Why deviating from your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) during launch costs more than just a poor win rate..
A critical step in any product launch is defining your ideal client profile (ICP), or put simply, the customer type most likely to purchase and retain a product like yours. On paper this exercise looks simple, “of course we know who we’re selling to”, but refining your ICP requires a lot of work. Once set, your ideal client profile should be central to all that follows in a product launch; your messaging, channels, content, objection handling and so on. Only with all these steps readied do you elevate your chances of driving commercial success upon launch.
Even after so much work to define the ICP and building your entire launch programs around these, without fail you will begin to get pressure to broaden the audiences being targeted. In my experiences this pressure largely comes from the sales organisation. This is even more prevalent in large global businesses with big sales teams that cover multiple regions and client types. You’ll hear things like:
“When can we expand marketing to {insert new client profile}?”
“I think i can sell this to clients in my region {insert completely different client types}?”
“We had a really interesting conversation with {insert new client profile), let’s target these firms too
Adding multiple variables at once, such as different client types, sizes, regions, at the point when you are trying to test true product market fit can have negative and sometimes irreversible impact on your new product launches. The following are all negative implications I have seen first hand doing so:
Win rates decrease
The definition of ICP is literally who are your most perfect paying clients for which this product was developed. Unless you luck out, or your original hypothesis were completely wrong, it’s very likely that the further you drift from your ICP into secondary or tertiary clients profiles, the harder you will find it to sell the product; certainly at the same price point defined. Obvious right!? But many organisations still have a view of throwing enough at the wall and hoping something sticks over conviction and quality.
Feedback gets harder to internalise
Those early client discussions are critical in understanding your ideal client’s willingness to pay for your new product. Staying really close to this feedback therefore is vital for informing some really key questions such as;
what product iterations are most critical to get paying clients
is our messaging being received how we thought
are our competitors who we thought they were
are the objections we are hearing aligned to what we expected and prepared the team for
And many more…
By adding additional, non-ideal client types to this already intensive feedback loop, it can become almost impossible to truly understand which feedback matters the most, and severely limits your ability to make the required iterations at the speed required.
I recently experienced this with a product launch I was brought in to reassess. It became obvious that the work to truly define their ICP up front had not happened to the degree required. On top of this, the team allowed any profile definition work they had done to drift as launch approached, meaning they launched to multiple regions, client types, sizes, characteristics simultaneously. Four months later they had closed one deal to a client type that I couldn’t even classify as tertiary, but even worse, they had no idea what was causing such little success - messaging, product features, sales ability, competition? Without defining who the product was built for and sticking to it, they had no way to filter in or out the most relevant feedback, rendering them almost paralyzed and teams pointing at each other as the reason for a lack of success.
Focus gets scattered
Whilst expanding the client profile means you have more whitespace to go after and a larger number of reps now selling this product, the quality of your pursuit of revenue is certain to decrease. Rather than focusing on executing in the highest probability client profiles, time is diluted between more secondary or tertiary profile opportunities. This will result in one of two things:
The standard of which you are able to understand these client profiles, and specifically plan and execute marketing and sales activations against them will fall significantly,
Your existing work begins to morph into more generic positioning, trying to be everything to everyone. Marketing efforts will also become reactive and ad hoc, rather than proactive and programmed.
In both these instances, chances of success in your ideal client profile will be reduced.
Sales waters get poisoned
In large, enterprise businesses many sales reps have multiple products they can sell. Choosing the path of least resistance is something I have seen time and time again, meaning it only takes a finite amount of rejection before a sales rep stops trying to sell that product. Giving a sales rep a sub-par product for their specific client base (not the ICP) is actually doing them a disservice, distracting them from where they have the best chance of winning business. What is worse is that these reps can also influence others to give up on their efforts with the new product, exchanging war-stories which culminate in the belief that “nobody wants this product”; whether true or not. Staying very tight on your ideal client profile means you can control this, informing reps that their client types/regions are, or are not, a target of the initial launch, as well as including those that are in your launch planning process.
Conclusion:
Maintaining conviction and focus around your ideal client profile is critical, particularly in the months following official launch. Whilst more reps selling to more clients sounds great on paper, these decisions severely impact your ability to plan, execute, learn and iterate at the pace required to successfully commercialise a product. Finding product market fit is hard, and requires constant feedback across teams and clients. Keeping your ICP and the team working on the launch tight is integral in finding initial product-market fit, from which gas can be poured onto the fires by expanding across a larger client base and to more sales reps.
