Today I will have the first meeting with one of my clients who needs help defining their international sales strategy for a new B2B SaaS product they want to launch in April 2023. It will be a first discovery meeting where we will agree on a framework for the next sessions.
The end goal is not only we clarify and make it crystal clear internally how they will sell their new product, but also to create a hands-on and practical Sales Playbook that my client can use with their salespeople and new hires.
Besides the framework, today’s goal is to make it really clear who will be the customers the sales team will be selling to. Since the company plans to launch a free version first and go mass market, we need to understand what will be the company goal in the longer term, who is the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
In general, I prefer to define with teams very clearly the ICP A, B, C, and D so that whenever we discuss a deal, we all know and have the same reference to what type of deal/client we’re talking about. Is it an A, which is our preferred type of client and hence we would put our most effort to win, is it a B, which may be a good client to have from the revenue perspective, but not necessarily the most profitable client, or is it a C, i.e the type of client we would love to have, but that we may not be ready yet to address, or maybe it is a D – typically strategic clients that are more about our very long term future?
Once the ICP is defined, we can start talking about where each ICP type can be found
So, for today, we will focus on:
- Define the general framework
- Define the ICPs A, B, C, D
- Define the specific problems of each ICP
- Define the specific competitors of each ICP
- Find the key differentiators for each ICP
- Make a feature & pricing comparison table
- Find the “bad mouth” on the web about such competitors
- Extract problems each competitor is solving and identify which ICP they target (read case studies)