Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected I wrote a book! Click for details. Subscribe

By Jason Cohen on<br>January 7, 2024

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Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected

by Jason Cohen on January 7, 2024<br>Targeting your “Ideal Customer Profile” (ICP) is the best way to differentiate and win sales, but does it limit your target market?<br>Click here for a set of AI Skills that implement the ideas in this article.

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Selling to everyone means selling to no one

Everyone goes to your home page, therefore your home page has to speak to everyone, right? Buyers, users, existing customers, curious explorers, all working at companies large and small.

Most companies approach this the wrong way, which is to speak to “everyone.” The worry is, if you were to speak only to a narrow customer segment, everyone else feels excluded or confused, and will bounce off the home page and buy something else. So you end up with generic positioning statements like “The Power To Know.” (Figure 1)

Figure 1 : SAS is The Power To Know®, but know what exactly?

SAS has trademarked “The Power To Know®” but I’m not sure why. Can you tell me what the product does? Who it’s for? Did you read that entire paragraph? Surely not.

Could anyone in the world⁠—even their perfect, ideal, best customer (ICP: Ideal Customer Profile)⁠—be intrigued and excited to learn more? If that ICP happened across the website, would they even know they are the ideal customer?

The first step in disabusing yourself of this fluffy language is to see that by not speaking to a specific customer, you’re saying nothing to everyone and thus everyone will bounce off the home page, and never think of you again. (You didn’t give them anything to think about.) If your ideal customer doesn’t know you’re selling to them, who will?

By the way, The Penny Group also delivers “The Power To Know®,” also trademarked (Figure 2). So much for defensible differentiation through trademarks.

Figure 2 : So much power! So much knowing!

Generalized messaging has no power, no emotional connection, no interest, no information.

Exactly the opposite of what you need from your advertising or home page.

The next step in disabusing yourself of this idea of “speaking to everyone” is to acknowledge that it is impossible to speak to everybody at once. You want software developers to know you have an extensible API, but you want the corporate buyers to know that your product makes them more money. You want to look professional so that managers at large companies are comfortable trusting your company, but you don’t want to so aloof that small company buyers see you as “too corporate” and can’t relate. You want to highlight configurable workflows and reports that allow large customers to apply your tool to all their teams, but you want small customers to realize that you can turn all that off so things are simple and easy.

Once you agree with these two points⁠—you must be evocative and specific, and you can’t speak to everyone⁠—you must conclude that you have to speak to just one type of customer.

But how do you pick, and how you avoid excluding everyone else, reducing your target market to a tiny niche?

We’ll start with the first question.

Selling to Carol

Describe a perfect customer. We’ll call her Carol. Pick a concrete company that she works for, a company similar to one of your existing, thrilled customers. What’s her official title and what does she do? If your potential market includes a wide variety of company types and positions, just pick one in particular. Whatever problems your product solves, Carol has all those problems. She has all the problems, she knows she has the problems, she already has the budget to spend on those problems, and she’s already looking for how to spend it, just like it says in your market analysis. Write those problems down from her point of view, the way she would describe them if complaining to a friend over lunch. Whatever advantages you have over your competitors,1 Carol needs exactly those things. Whatever makes people love you,2 Carol has those attributes. Whatever makes people continue paying for the product forever,3 Carol has that. List all these things.4

Carol is literally custom-built to be blown away by your product.

Not sure? Ask your Sales team⁠⁠—they’ll tell you, “oh yeah, any time someone says ______, I know we’re going to close the sale.”

Not sure? Ask your Support team⁠⁠—they’ll tell you, “oh yeah, the best people are ______ because they ask great questions and they’re always telling me how much they love us, even when they have a problem.”

Not sure? Look at your retention data⁠⁠—which customers stay forever, even if you think they shouldn’t? Not sure about that either? Use the Iterative-Hypothesis method to interview them⁠⁠—you need to do that anyway so you can build great products.

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