current customers, especially your most profitable and longest-tenured ones. Look for common patterns across factors like:

- Industry and sub-industry
- Company size/number of employees
- Annual revenue
- Years in business
- Location
- Current financial service providers and products used
- Average account balances
- Payment volumes/transaction frequency
- Credit score/financial health

Group together customers that share multiple traits to start determining clusters that make up your best customer base.

### 2. Conduct Market Research

Next, dive deeper into market research to expand your understanding of potential target customer segments for business banking and startups. Useful areas to investigate include:

- Industry growth trends and forecasts
- Funding stages and investment trends
- Geographic startup and small business density indexes
- Competitor targets and ideal customers
- Business and financial product usage surveys

Integrate insights from research with current customer patterns. Identify 2-3 high-potential target customer profiles based on alignment of their needs with your offerings and overall attractiveness.

### 3. Create Detailed Buyer Personas

With target customer segments identified, develop detailed buyer personas that humanize your understanding of each group. Include specifics like:

- Fictional name/photo/bio background
- Common pain points and challenges
- Goals/priorities
- Decision-making habits
- Values and motivations
- Media consumption habits

Fleshing out personas in this way, including giving them a name and photo, makes it easier to envision your ideal customers and craft messaging that resonates.

### 4. Outline Your Ideal Customer Profile

Now, compile all the research, customer data, and buyer personas into a single ideal customer profile document that provides an overview of your perfect-fit customer.

For business banking, this should outline details like target customer industry, sub-industry, years in business, revenue range, transaction volumes, credit health, number of locations, and number of employees.

For startups, highlight aspects like funding stage, industry/sub-industry focus, investor profiles, founder backgrounds, headcount growth plans, projected future funding needs, and more.

Having this detailed ICP makes it easy for sales, marketing, product teams to instantly evaluate whether a potential customer is likely worth pursuing or not.

### 5. Use Your ICP to Guide Strategy

With your ideal customer profile set, ensure you actually leverage it to focus your:

**Marketing Strategy:** Craft targeted content, ads, and campaigns positioning your brand as the go-to provider for your ICP customer segments. Optimize sites for SEO keywords your personas search. Publish content addressing common persona pain points. Sponsor events they attend. And promote through channels they frequent.

**Sales Strategy:** Equip business development reps with persona profiles so they can qualify prospects accordingly. Prioritize outreach to companies that closely match ICP criteria. Customize pitches based on persona goals/challenges. Focus on territories/verticals with high ICP customer density.

**Product Strategy:** Gather ongoing user feedback from target customer segments. Identify the features and functionalities that matter most in their decision criteria. Shape product roadmaps to ensure you offer an industry-leading solution tailored for your ICP needs.

Continually tracking performance metrics by customer profile allows you to double down on what works and shift investments away from less profitable targets.

# Conclusion
Defining your ideal customer is essential for startups and business banks looking to disrupt much larger players in a competitive landscape. By identifying profitable target customer profiles through analysis of your current book and additional market research, you can then build out detailed buyer personas to deeply understand the needs of each segment. With this crystal clear picture of your ideal customer, you have a blueprint for crafting a winning growth strategy across marketing, sales and product development with laser focus on the customers with the highest lifetime value potential. The most successful companies continually refine this understanding of ideal customers and double down on aligning their strategy to profitably serve these best-fit segments.