How to Build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for MSP Success | MKC Agency Guid

Hey there, I'm Megan Killian, the founder and chief consultant here at MKC Agency, and I wanna walk you guys through how we develop an ICP for our MSP clients as part of our lead generation offering. So honestly, if we are building an ICP for somebody, just one of those outta the box, bare minimum, a simple one is $500 and a full one can be up to $5,000. With this package, you get this completely free. It's built right into your onboarding costs. So with that said, let's just jump right in and I'll show you how we build one. Okay, so here's the template, and this is the KPIs right here. Here's the ICP builder. Now, the most important thing to remember is that this does not read top to bottom. It's reading more left to right as a scoring template. So the goal is to use this to be able to score every single contact that we or you or anyone in your org wants to add to your CRM for outreach. So at the bottom, you'll see generally we say a score of 21 or higher is an ideal prospect. A score from 14 to 20 is worth prospecting efforts and research to up that score, and a score under 20 needs to be researched and evaluated further before you pursue it. You can change these numbers based on your goals, how this sheet is spitting out numbers for you, and also just like how many salespeople you have to spend their time chasing after contacts. So what we do is we ask each customer to come to this meeting with their list of current customers, and we ask them to kind of reflect a little bit on their core values and their business to define What a good customer is. Is it someone who doesn't put in very many tickets? Is it someone who is easy to close? Someone who pays a lot of money? Someone who's highly profitable? They sort of need to figure that out themselves, or they can pay us to come in and consult on that. But it's not really included in this ICP building. So they need to sort of filter their client list based on those factors, because you and I both know not every client is a good client. Some clients are drains on our time, drains on our resources. They make our employees hate us. So we wanna make sure that we're getting you clients that not only are gonna be closable, but also will be happy long-term clients that pay you a lot of money, don't cost you a ton to service. That said, depending on where you're at in terms of your priorities, you may kind of feel like any client's a client. I hear that a lot from my MSP customers, but at the end of the day, someone who has 5 computers is no good for targeting. It's no good for messaging. So we come in here and we say, okay, what's a 5 for vertical? These are the companies that you get their industry, you know how they talk, you know how to solve their specific niche problems. Do they have strong compliance issues? Um, ones that come up a lot are like legal, medical, finance. Um, but it's all just about What you do. So for the purpose of this one, let's just say the ideal customer is in healthcare, because you have a lot of healthcare customers that you can point to their case studies. They typically don't churn. They're easy for you to service because you've built a lot of automation. You know all the systems that they work in, and they're just— they're easy customers for you, right? We say those are a 5. So then we're gonna say, okay, well, what's like a 4? Something that's good but not quite as good as healthcare. And you say, all right, that's legal. Number 3, maybe it's finance. Maybe 2 is construction. And this does not have to be one thing for every column. So you could say healthcare, medical. What else could we throw in here? Let's just say like utilities. Some, some of my clients really love utilities. And then let's just say like over here you wanted to put like Construction and engineering together. Just anybody you would rate as this is gonna go into this portion where on our end, our goal is to only get you clients that are 21 or higher. So you wanna keep that in mind as we're building this together, that if it's a 1 for an industry, that's basically like, that's bad. It's not good, right? So you would put in the 1 column Companies maybe you don't wanna do business with or that are harder for you to service. So that employee user count, I would say that right now most of the MSPs that are coming to me are saying their ideal seat is 20 to 50. Some, some clients that have bigger MSPs, they do want more customers, but most of my clients, they really do well with SMBs. And if they have too few seats, like 5, they become really expensive to service. But if they have too many, they become too complex. So this is their sweet spot. And then we say, okay, well, what's like the next best? Is it bigger or smaller? And so like, let's just say you're a smaller MSP. So you say, actually, like 5 to 20 is the next best size for us. And then you say, okay, well, after that, like 51 to 100 can work for us. What's like too large? Over 250? Or under 5, we don't really wanna work with them. And here might be like 100 to 250, right? Distance from the office. Now I do have 2 clients that are remote-first MSPs and they can support people anywhere. And that's a really, really cool differentiator that they have. But most MSPs I work with are, are pretty deeply entrenched in their local communities. They wanna be able to send a, a tech on site. That's part of their value, is that they will deploy a technician into your office. So for that reason, most of my clients are like, okay, well, we want them within, say, 10 miles of the office. Alternatively, sometimes we put zip codes into this field. It really depends on where you're located. So like, I live in the Orlando metropolitan area. I live in Maitland, which is just northeast of the city. From here, it's like really incredibly easy for me to service someone in Sanford. But it would be extremely hard for me to service someone in Kissimmee. Even though they're about equidistant from my office, they still are really very different in terms of time, because I have to go through the city, or I don't. So that's one of the things that we consider. We can either do it by like the number of miles, or we can do it by zip code. So typically 5s, they're very close to your office, right? They might be in the same zip code as you. Some people even put it in as like a link drive. That's a little bit hard for us to translate into our contact searching software, but we do our best. And then we talk about title. So with title, who do you ultimately wanna get to? Almost always CEO and owner sit here in number 5. We just, we know that's usually the person that signs on the dotted line. Then in number 4, we usually see like CFO, or office admin. And then here we see like IT director. We might see just like other finance/administrative people here, right? And we're just— again, we are rating based on how high of a value they are for us to talk to. So if we know that the CEO or owner is usually gonna be the decision maker, we also kind of throw founder into that column, president, GM, We also know the people who influence the decision. Finance may have to look at our contract. The office admin, you know, they run this shit, right? Like, we know that they know every single problem that's going on in the office. They know who's having trouble with their tech. They know, you know, what the contracts look like, who's frustrated. So even though they may not sign your contract, They're gonna be a really, really heavy hitter in terms of influence here. And this is different from company to company. You know, I worked with one MSP that was like, honestly, almost all of our contracts are signed by legal. Now, they were a bigger MSP, right? So maybe you do have like legal on here. Does the company have internal IT employees? Some MSPs are built to just be like your outsourced technology resource. That's great. There are other MSPs that are built to more so make your IT director's job easier if you just have one, or others are meant for outsourcing off-hour support so that you don't have to have somebody work the night shift. It really depends on your MSP and your go-to-market strategy. But I would say that usually, like, here we have zero, and then here we have like one, and it's like if they have 2, we would almost never work with them. Do they have an MSP today? There's really only a yes or no answer here, but we can put in some other sort of suggestions. So do they have an MSP? Usually we like to go in against another MSP because it means they already understand your business model, and if they're talking to you, that means there's a problem. There's something that you can do better than the current MSP. But some companies would rather go in and they've never had an MSP before. Those people are usually targeting companies that are closer to the 5-seat to 10-seat range. So yes, they have an MSP down here. We might have like, no, they've never had one here. We might have looking for one here. We might have just fired the IT guy or IT guy listing. You know, these are the types of things we can put in here. That we can search for in software. Then do they value technology? So you would think this is a yes/no question, but really what it's allowing us to do is track technographic data. So let's say you're an MSP that exclusively supports Office 365, which y'all old men, that seems to be the only thing that you wanna support, despite the fact that like more and more millennials are owning businesses and really prefer Google Suite. Just something for you to think about anyways. O365 can go here. That's something I can go into the backend of my software and be like, hey, show me medical companies with 25 employees that are within 10 miles of Orlando. Show me owner contact info where they don't have any IT employees, and they're using Office 365, and that's gonna give us a really niche list. A lot of times, a lot of times, as a server comes up, we use this kind of data one of 2 ways. Either it is so that we can go search using technographic data, or it's so that when our SDRs are calling, they have a question to ask like, hey, do you have a server? Because some MSPs are like, if they don't have a server, there's no point in us working with them. Other MSPs are looking for specific cloud software. And you give us the names of the ones that you support and work with, and we plug that in. Um, some MSPs are like, we don't do on-prem, we'll only support cloud. Um, one thing of note here is like, it can be a really good conversation starter. A lot of times when I'm calling into MSPs, I'll say something like, hey, are you using— are you using ConnectWise as your CRM? And then I'll ask a couple of questions about the pain points I know that are associated with that. Like, do your sales guys complain about how difficult it is to build dashboards in ConnectWise? Or do they talk about how difficult it is to send and track email through that system? That gives me an opening to talk about how we built a whole sales outbound engine in Glasshive that connects right into Connect. So it's just, it's a conversation starter, and also we can use it to search. Then these ones generally stay the same, whether or not they're aware of you. We can scale it, you know, like how aware they are of you, usually in this column. We look for like we've spoken to them before. In this column we tend to see something like connected on LinkedIn, or they follow our social, maybe on our email list, whatever. And then down here would be like, no, they're not aware of us. They've never heard of us cold. Full contact data is always direct dial, email, and LinkedIn. But we do scale it where like 3 is mid. So this one is usually just email. This one is email and LinkedIn. This one is direct dial and email. You get the idea, right? We're just, we're just grading based on the amount of contact info we have. And then LinkedIn connected, the, the top one would be first, and then everything else would be like third. Plus. So once we have this information, we can then go into a specific lead. So let's just do an example in Apollo really quick, which is just one of many softwares that we use in our day-to-day searching for customers. So let's just say we were rating for this, this MSP that we just made up. This guy, Kenneth Stowe, is VP of Enviromatic Systems, which looks like it's a utility company. So that would make it a 5 in column 1. And then Employee user count. We're gonna go to the company, and it's gonna tell us they have 36 employees. So that's once again gonna be a 5. Distance from the office for this client. This person is within 10 miles of their client, of their office. So we're gonna say it's a 5. Title. This guy's a VP. So maybe we'd put that as like a 3 or a 4. I'm gonna make it a 4. Internal IT employees. And again, we're gonna go to Enviromatic, because I don't know if we searched for it when we did this. But when I go to their employees overall and open filters, is there anybody in IT there? No. Apply filters. So they have 12 people that are supposedly in IT, but this looks like these guys are systems programmers, engineering matters. So this doesn't look like standard, like IT director type. So we're gonna say that there's 0, which makes them a 5 here. Do they have an MSP today? Now we would have to call to find that info out. So we don't know yet. Do they value technology? We can take a look at their Infographic data back on that name. It's gonna show me their technologies. They're using O365. So we're saying that gives them a 5. Are they aware of us? We're gonna say that they're not. I do have full data here. And we're not LinkedIn connected. So that's 5, 10, 15, 19, 24. We're already up above 21 by the time I get to the 5th column, right? So this guy would be a great contact. Full steam ahead. What we do is we log into GlassHive. We would go into your vendor account, and from there we're just gonna go Telecom One because they're not an MSP, which means y'all can't steal anything from them. We go down in and we go to contacts. We would upload the contact or add a new contact. So when we get into Glasshive, the important thing is that we want to one, mark them as an MQC, which is how we say that they're marketing qualified, meaning we scored them and they scored above whatever the precipice is. So for this situation, it's a 21. And then when you scroll over to the right a little bit, you'll see that you can actually mark the score itself on that person. So this gives whoever's working these accounts, and in our plans, that's— you're getting an SDR assigned that's gonna call into these accounts as well as send emails, and they are going to prioritize who they call by 2 main sort of levers in the system. One, what's their score? How ideal of a candidate are they? And 2 is how warm are they? Are they opening our emails? Are they engaging with our content? Are they reading things, responding to things, etc.? So every day when your SDR comes in, they're getting a list of who the top priorities are to call. Now, in these packages, usually we deliver about 200 MQCs, which if you were to buy those separately, we charge $15 an MQC to do this process. It is time-consuming. We also go verify those emails. So we build out each, each person's being scored, they're being put into GlassHive, and then we're using those levers to give them a full list. So let's say you have 200 MQCs because you're in one of our 6-month packages, and all 200 are gonna get called. But we are going to call the warmer, higher-scored leads first and more often, because those are the ones we really want to get in touch with. Does this all make sense? Does it not? Shoot me an email if it doesn't. Leave a comment. Let's talk about it.