It’s never bad for businesses to invest in understanding who their customers are. Companies that excel at creating personalized experiences for customers generate 40% more revenue than those that are just average, according to industry research by McKinsey & Company. Engaging customers effectively is about more than simply increasing the frequency of customer outreach and fine-tuning based on how customers respond.
The process should start with building a masterful understanding of a business’s customers—ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Significantly, customers are not a monolith, and ICPs shouldn’t be either. Businesses need fully articulated, segmented ICPs to truly drive customer engagement.
Read: 4 Territory Planning Strategies to Avoid The Sales Ops Mindset
Detailed ICPs also should be at the center of territory planning. When a business builds robust, comprehensive ICPs, it becomes well-positioned to bring all its revenue-planning teams together to develop a comprehensive revenue operations (RevOps) strategy collaboratively. A robust RevOps strategy, in turn, enables the business to engage in effective territory planning. Let’s explore four actionable strategies that companies should implement to put their customers at the center of territory planning and maintain a customer-first mindset over time:
Stop assuming you already know your customers
Most businesses will claim that they already know their customers well. But when looking closely at the business’s ICP, it’s not uncommon to find that these so-called customer insights are actually based on gut instinct and assumptions—not hard data. Moreover, even where data is used, customer insights tend to be based on outdated, non-comprehensive data sets that come from the sales team only. As a result, the ICPs are not particularly useful as a basis for territory planning. By contrast, a robust RevOps strategy expects businesses to collect, analyze, and infuse insightful, relevant data into all decision-making, including territory planning.
Recognize that generalized ICPs are of limited value
Customers are not a monolith, which means ICPs should not be so broad and generic that they could be universally applicable to any customer. Instead, businesses should be looking to divide customers into specific segments based on shared characteristics. Then, they should collect data that sheds light on which particular behaviors, needs, and pain points drive purchasing decisions by different customer segments. Using these highly specific ICPs, the business can tailor its marketing strategies, personalize its customer experience, and avoid suboptimal messaging at suboptimal times. Just as importantly, these articulated ICPs can also serve as a critical foundation for establishing optimized, fair sales territories.
Use AI to build more robust customer profiles
Traditionally, businesses build ICPs by manually generating and analyzing data. As a result, ICPs are limited by the resources available. Moreover, they don’t have the resources to update their ICPs as customer sentiments and preferences evolve continuously. By contrast, AI makes it possible for businesses to analyze vast amounts of customer data in real time, as new data is being continuously generated. AI can instantly identify relevant, insightful trends and patterns and monitor for changes over time. These AI capabilities can also be leveraged to create data-driven insights that support more intelligent territory planning decisions.
Commit to cross-disciplinary data sharing
ICPs shouldn’t be based on the data from just the sales team. They should come from disparate parts of the organization—marketing, customer service, and product development. All of these teams have data that should be shared to produce more robust, relevant ICPs and support more effective territory planning. A comprehensive RevOps strategy provides businesses with structure and a framework for organizing and coordinating multiple teams involved in revenue planning. When these teams work together to build comprehensive, insightful customer profiles, these ICPs—and the data behind them—can be immediately leveraged to inform territory planning decisions.
Developing in-depth, differentiated ICPs is a pivotal investment for every business. Among the many benefits of building a masterful understanding of customers is that it supports effective territory planning. To develop useful ICPs, organizations should critically question how well they understand their customers, recognize that generic ICPs are of limited value, turn to AI to build more robust ICPs, and commit to cross-disciplinary data sharing.
Fullcast is a seasoned expert at helping organizations implement RevOps strategies that lead to ongoing collection and analysis of robust, relevant customer data. We lead our clients in building ICPs that directly drive optimized territory planning decisions.
To learn more about our data-driven approach to designing sales territories, please visit https://www.fullcast.com/product/plan-collaborate/.
