Today I’m sharing what we call our EICP or Enhanced Ideal Customer Profile. Most people are familiar with the concept of the Ideal Client Profile (although few have it written down in a way they can use).
The Enhanced profile goes further and has a more granular definition of an “Ideal client”. It is also formatted in a way to correspond with various databases so one can search for matches on platforms like LinkedIn.
It crosses the boundaries between marketing and sales by including psychographics and Universal Pain Points – things that are statistically very likely to be true among a group of similar people and among the most important concerns among members of that group.
The best way to use it is with a team. Each person on the team likely has a different idea of the “ideal” customer and what that customer things or believes. Hopefully marketing has performed primary customer research and can back their positions with data (not usually the case).
The key is to combine the teams perceptions, confirm with research and have a unified definition that takes into account how the target market perceives your offering and what their beliefs are around that offering.
We developed this over many years and use it as part of our Marketing Action Planning System our proprietary system of rapidly diagnosing a client’s marketing problems, pulling together the people, information and processes to execute and solve those problems.
The EICP is just one small part of the process we facilitate with B2B companies and most clients can get it down on paper in 20 minutes. Some clients have multiple profiles with different characteristics and concerns – so we map each one.
The value of writing it down is that it can then be analyzed by a team, it brings the team together with a common definition that can be referred to later (and over and over again). It’s a living document that evolves as the business evolves.