Activating Your Ideal Customer Profile Using AI

When building a Go-to-Market strategy, the foundational question that needs to be answered is “Who is the target customer?” as the entire Go-to-Market plan (messaging, pricing, marketing, sales, channels, etc.) flows from the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

As vital as it is to know your ICP, it is equally vital to be able to find your ICP.

In our experience, ICPs are not usually defined by easily identifiable factors. It tends to be straightforward to find a list of companies of a certain size or in a certain industry. It is rare for the ICP to align with this readily accessible demographic data.

Example: Demographic Data of Limited Value in Finding Prospects in the ICP

For example – for one client, we identified that their ICP was:

  • Private Foundations
  • Run by a non-family member Executive Director
  • Who reviews over 50 grant submissions per year

In this case, it takes only a couple of hours to find a list of the 99,000 private foundations in the US. Every private foundation is required to file a Form 990-PF with the IRS annually and those forms are publicly available.

The hard part is identifying the 8,000 that fall into the ICP. Without knowing which ones are in the ICP and which ones are not, the list is virtually worthless. Handing a list to BDRs or purchasing email contacts where fewer than 10% of organizations are qualified is not an economically viable way to generate new business.

Historically, identifying the ICP from the base list requires an intensive manual review. For Private Foundations, this effort might include:

  • Reading through the text of the 990-PFs
    • For descriptions of their grant activity
    • For the name of their Executive Director and determining whether that person is a family member
  • Finding the website for each foundation as URLs are not listed in the 900-PF
  • Visiting websites to
    • Distinguish family foundations from other types of foundations
    • Identify whether the foundation takes grant submissions (as foundations reviewing more than 50 submissions/year typically have a submission form on their website)
    • Identify the name of their Executive Director and determine whether that person is a family member

As this type of manual review can take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars, few companies undertake the effort. Furthermore, keeping the list current requires repeating the exercise on a regular basis as new foundations are formed, external Executive Directors are hired and fired, and grant activity ramps up and down.

AI Reduces Time and Cost to ID Companies in the ICP by as Much As 90%

AI changes the equation by automating the entire process so that it can be completed, and repeated, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of cost.

As part of Topline’s market sizing analyses, we historically sampled a small portion of a base list, typically 500 to 1,000 records, to generate a statistically valid TAM analysis. These exercises took several days and could require $3K to $5K in temporary labor.

Using AI, we can now analyze 2,500 to 5,000 organizations in a few hours at a cost of $500 to $1,000.

An unexpected benefit of this new capability is that our clients are now asking us to process an entire base list to provide them with an actionable list of prospects to market and sell to, accelerating customer acquisition and lowering CAC.

If you have any questions about how to use AI to activate your ICP, let us know.