This content was created by Gregory Shepard. This content was uploaded by Gregory Shepard. This is a YouTube video titled "Why Knowing Your Ideal Customer is so Important? | Gregory Shepard | Minute Mentor" (published 2022-06-24) featuring Gregory Shepard giving a short mentor-style talk. He explains the difference between ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona, outlines how to decompose an ICP (company attributes, needs, willingness to pay/do, cultural fit), and gives practical go-to-market and messaging advice (including that the biggest competitor is often the prospect doing nothing).
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So I want to talk a little bit about ICP. ICP and persona are different. So the ICP is the company and the persona is the person that works at the company. Different, right? So you can sell the company all you want and have value to add to the company, so on and so forth. But a lot of times, and I've experienced this myself, you're trying to sell somebody something that is actually going to put them out of a job. Or you're trying to sell them something that's going to be really complicated and hard for them to initiate, or they're really busy at the moment and they don't have a right time, or you're trying to sell something that they have to go sell to legal and their, their chain of command, and it's just too much of a hassle. So the biggest competitor is usually do nothing. It's not some other competitor, oddly enough. When it comes to ICP and you're looking at the company itself, Understanding the ideal customer profile. Ideal is very important. What I mean by that is you have to think of things like, what do they want? What do they need? What is a pain point? And what is a nicety? The next thing you have to think about is what are they willing to do themselves? And what are they willing to pay for? And where are you willing to cede to your competitors in order to achieve in another area? So when you're breaking down your ideal customer profile, you need to make sure that the components that add up to understanding exactly who the company is. A way to think about this is if you were to explain your company to somebody, you would say, well, my company is like this. It's got these kinds of people. It sells these kinds of customers at these prices in this ecosystem. And the overall feeling or culture of the company is this way, so on and so forth. You break down the ICP into the components that tell you a story about who you're selling to so that you can set up your go-to-market strategy, your content strategy, your messaging, all the way down to the colors based on the people that you're talking to in this company. I think that it's important that there is some sort of a blend between persona and ICP in the end, but it's important to do them separately. I hope this was helpful.
