Building Your Ideal Customer Profile Target List

The traditional SIC-code approach to building a target account list just doesn’t work for marketers anymore. It’s gotten derailed by the tidal wave of vendors targeting the same people and the impossibility of targets to process what’s coming at them. 

Of course, identifying your target account list doesn’t start in a database tool. It starts with careful identification of what your ideal customer is. That’s largely independent and before what I’m describing below. But that’s not the point of this post.

Building a set of targets that you can focus on matters more than ever for marketing teams. So, here’s the approach I like. Not all data vendors can help you to use this model, but let’s explore the general structure.

Split up the scoring of target accounts into three buckets of measurable attributes. The scores will help you better focus your account-based and outbound efforts where they’ll bear the most fruit. Let’s go.

Scoring Bucket 1 “Firmographic”: Here’s your traditional SIC-code style firmographic models. You can narrow things down using standard filters that most data providers offer, like geography, revenue, employee count, SIC-code or industry tag, etc. This is where a lot of approaches will stop. But this is just the beginning.

Scoring Bucket 2 “Receptivity”: Andy Ruskin has a fabulous model for messaging that is built around meta-trends. I had the chance to sit in on his presentation at the Pavilion GTM conference two weeks ago. That was a highlight. This is the idea that companies don’t want to be left behind a major market shift. So, you should pitch the meta-trend and that your solution can assist the target to get to the promised land. 

Fair enough, but how do you measure the receptivity to this message? You’ll find lots of risk-averse companies that don’t care about the shift, or don’t want to confront change. I’ll dive into how to identify those that are receptive in a separate post this week. And I’ll talk about why today’s data providers don’t always help with this.

Scoring Bucket 3 “Readiness”: This is the notion of Buyer Intent. That is, the signals that indicate that a company is in-market now or will be soon. A raw list of companies isn’t enough. You want to know who’s ready to walk onto the car lot, so to speak. 

Next post, I’ll talk a bit about how you might weigh each of these three buckets. Then, I’ll explore the practicalities of measuring these scores.