If your company could sell its solution to a market as deep as an ocean, you need to focus on the prospects with the greatest chances of buying it for maximum effectiveness.

Even if you’ve never gone fishing, you probably understand the basics behind doing it right. You don’t randomly cast a line, hoping to catch something. You identify the type of fish that bite the specific bait you use, and then you go where a large school of those fish swims.

Likewise, if your company could sell its solution to a market as deep as an ocean, you need to focus on the prospects with the greatest chances of buying it for maximum effectiveness. With sales and marketing, proving out a repeatable, financially-efficient customer acquisition program is good for the business, leadership confidence and justifying additional investment to scale the commercial engine.

At Dizzion, we used a data-driven Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and named-accounts approach to optimize customer acquisition, focusing on the most relevant and likely prospects within a very large total addressable market (TAM). Below, I’ll highlight the steps we took to develop an ICP, how we used it to skillfully go-to-market and what we learned from the effort.

Our goal was to focus the talent and resources we had on the companies and opportunities that represented the highest possible level of success.

How it started

Dizzion was founded in 2011 with a singular mission to redefine the way the world works. The company created a cloud-based, end-user computing offering called Desktop as a Service (DaaS) to protect businesses with remote and third-party end users, give team members the freedom to work from anywhere and streamline the entire EUC management process for overworked IT departments.

The 2020 work-from-home shift, brought on by the COVID pandemic, created a huge demand surge for Dizzion. Organizations were simply not built to support full-scale remote work and needed a solution to keep things business as usual without the comfort and security of the office environment. Every remote team member represented a serious security and compliance risk, especially for those operating under strict government regulations.

This exponentially wider market opportunity forced Dizzion to develop a more scalable go-to-market approach. We were simply not resourced to go after it all. Our goal was to focus the talent and resources we had on the companies and opportunities that represented the highest possible level of success, while managing costs and relying on mature and predictable sales outcomes.

So, we created a scalable, integrated and automated customer profiling framework, termed an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), that allowed us to target and engage exactly the right prospects. It’s a focused, repeatable commercial engine that thrives under normal operating conditions as well as periods of significant demand spikes.

With limited revenue team resources, the opportunity cost of engaging the wrong targets is significant.

Our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) methodology

With limited revenue team resources, the opportunity cost of engaging the wrong targets is significant. Prospecting hundreds of thousands of targets is neither possible, nor strategic, for most businesses.

The ICP exercise is an excellent way to bring leadership stakeholders to the table around a high-stakes challenge like this. An ICP is a data-driven approach that indicates what makes one customer a better fit for your company than another. A simple ICP can be developed around common business attributes—including size, revenue, industry and location—that are readily available using common tools and data services such as LinkedIn.

We developed a Dizzion-specific formula to identify our ICP and use data to narrow it further. Here’s how we did it:

  1. First, starting with institutional knowledge and looking at our existing, most valuable customers, we identified the best fit company criteria for our ICP and future sales targets. Based on the foundational, available data and insights from our sales team, we were able to identify similar accounts in our pipeline.
    • However, this ICP filtered the list of prospective companies from tens of millions down to more than one hundred thousand: Still too large for our needs and efficiency.

2. Then, we went beyond this basic ICP to gather next-level data by implementing a scoring formula within the ICP, thus narrowing further to the “best of the best” and identifying named accounts. Criteria included shared alliance partners, propensity to outsource IT or use cloud-based services, and the probability of a bad desktop environment leading to unhappy users.

    • Obtaining this detailed data can be difficult, but investing in technology platforms such as ZoomInfo makes it easier.
    • This took the initial list from over one hundred thousand to a manageable segment of approximately 9,000 accounts.

3. After that, we segmented these named accounts, mapping the most likely targets to the most capable and relevant resources on our team. The accounts were then prioritized into levels from 1-4 based on scoring of strategically desirable characteristics. This tier-based prioritization was also used with alliance partner integration and account mapping with strategic teams to increase efficiencies.

    • Dizzion assigned the top 17% of the “named accounts” to account executives with specific sales penetration expectations.
    • The rest of the upper-tier accounts were entered into marketing programs to nurture until identifying sales-ready organizations to transfer to internal sales-ready resources.
    • We also partnered with internal alliance teams to help them prioritize the accounts that mapped to our alliance partner customer/prospect lists, so that we could identify ideal overlap and launch joint penetration efforts.

We continue to evaluate our account scoring during the year to make sure we remain effective through market fluctuations.

Business impact of Dizzion’s ICP in action

Keys to Dizzion’s success with an Ideal Customer Profile included setting a foundation that would scale efficiently and effectively, starting with the right tools, and a small team of talented sales and marketing personnel that would evolve into a powerful, global engine that optimized customer acquisition in any Dizzion availability zone across the world.

This new account-based scoring also helps sales and marketing respond appropriately to new leads that come in via inbound sources. We continue to evaluate our account scoring during the year to make sure we remain effective through market fluctuations.

Design your marketing technology stack with care by thinking about the tools to best help you reach and engage your target audience.

What we’ve learned

If you’re thinking about developing an ICP or a similar program to optimize your customer acquisition process and costs, consider several factors:

  • Your MARTECH stack: design your marketing technology stack with care by thinking about the tools to best help you reach and engage your target audience. At Dizzion, we used Salesforce.com, ZoomInfo, Marketo, Salesloft, and LinkedIn SalesNavigator.
  • Data, data, data: look at the data you collect, think about what more you want to obtain from it and decide what you might require next. Are you using data sources that offer next-level information on technology usage, department-level budgets and real-time updates? What about AI-based or intent data? This will help you begin to refine your target lists, and, if necessary, continue to draw them out further into tiers.
  • Stay in your lane: developing an ICP and, most importantly, using it to tier and name a set of target accounts for each member of your sales and marketing team, is tremendously helpful for keeping individuals in their own “swim lane.” That’s not to say there’s no collaboration on key accounts, but the exercise helps everyone find individual focus and accountabilities, prevent internal confusion or competition, and get everyone working more strategically.
  • Be resource-full: developing an ICP can be an involved undertaking; think about putting a team in place or partnering with third-party vendors who can assist with setting up and running data sourcing, scoring formulas and systems integration. This prevents small departments and/or executive marketing player/coaches from being taken offline to complete a lengthy, highly tactical process.

Here’s the bottom line.

Developing an ICP can help you bring a structured approach to narrowing your TAM to the most profitable targets as well as scaling for growth. As a result of this process, at Dizzion we’ve identified the companies that have the highest propensity to purchase what we sell. All of this led to more quality prospecting engagements as well as an opportunity for sustained short and long-term profitability.

We began with identifying the right tools and a small team of talented sales and marketing professionals—and we evolved that into a powerful, global go-to-market engine that has optimized customer acquisition around the world.

And there’s nothing fishy about that.

This GrowthBit is featured in LLR’s 2023 Growth Guide, along with other exclusive insights from our portfolio company leaders and Value Creation Team. Download the eBook here.