🔦 Spotlight - ICP research

How to know why they click and stick

The long term readers of the SBO Hub will be familiar with all the aspects of building a Strategy and BizOps function. One question I get often is, “when should I start building BizOps? The easy answer is ‘it depends’. Usually when you know you need to start scaling you should already have a BizOps person, at least. But ideally you have a foundation on which to build - and that foundation is basic systems and an ICP. That could have been built by BizOps or a sensible team before that. But BizOps can’t do anything of substance for your company before you have nailed what the ICP is. We can (probably) fix the system if it was clunky. But ICP is Business 101. You don’t need to have a fancy MBA to know this.

If you didn’t have it, it would be akin to building a house on sand: Marketing doesn’t know who to talk to, Sales have no idea how to approach the sales conversation, CS doesn’t know how hard they should work to keep a customer, Finance might be pushing for “efficiency” in the wrong ways... I’d even ask, “What is there to scale?” Your sand castle in the sky? Doesn’t work like that.

Photo by Jaime Spaniol on Unsplash

But, even when I hear founders telling me they know their ICP, at times, I have had to at least polish, or build the ICP from scratch.

How do I know you have an ICP problem?

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🩺 You know you have an ICP problem when…

Sales and Revenue Indicators

• Your sales team struggles to close deals despite putting in significant effort

• Your conversion rates are consistently low or declining

• You’re experiencing unpredictable revenue with peaks and troughs

• Your sales process feels unnecessarily complicated and inefficient

Customer Relationship Issues

• You’re facing a high customer churn rate

• Customer onboarding is consistently lengthy and / or challenging

• Customer satisfaction scores or NPS are declining

• Customers aren’t seeing the ROI they expected from your solution

Operational Challenges

• Your marketing and sales teams are misaligned on who to target

• You find yourself constantly pivoting your target market

• Your team is “throwing darts in the dark” or “spaghetti on a wall”

• You’re competing primarily on price rather than value

Data-Driven Warning Signs

• You’ve performed your ICP exercise multiple times but still feel uncertain

• Your team is pursuing different customers with no clear pattern of success

• You can’t clearly articulate the specific problem you’re solving for customers

• Your sales team is targeting based solely on basic demographics … or billing

(Yes, once I heard “Our ICP is anyone that sends us an invoice” ← 🚩😅😧😳)

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So, whenever I see there is a vast gap between a solid ICP foundation and where I find the company to be, I have a number of questions I want to ask the customers.

The following is an example of a line of questioning to get to the ICP. But first, let’s define ICP: Ideal Customer Profile, a definition of the firmographics of the buying entity. Within ICP you usually have a number of Personas: that’s the dramatisation of the living and breathing human who uses, views, and buys the product. I carve out the Persona for what I believe should be obvious reasons.

I like to structure the research in two parts:

Level 1: a written form to be filled out pre-interview, exploring the ICP and Persona. Level 2: a live 1:1 interview over 45-60min with individuals within each Persona. This one dives into what I call the DMQs: the Deep Motivation Questions. The questions that take it all out of you and the interviewee but give you so bloody much!

And, Yes, that long. Because firmographics are only the beginning. You need to drill down into the psychographics of the customer throughout the full cycle of usage, to understand what really makes them click and then stick. I’d rather have 10 interviews of quality than 30 of a 15min conversation, per segment that is.

Note that the following is the skeleton. You can dial up or down any of those depending on what you need to learn.

On this rare occasion, I will leave the comment section open, in case there are questions. 🤓

So. Let’s. Dive. IN! 🤿

Level 1:

ICP

1. Company size:

- Global Level - # employees

- Regional office or country office - # of employees

2. Corporate structure:

- is their company a part of a larger parent conglomerate?

- or is it independent?

- how many departments are involved in the purchasing of solutions? / Or do they have central procurement?

3. Revenues:

- bucketed in $

4. Budget for tools:

- bucketed in $

- at what budget does Procurement get involved?

5. Industries:

- list of industries, informed by your own data

6. Markets:

- list of geos, informed by your own data

7. Tech stack:

- Which apps / tools do they use on a daily or weekly basis?

- Which are must-have integrations?

- Which tools did they acquire recently?

Persona

1. Where do they sit in their organisation?

- Global OR Regional office OR Country office

2. What is their management experience?

- Individual contributor; Manager; Executive (or Manager of Managers)

3. Which Function are they part of?

- Which department do they sit in? Who do they interface with on a daily basis? Who do they need to seek approval from for their initiatives? (as relevant to the product you are selling)

4. Who do they report to:

- Level, Title, Role of N+1, N+2, etc

5. Do they hold budget for tools or have access to unlocking such?

- Yes / No

5b. If Yes, How much is their annual budget?

- bucketed in $

6. Do they make vendor selection decisions?

- Yes / No

6b. If Yes, What is their scope for such decisions?

- For which teams / functions

7. What % of the time do they…:

- achieve results through others; gather people cross functionally; work as an Individual Contributor

8. How do they use your product?

- use case 1 / 2 / 3; with access as viewer, editor, admin.

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Level 2:

Deep Motivation Questions

Push of the situation (what problems pushed them to seek a solution):

• What are their top goals?

• Why are those important?

• What’s in it for them? (professionally, personally)

• How do they typically go about reaching those goals?

• What existing solutions do they use? or stitch together?

Pull of the new solution (what attracted them to your solution):

• How did they first think about finding a solution to their problem?

• What was the frustration?

• How did they find you?

• What did they compare your product to? (direct / indirect competition)

• What caught their attention about your solution?

• What made them sign up?

Anxiety of the new solution (what concerns they had)

• What doubts did they have before they started using the solution?

• What was the first value they got?

• How long did it take?

• What do they absolutely love about your solution?

• What do they hate about it?

• Do they still hold long term concerns?

Habit of the present (what existing habits make them hesitant to long term change, and adoption)

• Did the solution live up to expectations?

• Did they come back to it?

• Why did they come back?

• How often do they use it? How does it fit into their work / life cadence?

• What blockers do they have to using the product more?

• Have they shared it with anybody?

• Ultimately, do they feel they get ROI? (no calculators allowed)

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Again, depending on what you already know about your customer, you definitely want to add or subtract some questions.

In a previous company, I ran this with fewer questions, but I found that a big driver for why senior execs were buying into the solution was the desire to stay relevant. It was so pronounced that NOT talking about this felt like a crime! I personally signed two customers (and I wasn’t in Sales) just by talking to Champions in the company about those feelings. Never underestimate ICP research. You think you know it all. I 99% guarantee you don’t. And you only need one nugget to change the course of a Quarter.

NB: I can hear a few people already shouting: but Vess, I am in BizOps, I didn’t study how to interview people, or conduct research. Shouldn’t this be Product or Marketing who does this? This is a unique skill, and yes, not everybody feels comfortable with it. But, I guarantee that if you have never done this, you will benefit immensely if you cultivate customer interviewing. Start small, maybe not with full on ICP but some smaller user research topic, and work your way to more complex projects. It teaches you so much, gives you so much empathy, and ultimately makes you much more reliable business executive. At any given time, various functions have latent questions sitting on the back of their mind. If you took the initiative, your company would benefit from someone to pull all the these together and deliver!

Once you have your questions ready, get a big jug of coffee, charge up your laptop, and get ready for some conversations that will open your eyes wide! ☕️

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